The Japanese Journal of American Studies, No. 28 (2017)
Copyright © 2017 Kazuteru Omori. All rights reserved. This work may be used, with thisnotice included, for noncommercial purposes. No copies of this work may be distributed,
electronically or otherwise, in whole or in part, without permission from the author.

“Little America” in Africa:
Liberia as a Touchstone for African Americans

Kazuteru OMORI*

So much apprehension is felt for the future of Liberia as a State in
Africa composed of African Colonists. The settlers born and brought up
under the individualistic ideas of the West could not understand andhardly yet understand that there is an African Social and Economic
System most carefully and elaborately organized, venerable,
impregnable, indispensable.
—Edward Wilmot Blyden, African Life and Customs, 1908
INTRODUCTION
Native peoples in the region called the Republic of Liberia “Little
America.”1 Indeed, from its inception in the early nineteenth century, thecountry strove to be a real America, a land of opportunity for all that exslaves and free blacks bitterly dreamed of but were unable to obtain in the
United States. Despite the prevalence of American material culture on thesurface, such as “drink Coca Cola” signs even in the remotest villages andchildren dancing to the music of the “Bandstand USA” radio show, Liberia
by the 1960s was a failure, an embarrassment to most Americans of African
descent.2
Historians have explored African Americans’ ambivalent attitudes toward
Africa, from sheer prejudice and paternalism to pride and solidarity.3 It
seems, though, that Liberia is an especially difficult subject for scholars*Professor, Hokkai Gakuen University

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delving into trans-Atlantic black connections in the twentieth century.
Except for commentaries on rivalry between Marcus Garvey and W.E.B.
DuBois and criticisms of literary works on the black republic,4 scantattention has been paid to the various perceptions in the black community ofthis miniature of the United States in West Africa.5
In this essay, I try to repair this lacuna by examining articles and lettersabout Liberia that appeared in two of the leading black newspapers, theChicago Defender and the New York Amsterdam News, from the earlytwentieth century through the 1960s. The Defender, which competed keenly
with the Pittsburgh Courier for the title of the nation’s most circulated
newspaper among African Americans, was a driving force behind the Great
Migration of Southern blacks to Northern cities. The Amsterdam News, thethird-largest black newspaper in the North, had on its staff and as writers
people who were involved in Garvey’s Back to Africa crusade.6 The two
papers were voices for exodus, and they gradually became forums for otherkinds of reforms. Here I attempt to outline the complicated relations
between Liberia and the United States from the period of emigration andmigration through that of the Civil Rights struggle and to ascertain how
Americo-Liberians, who did everything they could to be Americans in
Africa, and African Americans, prisoners of the American Dream, both
failed to realize an African American dream of fairness and affluence in theirrespective lands of the free.
HISTORY OF THE DEBT-RIDDEN COUNTRY
Liberia at the turn of the twentieth century was one of only two black
republics in the world (the other being Haiti) and one of only two
independent black nations in Africa (the other being Ethiopia). As such, it
could have been a beacon of hope for those in the African diaspora, but,
according to a black New Yorker’s recollection, “prior to World War I,” thebare mention of the name Liberia to the average African American would
surely trigger “a combined raised eyebrow and horse laugh.”7
Begun as an experiment in 1820 under the auspices of the American
Colonization Society, the settlement of Liberia (officially named in 1824)
was a retreat for those Americans who “were debarred by law from all therights and privileges of men” in the South and who were looked down on by“public sentiment, more powerful than law” in the North, as the country’s
Declaration of Independence stated in 1847. Nominally free blacks in the
United States decided “to abandon forever the scenes of [their] childhood,

