The Washington Post has an article today on the vote by the Mississippi legislature to create a colony in Africa where its Black population could be sent. The date of this vote is incredible, Feb. 20, 1922. Here are some excerpts:
The act is a reminder of just how long after the end of slavery some White Southerners were pushing not just to strip African Americans of their political rights but also to remove them from the land of their birth.
What opposition there was to the proposal in the all-White Mississippi legislature came not from people who believed in racial equality but from plantation owners who feared losing their cheap, brutalized labor force. And remarkably, the proposal had a few Black supporters: Black separatists who preferred a move to Africa over the violence and abuse that African Americans faced in Jim Crow Mississippi.
Senate Concurrent Resolution No. 21 was written by Sen. Torrey George McCallum, a former mayor of Laurel in Jones County. The county has achieved some measure of Hollywood fame as the “Free State of Jones,” a pocket of Unionist sentiment during the Civil War, but the McCallums were deeply engaged in the institution of slavery. Torrey’s grandfather Archibald enslaved 51 people on his plantation in 1860 and had a net worth of $80,000, about $2.5 million today.
…McCallum made clear that “the spirit of race consciousness” he cared about belonged to White people. The goal, he wrote, was “that our country may become one in blood as it is in spirit, and that the dream of our forefathers may be realized in the final colonization of the American Negro on his native soil.” The resolution does not specifically state whether the proposed mass migration would be voluntary. But its use of language like a “final settlement,” “the final colonization,” and the United States becoming “one in blood” makes clear the aim was total removal.
Not consulted in this process: Mississippi’s Black residents, who in the 1920 Census made up 52 percent of the state’s population. During Reconstruction, Mississippi’s Black majority had sent three African Americans to Congress and more than 60 to the state legislature. That had all ended, though, first with rampant White violence in the 1870s and 1880s, then with the passage of a new state constitution in 1890 that effectively disenfranchised Black people.
…Black newspapers nationwide mocked McCallum’s proposal, just as African Americans had generally resisted the previous century’s attempts at colonization. “Only one thing seems to have been overlooked by the Hon. Senator, and that is, how even the Mississippi colored people will be induced or enabled by the Mississippi Legislature to go to Africa,” wrote the Broad Ax, a Black Chicago newspaper. After generations of rape of enslaved women by White men, it wrote, “the intervening shades are so numerous and various, it may be a question to determine who is a colored person. Of course, such things don’t bother McCallum.”
“We see that representatives in Mississippi would colonize the American Negro in Africa,” wrote the Southern Indicator of Columbia, S.C. “Poor fools.”
This article reads very well, and focuses on one of my personal favourite topics that have an attachment aspect to the Civil War/War Between The States: Black American colonisation outside of America.
The article produces good research in citing from primary sources, and generally does a good job at illustrating how Black colonialism outside of America could and did take on an unapologetically theme of racism and alternative form of White supremacy for the American nation. The article cites that these well-endured into the 1920s.
However, a number of critiques can be made and/or, rather, additional historical contextual explanation ought be present in the text.
The article is not so much inaccurate as ‘incomplete’; it does not convey all about the topic that would lend for a holistic perspective about it in the historical sense.
A high number of White Americans in the North had also supported Black American colonisation outside of America as a means of facilitating an alternative form of White supremacy.
Henry Clay, the political mentor of Abraham Lincoln, was very much of this mind and value-set, as were a large number of Abolitionist organisations. In this regard, there was a high amount of concurrence between the sentiments of White Americans in the North and their Southern counterparts such as John Wilkes Booth; America as a nation had been fomented for the White race, (for Booth’s perspective, see his re-printed personal letters in Carl Sandburg’s, ‘Abraham Lincoln: The War Years’, Vol. 4).
The article also does well to cite that a large body of Black Americans were resistant to the notion of their external colonisation, and the vagueness that could accompany the scheme, as Susie King Taylor even noted in her Autobiography.
Abraham Lincoln ought be a focal point in any historical examination of Black colonisation, and Frederick Douglass important as well. The latter largely, though it is important to note, not ‘absolutely’ stood against this notion and scheme over his life and career, though he did examine its merits. This was an aspect he avoided being forthright about. One can argue that Douglass remained determined to have Black Americans remain affixed as Americans within America.
Douglass encountered the hard edge of such White supremacy views in Black American colonisation when he met with Lincoln’s successor, Andrew Johnson, at the White House in 1866.
Lincoln had long believed in Black American colonisation as strongly as he did in Emancipationism. His pre-1863 statements and speeches have scores of racist comments that imbibe for their removal from America and settling abroad, (on the day he announced the Emancipation Proclamation on 22 September 1862, in the same speech he requested Congress to appropriate moneys for the scheme). His meeting at Christmas in 1862 with leaders/notables of the Black American community in Washington DC is iconic in the study of the topic in the field. The racism he espoused the scheme in and the resolute terms the attendants averred the proposal with have rather made for how Black American colonisation has been looked back on through history.
But there’s another part, what I describe as the ‘second branch’ of the matter; Douglass and the Washington DC group whom met with Lincoln as above did not represent the views of ALL Black Americans on Colonisation, nor did Lincoln retain his original racist views about the scheme and Black Americans. As well, it is only fair to consider Douglass’ own exodus from America to Europe, Britain, Ireland, Canada, Haiti, etc, as being fair to consider in the scope of his views.
While it can’t be successfully argued that Lincoln eschewed 100% of his racism, he did live to challenge/reconsider/challenge these in progressive manner. Much has been made in that he never fully eschewed Black colonisation to the end of his life, but he came to see this in the perspective of the ‘second branch’; Black colonisation could be utilised as a way of establishing equality for Black Americans abroad by convening to them the same rights, privileges and most important of all, status as Americans abroad that their White counterparts would enjoy from the end of the Revolution through to roughly the Great Depression.
His attempt to lease land from Britain in 1863 near Belize as a Black American colony for ex-USCT was rejected by the British as suspected of being akin to earlier American ventures which had seen Latin American areas declare independence from the European coloniser and establish sovereignty and alliances with America, (except herein, the British thought such a scheme would result in the area being proclaimed as an actual American territory).
And Lincoln after 1863 became aggressive on the point that ONLY the Black Americans whom wished to leave would be so enabled to emigrate, and would do so with the full support and aid of the US government carrying forth with them as recognition as AMERICANS!
It is crucial to note that White Americans whom left their homeland in the era did not view themselves as leaving America; they viewed themselves as bringing America yo the world and the foreign primary evidence makes clear that foreign lands/administrations did indeed see Americans abroad in exactly this light.
Examples are endless but such as Texas in the 1830s is one in a sea. In that same era, newspapers supportive of the Underground Railroad in what is now Ontario, Canada, also implied a warning of the ‘American influence and presence’ fugitive slaves would bring with them to their new land.
US Grant sought to acquire Santo Domingo as a safe haven for Black Americans and a means of furthering de facto Manifest Destiny.
Several Black Americans were present in the Eureka Stockade and seen as ‘an American and democratic influence’ along with their White counterparts by the British colonial authorities in Victoria, Australia. John Joseph of New York was one of the Eureka 13 whom were tried and acquitted for treason, thus symbolically representing the successful fight for Australian democracy.
Thomas Morris Chester, Martin Delany and MW Gibbs all saw the scheme of Black colonisation in terms to some extent in line with an American abroad mindset. Gibbs in particular, and other Black American settlers in what is now British Columbia, in particular had to contend with what we’re essentially political accusations of being de facto American Fifth Column agents, along with their White American counterparts, whom sought to make good on the American claim to British Columbia of ‘54 40 or fight’!
At the very time the article was printed, Marcus Gavey of Jamaica was still forcefully advocating a ‘Back to Africa’ migration scheme with his Black Star Lines shipping.
The article is very apt in depicting how by 1922, White Americans in the state of Mississippi had not abandoned the old scheme of Black American colonisation as a means to augment White supremacy. As well, it just as accurately evidenced classic Black American arguments against this and how they sought to prevent it.
But more was needed to accurately and holistically understand Black American colonisation outside of America. Particularly in this era, too little scholarly examination has been given to ‘the second branch’; it could be a way of convening equality to Black Americans abroad as White Americans long enjoyed with the support/recognition/status as AMERICANS abroad, bringing Manifest Destiny in a global implication.