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49

and to sever the most endeared connexions” so that they could “improvethose faculties” in their new sanctuary, “which the God of nature has given[them] in common with the rest of mankind.”8Americo-Liberians, or simply “Americans” as native Africans called
them, tried to build a home away from home in the middle of nowhere, withthemselves not only as masters of their own lives but also as the masters in
the new republic. Alexander Crummell, a New York–born black clergyman
who had “returned” from Liberia to the United States in the early 1870s,
lamented the situation. “Everywhere on earth,” he said, “men like to hold on
to power; like to use their inferiors as tools and instruments; plume andpride themselves as superior beings; look with contempt upon the labouringclasses, and strive by every possible means to use them to their own
advantage.”9 Liberia was no exception. According to Crummell, “you willfind the same sentiment among land owners in England; among planters in
the West Indies; among manufacturers in New England; among proprietors
in the East Indies; will you believe it? Yea, among black emigrants in
Liberia surrounded by crude and ignorant pagans.”10
The Herrenvolk democracy that Crummell criticized but AmericoLiberians adhered to, however, did not work. Even with all the manpower
they had access to (virtual slaves, so to speak), African Americans in Liberia
lacked staple crops to export and sufficient funds to develop the rich natural
resources. Given the strained circumstances in Reconstruction-era America,
they had no choice but to turn to an imperial power that did not like the ideaof a free and independent black nation and that threatened its existence, theUnited Kingdom. Through the (not so) good offices of a British agent,bankers in London agreed in 1871 to make a loan of $500,000, but it wassomehow “discounted” at 30 percent with 7 percent interest on the originalamount, payable three years in advance, which meant the Liberian
government had to pay back more than twice what they received. The debt
was, after years of negotiations, significantly reduced by the end of thenineteenth century, but the economically insecure country needed two moreloans to settle it, one in 1906 of $500,000, also from London, and the otherin 1912 of $1,700,000 from US, British, French, and German banks. As aresult, Liberia lost control of its own finances to the four nations, andcustoms and other substantial tax revenues were awarded to the advisers andreceivers that were appointed by each government. Before long, however,the poorly managed country went broke again, and in 1918 it asked theUnited States for an advance of $5 million, which the Wilson administrationconsented to with severe conditions and which the House of Representatives

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approved. But the plan was rejected by the Senate, leaving Liberia desperate
for money from anywhere.11
Rescue of a sort came in the form of the Firestone Rubber and Tire
Company of Akron, Ohio, which proposed to lend the nation the $5 million
in exchange for lease of one million acres of land for ninety-nine years foreight cents an acre per year. There were worries about continued restrictions
on national sovereignty, but Liberia, under duress, accepted the terms in
1926 and repaid its debt to all its creditors, excepting, of course, toFirestone, whose loan would not be liquidated until 1951. Liberia was
finally stabilized, with a balanced budget in 1935 during the worldwide
Great Depression; the ruling class of the country and the company benefitedmutually at the expense of the native population.12
AMERICO-LIBERIANS AS RULERS
Men from the interior had always been Liberia’s most important export.
As early as 1887, the government allowed a French firm to recruit up to five
thousand contract laborers and send them to Panama to build a canal; foreach one the authorities received a $2 commission plus administrative fees.
The human traffic expanded in the early twentieth century, when European
powers needed a stable supply of workers in their African colonies. With thecommission more than doubled and a newly instituted license fee ($250) anda deposit ($150) per broker, Liberia, the home of liberty, profited from thisvirtual slave trade in which laborers were abused and exploited.13
Firestone needed laborers, too, and thus tried to suppress this human tradeand direct the supply to its own rubber plantations. To that effect, and also todivert attention away from the forced labor already in place in Firestone
farms to the shipping of “slaves” abroad, the company persuaded the US
government to take the matter to the League of Nations, which launched an
official investigation in 1930. The final report of the International
Commission of Inquiry to Investigate Slavery and Forced Labor in Liberia
was a major discomfiture for Americo-Liberians—both the president and thevice-president resigned soon after it came out—and the slave trade andslavery were banned, but the attitude of the rulers toward indigenous
Africans remained the same. The so-called savages were regarded as theirresources to use at will.14
African American newcomers to Liberia were also judged by how useful
they were to the country. Liberians born in the United States in thenineteenth century and their descendants did not want all black Americans to“LITTLE AMERICA” IN AFRICA

51

follow their path but only welcomed “Americans of color who [were]trained agriculturists, artisans or physicians trained in tropical diseases” or“men trained in business” with capital. The Liberian government had notolerance for “an undesirable class of persons who [were] as useless here asin America” and vehemently objected to their “country being a dumping
ground for any ‘back to Africa’ movement,” preferring the Firestone routefor their country to prosper over Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro
Improvement Association (UNIA) emigration project.15
Americo-Liberians also refused to accept black Americans who werelikely to overshadow them. Garvey’s plan of resettling blacks from theAmericas, who were skilled and experienced in various fields, in the West
African nation and helping it develop into a base to fight against colonialism
failed, not because it was not workable but precisely because it was. The
Liberian elite initially rejoiced at the prospect of economic stimuli but soonturned their backs on the self-proclaimed “provisional president of Africa,”
fearing that he would rattle the status quo and become a menace to their
dominance.16 As a UNIA agent, Elie Garcia, wrote to Garvey in August
1920, “the Liberian politicians . . . know that if any number of honest
Negroes with brains, energy and experience come to Liberia and are
permitted to take part in the ruling of the nation, they will be absorbed andousted in a very short while.”17 A year and a half later, the Liberian president
obtained a copy of the letter, which confirmed what he feared.18 The
precious Little America the elites created was theirs to rule. Neither
uncivilized natives, who outnumbered them by more than a hundred to one,nor arrogant outsiders, however competent, should be allowed to stand on apar with them.
AFRICAN AMERICANS FOR AND AGAINST LIBERIABlack intellectuals in the United States tended to stand by AmericoLiberians. In a review of George Schuyler’s Slaves Today (a fictional work
reprobating Liberia), W.E.B. DuBois apologized for “a country, hemmed inas only a small, helpless group of internationally despised people can be.”19
He continued:
There was only one thing that Liberia had left, and that was her nativelabor. She could not use it herself because she had no capital. She wasbeset by England, France and Spain to allow them to use it. . . . She
was guilty but she was not nearly as guilty as Spain, Belgium, France

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and England. And to picture Liberia as a land of slaves, and say
nothing about her background and surroundings, is both unfortunate
and untrue.20
The New York Amsterdam News concurred, attacking in an editorial the
hypocrisy and double standard of Liberia’s accusers. There must be “somemeasure of truth” in the charges “of kidnapping the natives of the interiorand selling them into slavery; of wanton reprisals upon those who protested;of bribery and rotten politics; of default of payment of debts . . . and ofreprehensible misgovernment.” But which among the imperialistic nationsof Europe was spotless enough to throw a stone at the victimized republic?
“What of the forced labor of black men in the diamond mines of British
South Africa? What of the slaughter of recalcitrant natives in the Congo andNiger regions? . . . What of the French refusal to pay the war debt?”21 And
was the United States any better? “What of the bribery and misgovernment
by Tammany in New York and the Thompson machine in Chicago?”22
Strangely enough, Garvey’s followers did not lose faith in the country,
even though their plan was defeated and they were ousted. A. M. Wendell
Malliet, a Jamaica-born Garveyite and foreign news editor of the Amsterdam
News, lauded Liberia for its prosperity in the late 1930s, when rubber
production was on the rise and newly found iron deposits seemed quite
promising.23 Malliet eulogized Garvey when he died in 1940 and reasserted
his belief that Garvey’s effort in Liberia was “no pipe-dream.”24 Indeed, theplan had not died yet.
Stimulated and supported by black repatriationists (various groups ofAfrican American nationalists who had convoluted enmity toward one
another), US senator Theodore G. Bilbo of Mississippi, of all people,
introduced what was called the Greater Liberia bill in 1939. Bilbo was anotorious racist and “Mississippi’s loudest mouth Negro-hater.”25 An
avowed Klansman, he wanted to see as many blacks as possible go to theirfatherland for what he saw as being to the mutual advantage of both races.26
Repatriation, he averred, citing (correctly) Jefferson and Lincoln, was “theonly feasible solution of the race problem.”27 Besides, economically, it
would “certainly be cheaper and better to care for them in that way than tolet them stay in the United States and keep them indefinitely on the relief
rolls.”28
The proposed legislation would carve out a colony in Liberia andadjoining lands ceded by England and France in return for the United States
forgiving those nations their World War I debts. It would help African

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53

Americans who so desired (estimated at five to eight million over a period oftwenty-five years) to resettle there, with land and money grants from thefederal government (at a cost of $15 to 20 billion over the next forty years).
The new territory would in a few years either be annexed to Liberia or
become fully independent.29 World War II, however, changed the politicalclimate in and out of the United States. European allies, busy fighting the
Nazis, could not afford to care about black nationalists, who looked
unpatriotic in the eyes of the American public. Bilbo stopped pushing thebill, which most thought would never pass the Congress in the first place. He
hoped to resume his campaign after the war, but no one took seriously theold Mississippian, who thought of blacks, even those “fighting and dying topreserve and extend American democracy to all, regardless of race, creed, or
color,”30 as potential candidates to go “back” to Africa because they could
not “obtain security and equal opportunity” in the United States, where, in
Bilbo’ view, discrimination and oppression would never go away and “fair”
race relations would always be seen as “un-American.”31
The repatriation plan and its destination of the repatriates received mixed
reviews in the black press both before and after the war. Generally, African
Americans had long wanted Liberia to succeed as “a democracy of black
men whose power, splendor and achievements [would] melt the race
prejudice of the nations.”32 A black bishop from Georgia, who wrote to the
Defender, advocated emigration to Liberia or Abyssinia of those who would“thrill to the prospect of helping to build” in Africa “a civilization free of
prejudice and unjust discrimination based upon color and race.”33 Somerediscovered an affinity with the West African country; famous dancer Pearl
Primus, for instance, found in Liberia “the very roots of the dance” ofAfrican Americans.34 Wealthy women of color formed in 1953 the American
Friends of Liberia, a nonprofit organization “dedicated to fostering
understanding” between the two nations, and its Washington, DC, branchpresident deplored inaccurate reportage about Liberia, whose“accomplishments show[ed] that it [was] consciously and energetically an
outpost of western democracy in Africa.”35 Furthermore, Cold War–era
international politics dictated that Liberia be a showcase for the superiorityof Western capitalism. As a keeper of “the torch of liberty ever beaming on
the African continent,”36 the country would “greatly influence whether theother Negro nations of Africa adopt democracy” or would be “moreimpressed with what Communist nations claim to be the advantages of their
way of life.”37 It is in this context that Liberia, “oriented toward thefundamentals of modern democracy,” outlawed in the late 1950s racial

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segregation and discrimination against native Africans, particularly byforeign companies, making it a grave offense “punishable by fines up to$30,000 and jail terms in some cases.”38
There was, however, as much disparagement and disappointment as praiseand optimism directed at the black republic. The most caustic of critics was
George S. Schuyler, an African American journalist who drifted fromsocialism to the John Birch Society with a period in the NAACP in between.
After spending three months in Liberia in spring 1931, he published a novel,
Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia, which was a round denouncement of thenation’s ruling class, equating them with Southern slaveholders, and which,as mentioned earlier, DuBois disapprovingly critiqued.39 Schuyler kept on
attacking Americo-Liberians, labeling them as “lazy, shiftless andunprincipled” and their government as “combining the worst corruptions ofAmerican democracy with complete incompetence and barbaric
cruelty. . . . Only the lunatic fringe of Garveyite Aframaniacs” could bedeluded into the belief that this was “the Black Man’s Land, the haven ofcolored folk eager to escape white oppression.”40 The power structure
remained the same for many decades; an observer in the 1950s echoed
Schuyler when he said that “the Negro planters of Liberia acquired all thevices of the white planters of the American South, with none of theirvirtues” and that they “transmitted their wealth and power to their sons andgrandsons who did less and less to deserve them.”41 The rotten country could
be saved only through the infusion of “new blood” either from “immigrationof American Negroes or [from] the native African population,” both ofwhich groups “the ruling caste succeeded in excluding . . . to Liberia’s great
disadvantage and eternal shame.”42
But emigrating from the United States to an unknown “homeland” wasnot easy. In response to Bilbo’s bill, the Defender ran a series of articles anda letter reminding readers of the risks.43 The difficulties loomed increasingly
large when African Americans felt more distanced from Africa in the post–
World War II affluent United States, knowing “no country and no heritage
but America.” “The real paradox of the Negro’s attitude toward Africa,”
though, lay not in “his unwillingness to emigrate to that continent” but in thefact that “many Africans who [came] to the U.S. as visitors and students
report[ed] downright hostility from Negroes.”44 A scholar from Liberia
wrote in his reminiscences of his college and graduate school days in
Pennsylvania and Michigan in the late 1940s and 1950s that black
Americans were “grossly ignorant,” asking him why he did not have a nosering or if he had a tail.45

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55

Africans in the sub-Saharan region began to suspect that these rude“‘brothers’ who . . . balked at being identified with Africans either
historically or anthropologically, [might] not be the best allies and friends ofthe black continent.”46 Liberia, which, though skeptical as ever,conditionally accepted as immigrants “American Negroes who [could] makevaluable contributions and [were] willing to help advance” the country’s
economy,47 was reported to be unhappy in the late 1960s “over the prospectof another black colony coming there to settle.”48
But Liberia was Little America, so much so that Americo-Liberians
actually referred to the United States as “home.” They sent their sons anddaughters to “American Negro schools and married them to Americans
whenever they could.” In their society, there was an unspoken marriage
scale to determine who was preferable. “Girls born and raised in the UnitedStates,” a black American in Monrovia testified, were “the highest prestige
group.” The second best were “girls born here of parents who came from theUnited States.” “No president of Liberia,” according to this person, had been“the son of two parents born in Africa; at least one [had] always been
American born.”49 The statement was an exaggeration—some presidents
were born in the West Indies or of West Indian parents—but it was notentirely off the mark. Liberia was “the best model of American democracy
and culture on the continent of Africa,” the Defender editorialized, and “theone country in the world that [had] shown consistent respect and affection
for the American political and intellectual orientation” and thus “deserve[d]encouragement.”50
Some African Americans, however, regarded Americo-Liberians and theircountry as not American enough. Although they “never fail[ed] to rush to
America when they need[ed] help and declare[d] their kinship to American
Negroes,” an indignant letter from a reader in the Amsterdam News stated,
they did not show much respect and gratitude for “American Negro
missions . . . working in Liberia” for health and education “sent by theUnited States Government” or “American Negro troops . . . protecting thecountry.” Instead of “arrogant and greedy” Liberians, African Americans“should go and take Liberia over” and make it “a great monument for
Negroes all over the world.”51 Africa should “be made over in our image,”said black journalist Louis Martin,52 through “American intervention andbenevolent supervision” if necessary, as George Schuyler had maintained
back in the 1930s.53

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KAZUTERU OMORICONCLUSION
It may seem that African Americans’ attitudes toward Liberia have been
ambivalent, with high expectations and applause on the one hand anddisillusionment and censure on the other. But they are two sides of the samecoin. Liberia has always been a caricature of America, which itself, in thewords of black poet Langston Hughes, “never was America” to black
Americans.54 Built by ex-slaves and free people of color from the UnitedStates—nine of the country’s eleven presidents in the nineteenth century
were American born—Liberia struggled to be a Little America without muchsuccess, which left African Americans in the United States to choose to see
the glass as either half-full or half-empty.
Little America failed not only because it was little but because it was
America. Taking the land away from the natives and putting them in forcedlabor was a survival strategy Americo-Liberians learned from the UnitedStates.55 The “African Social and Economic System most carefully andelaborately organized” was never appreciated by the Liberian ruling-class,nor even by Garveyites,56 let alone by foreign industrialists, as Edward
Blyden, the Liberian father of pan-Africanism or Afrocentricity,
bemoaned.57 It was inevitable that in this American-style dog-eat-dog
economy a real American company snatched the fruit of producing andexporting staples. Firestone, with “ridiculously low” wages for workers andunusually generous contracts from the government, made a huge profit over
the years but left little money in Liberia.58
African Americans who believed in American democracy and freeenterprise did not, or could not, have a plan to salvage this wrecked mimicryof America but only encouraged entrepreneurship. In the letter cited above,shockingly titled “We Should Invade Liberia,” the writer suggested, in vain,
investing the power of black “insurance companies, banks, individual
Negroes of wealth, real estate holdings, schools and colleges, great race
leaders, and . . . our great newspapers” in Liberia.59
Articles and letters concerning Liberia in the black press from the Great
Migration through the Civil Rights era reveal that, though fighting a longand hard fight against Jim Crow, blacks in the United States had (almost
blind) faith in the fundamental soundness of the American ideal of liberty
and the pursuit of happiness (not happiness per se but pursuit of it) and its
applicability in Africa. They were unable to come up with a new vision of
Liberia, in which, to quote Hughes again, “every man is free,” yes, free fromhunger, poverty, and oppression. It is only natural that, in so-called post-

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57

racial America, these un-African Americans, never questioning theAmerican Creed,60 in the same way that Liberians yearn for America eventoday still have difficulty making the United States just and gentle toward
people of color, domestically and internationally.61 Unless they envision a
different future, in lieu of planting imitations of America in Africa orelsewhere, a nightmare of racism and blaming the victim will continue tohaunt Americans of any color and cloud their judgment about Africa and therest of the world.62
The Americo-Liberian regime was overturned in the 1980 coup d’état,which was followed by two bloody civil wars and disorder, with the UnitedStates opportunistic and indecisive as to what best to do, not for the Liberianpeople but for themselves, and with “few African-American leaders . . .
stepp[ing] forward to press for aid” and “no Black-owned businesses . . .
offer[ing] to help the famine-stricken nation.”63 Liberia, once considered theultimate solution to the “American dilemma,” providing various groups(white segregationists, black separatists, pan-Africanists, and even civilrights advocates) with unique dreams, continues to be a starting point forrethinking race, nation building, and liberty in Africa and America.
NOTES
George W. Ellis, “Liberia in the Political Psychology of West Africa,” African Affairs 12(October 1912): 52–70.
2“Liberia Seen as ‘Forgotten Relative’ of U.S.,” Chicago Defender (hereafter cited as CD),
October 15, 1962, 6; Harold R. Isaacs, The New World of Negro Americans (New York: John
Day, 1963), 129–33.
3
James H. Meriwether, Proudly We Can Be Africans: Black Americans and Africa, 19351961 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).
4
Tamba E. M’bayo, “W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Pan-Africanism in Liberia,
1919–1924,” Historian 66 (Spring 2004): 19–44; John Cullen Gruesser, Black on Black:
Twentieth-Century African American Writing about Africa (Lexington: University Press of
Kentucky, 2000), 56–58, 80–93, 120–34.
5
The capital of Liberia, Monrovia, was named after US president James Monroe, theconstitution was modeled after that of the United States, the official language is English, andthe national flag is a star and stripes. Aaron C. Sleh, “Liberia: Why ‘Little America’ Has Run
Its Course,” New African, November 14, 2014, http://newafricanmagazine.com/liberia-littleamerica-run-course/.
6
Armistead S. Pride and Clint C. Wilson II, A History of the Black Press (Washington, DC:
Howard University Press, 1997), 135–37, 141–43; Jessie Parkhurst Guzman, Lewis W. Jones,
and Woodrow Hall, eds., Negro Year Book, 1952: A Review of Events Affecting Negro Life
(New York: Wm. H. Wise, 1952), 32–35.
7
Claude DeMonde Lewis, “Pulse of the Public: Article on Liberia Very Illuminating,” NewYork Amsterdam News (hereafter cited as NYAN), November 6, 1954, 16.
8John-Peter Pham, Liberia: Portrait of a Failed State (New York: Reed Press, 2004), 5‒20;
Claude A. Clegg III, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia
1

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KAZUTERU OMORI(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 37‒38, 51‒52; Charles Henry
Huberich, The Political and Legislative History of Liberia: A Documentary History of theConstitutions, Laws and Treaties of Liberia from the Earliest Settlements to theEstablishment of the Republic (New York: Central Book Co., 1947), 1: 828‒32.
9Alexander Crummell, “The Dignity of Labour; and Its Value to a New People, An Address
before the ‘Working Men’s Club,’ Philadelphia, Pa., 1881,” in Crummell, Africa andAmerica: Addresses and Discourses (Springfield, MA: Willey and Co., 1891), 379‒404(quotation at 386‒87).
10
Ibid., 386.
11Charles S. Johnson, Bitter Canaan: The Story of the Negro Republic (New Brunswick, NJ:
Transaction, 1987), 97‒109; D. Elwood Dunn, Amos J. Beyan, and Carl Patrick Burrowes,
Historical Dictionary of Liberia, 2nd ed. (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2001), 215‒16;
Pham, Liberia, 25, 32‒37.
12
Johnson, Bitter Canaan, 109‒13; Dunn, Beyan, and Burrowes, Historical Dictionary of
Liberia, 134‒35; Pham, Liberia, 37‒41; Gabriel L. Dennis, “Liberia To-Day,” African Affairs
35 (October 1936): 432‒34.
13
Pham, Liberia, 67‒69.
14
Ibrahim Sundiata, Brothers and Strangers: Black Zion, Black Slavery, 1914‒1940(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 107‒26; Pham, Liberia, 69‒71.
15“Walton Says Liberia Offers Opportunities: ‘No Dumping Ground for Back to Africa
Movement,’” CD, March 26, 1938, 6; Arthur Barclay, “First Inaugural Address, January 4,
1904,” in The Inaugural Addresses of the Presidents of Liberia: From Joseph Jenkins Roberts
to William Richard Tolbert, Jr., 1848 to 1976 , ed. Joseph Saye Guannu (Hicksville, NY:
Exposition Press, 1980), 189‒208 (quotation at 204).
16
Sundiata, Brothers and Strangers, 35‒37; M’bayo, “Du Bois, Garvey, and PanAfricanism,” 39‒41.
17“A Confidential Report on the True Conditions in Liberia by Commissioner Garcia to
Marcus Garvey, August, 1920,” in Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, ed. Amy
Jacques-Garvey (1925; repr. New York: Arno Press, 1969), 2: 399‒405 (quotation at 399).
18
Robert A. Hill, ed., The Marcus Garvey and Universal Negro Improvement Association
Papers, vol. 9, Africa for the Africans, June 1921–December 1922 (Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1983), lxxiv.
19
W.E.B. DuBois, review of Slaves Today, by George S. Schuyler, Crisis 39 (February1932), in Book Reviews by W.E.B. DuBois, ed. Herbert Aptheker (Millwood, NY: KTO Press,
1977), 161‒62.
20
Ibid.
21
“Confusions in Liberia,” NYAN, May 26, 1934, 8.
22
Ibid.
23
A. M. Wendell Malliet, “Liberia Advances: Is Definitely Making Way for Herself; Rubber
Industry Has Rejuvenated Life of Country,” NYAN, August 7, 1937, 11. Earlier, another
Garveyite had criticized Firestone, saying that the company’s “entrance into Liberia is . . . a
tragedy” and that “Liberia means more than rubber” but is, rather, “Negro life with an
idealism, a soul, a culture, a nationalism.” Ulysses S. Poston, “Another Side of Firestone in
Liberia,” NYAN, March 9, 1927, 20.
24
A. M. Wendell Malliet, “Garvey’s Back-to-Africa Movement No Pipe-Dream,” NYAN,
August 17, 1940, 9.
25“Favors Back-to-Africa Plan: Negro Group Backs Bilbo Africa Plan,” NYAN, April 22,
1939, 1.
26
“Sen. Bilbo Plans ‘Back to Africa’ Bill,” CD, April 22, 1939, 1; Michael W. Fitzgerald,“‘We Have Found a Moses’: Theodore Bilbo, Black Nationalism, and the Greater Liberia Bill

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of 1939,” Journal of Southern History 63 (May 1997): 293‒320; Robert L. Fleegler,“Theodore G. Bilbo and the Decline of Public Racism, 1938‒1947,” Journal of Mississippi
History 68 (Spring 2006): 1‒27.
27
Theodore G. Bilbo, “An African Home of Our Negroes,” Living Age (June 1940): 327‒35(quotation at 335).
28
Ibid.
29
Fitzgerald, “‘We Have Found a Moses,’” 307‒8; Sundiata, Brothers and Strangers, 309‒
13.
30“Bilbo Will Press ‘Back to Africa’ Drive for Negroes,” CD, February 19, 1944, 11.
31
Ibid.; “Bilbo Repeats: ‘Send Negroes Back to Africa,’” CD, May 19, 1945, 1; Fitzgerald,“‘We Have Found a Moses,’” 314‒19.
32
George W. Ellis, “America’s Colony in Africa,” CD, April 4, 1914, 4.
33
W. Y. Bell, “‘Back to Africa’ Movement Lauded,” CD, September 11, 1943, 14.
34“Pearl Primus Says Roots of U.S. Dances Are in Liberia,” CD, September 2, 1950, 20.
35“U.S. Friends of Liberia Give Installation Party,” NYAN, June 6, 1953, 8; A. Garland
Smyer, “Gunther’s ‘Inside Africa’ Shocks Friends of Liberia,” NYAN, November 5, 1955, 10.
36“Tubman Pledges Liberia to West,” CD, August 4, 1956, 10.
37
Edward K. Moss, “Liberia May Determine Fate of East and West,” CD, December 24,
1955, 4.
38
“Liberia Outlaws Race Bias,” CD, February 20, 1958, 11.
39
George S. Schuyler, Slaves Today: A Story of Liberia (New York: Brewer, Warren, andPutnam, 1931).
40
George S. Schuyler, “Uncle Sam’s Black Step-Child,” American Mercury 29 (June 1933):
147‒56 (quotation at 147).
41
Charles Walker, “Africa Talks Back: More about Liberia,” NYAN, October 23, 1954, 17.
42
Ibid.
43
Kelly Miller, “Senator T. G. Bilbo and His ‘Back to Africa’ Proposal,” CD, May 20, 1939,
14; E. A. Moffett, “‘Back to Africa’: A Privately Conducted Migration That Ended
Disastrously for the Migrants,” CD, May 27, 1939, 19; Frank A. Young, “A Back to Africa
Movement Failed 22 Years Ago,” CD, July 15, 1939, 19; Mabe Kountze, “Should Negroes
Return to Africa?,” CD, January 13, 1940, 13.
44
Lloyd General, “Has the U.S. Negro Any Real Ties to Africa?” CD, December 1, 1962,
11.
45
Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis, Slaves to Racism: An Unbroken Chain from
America to Liberia (New York: Algora, 2008), 150‒51. Africans often had trouble getting intoand studying at American (even black) schools and colleges, where they were “looked upon
as either barbarians or ex-barbarians who had become snobbish Europeans.” Isaacs, New
World, 312.
46
“U.S. Negro in Africa,” CD, August 24, 1965, 13.
47Charles J. Livingston, “Cleric Sees Unfettered Future for Negro Settlers in Liberia,” CD,
July 10, 1965, 13.
48
Audrey Weaver, “Back to Africa: Fact or Fancy?,” CD, April 5, 1969, 14.
49
Isaacs, New World, 313. This part of the book was reprinted in the Defender as the seventhin an eight-part series, “Why Negroes Can’t Go Back to Africa.” Harold R. Isaacs, “Do
Africans Insist on White U.S. Envoys?,” CD, September 13, 1962, 9.
50“Liberia’s Economy,” CD, February 19, 1966, 10.
51
Henry Fleming, “Declares We Should Invade Liberia and Run It ‘Right,’” NYAN,
February 16, 1946, 10.
52
Louis Martin, “Dope and Data,” CD, March 19, 1960, 10.
53
Schuyler, “Black Step-Child,” 156.

60

KAZUTERU OMORI

54
Langston Hughes, “Let America Be America Again,” (first appeared in the July 1936 issueof Esquire magazine) in The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad
and David Roessel (New York: Knopf, 1994), 189‒91.
55
The infamous Liberian Frontier Force (regarded as slave hunters and traders) was, in its
early years, commanded by US Army officers (former Buffalo Soldiers). Timothy D. Nevin,“The Uncontrollable Force: A Brief History of the Liberian Frontier Force, 1908‒1944,”
International Journal of African Historical Studies 44 (2011): 275‒97.
56
Although Garvey thought of white civilization as “barbarous” and “savage,” what heenvisioned was political and economic empowerment for blacks in their fatherland in muchthe same way as their capitalist and/or imperialist oppressors pursued power in the Americas
and Africa. “‘Mussolini Gone Mad’ Says Garvey,” CD, October 12, 1935, 24.
57
Edward Wilmot Blyden, African Life and Customs (1908; repr. Baltimore: Black Classic
Press, 1994), 33. Born in the Virgin Islands in 1832, Blyden went to Liberia by way of theUnited States in 1851 and became an educator and politician, assuming such important posts
as principal of Alexander High School in Monrovia, professor and later president of Liberia
College, secretary of state, minister of the interior, and ambassador to the Court of St. James.
Blyden, especially in his later years, was a rare exception among the Liberian ruling elite inthat he believed in African ways to progress. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots ofAfrican American Popular History (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75‒76,131; Kimberly Welch, “Edward Wilmot Blyden,” in African American National Biography,
2nd ed., ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2013), 2: 40‒41.
58“Liberia’s Economy.”
59
Fleming, “Declares We Should Invade.”
60
Tunde Adeleke, UnAfrican Americans: Nineteenth-Century Black Nationalists and the
Civilizing Mission (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998), 148‒50.
61
It is said to be the custom in Liberia, even in the twenty-first century, that “the worst
performing students from the worst university in America are preferred over the best
performing graduates of the best university in Liberia for the top jobs.” Sleh, “‘Little
America.’”62
African Americans are now advised by a noted black journalist to see Liberia “as an
attractive target for investment and development” where “the opportunities are more than ripe
and ready.” It would “benefit [their] brothers and sisters on the continent of Africa
enormously” for Americans of African ancestry to help the country “founded by some of[their] very forbearers” explore oil and other natural resources, build luxury hotels and thelike, thus furthering Americanization. Jonathan P. Hicks, “In Liberia, a History andOpportunity for Black Americans,” NYAN, April 26, 2012, 14. The plan proposed by Hicks,
who temporarily lived in Liberia in his childhood and later became a reporter for the New
York Times and a columnist for the Amsterdam News, looks very much like the same old pathof foreign investment and development for the rich that got Liberians into trouble in the firstplace.
63
Wilbert A. Tatum, “Liberia: The Moment of Truth,” NYAN, August 11, 1990, 31;
Benjamin F. Chavis, Jr., “Tragedy in Liberia: U.S. Irresponsibility,” NYAN, August 11, 1990,
13; Carolyn Butts, “Woman Urges American Pols to Assist War-Ravaged Liberia,” NYAN,
April 25, 1992, 2; J. Zamgba Browne, “Liberia: Help Sought of ‘Reluctant Godfather,’ theU.S.,” NYAN, July 10, 2003, 2.