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The 19th-century American Colonization Society (ACS) project of persuading all American free blacks to emigrate to the ACS colony of Liberia could never be accomplished. Who supported African colonization and why? No state was more involved with the project than Virginia.
Tyler-McGraw traces the parallel but seldom intersecting tracks of black and white Virginians' interests in African colonization. African colonization attracted aging revolutionaries, republican mothers and their daughters, bondpersons schooled and emancipated for Liberia, evangelical planters and merchants, urban free blacks, opportunistic politicians, Quakers, and gentlemen novelists. Tyler-McGraw follows the experiences of the emigrants from Virginia to Liberia, where some became the leadership class, consciously seeking to demonstrate black abilities, while others found greater hardship and early death. ... Read more

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Very good work.
This is an excellent, readable, well-researched history of the early founders of the Republic of Liberia and their origins in Virginia. Though esoteric by nature, this is an important work on the growing field of Liberian-American history. In my opinion, it is the best of the hand-full of recent publications on the Liberian-American connection during the antebellum years. It is certainly the best work on the American origins of the Liberian "Founding Fathers," all of whom emigrated from Virginia in the 1820s and 1830s. This book captures the strong, highly important, connection between Americans and the people of Liberia, importantly touching on the reliance of the latter on the former. Overall, a very good book. Well-written, well-researched, and well-published. A must read for anyone interested in African-American history, or, especially, Liberian, or West African, history. ... Read more

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Liberia was founded by the American Colonization Society (ACS) in the 1820s as an African refuge for free blacks and liberated American slaves. While interest in African migration waned after the Civil War, it roared back in the late nineteenth century with the rise of Jim Crow segregation and disfranchisement throughout the South. The back-to-Africa movement held great new appeal to the South's most marginalized citizens, rural African Americans. Nowhere was this interest in Liberia emigration greater than in Arkansas. More emigrants to Liberia left from Arkansas than any other state in the 1880s and 1890s.

In Journey of Hope, Kenneth C. Barnes explains why so many black Arkansas sharecroppers dreamed of Africa and how their dreams of Liberia differed from the reality. This rich narrative also examines the role of poor black farmers in the creation of a black nationalist identity and the importance of the symbolism of an ancestral continent.

Based on letters to the ACS and interviews of descendants of the emigrants in war-torn Liberia, this study captures the life of black sharecroppers in the late 1800s and their dreams of escaping to Africa. ... Read more

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The Back to Africa Movement Explained
This is a very readable book on the back to Africa movement and how it played out in Arkansas in particular.The Author does a execellent job of explainig the history of the movement along with the motivation of the poeple who wanted to go and those that wanted to help them go. While this book focuses on Arkansas the conditions in it were the conditions for many Blacks in the aftermath of Reconstruction.It is this fact that gives the book a universal appeal This is a must read for anyone intrested in American history immediatly after reconstruction or the Back to Africa movement. ... Read more

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The book "Liberia communication brings refreshing memory of history. Many dedicated pioneers who sacrifice to make history of communication possible are portrayed with dedication in the book as "Pioneers without reward." These pioneers stood the test of time. They suffered, study, worked hard, shared their knowledge and freely gave wisdom in so many of their talents. They are simply thrust up to descendents and most likely lost to history, so to speak; are forgotten as soon as they die. This book is the most recent comprehensive, true history of Liberian communication. It is not written for self, but,- to say the book takes you on courageous adventure to save communication during the coupe and offers vivid insights into two decades of bloody wars of military and sociopolitical depression and suffering that culminated in indescribable violence and disregard for human needs ... Read more

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Reeves and Davis retell the wonderful founder's tale of Yawah Toe dating to the 16th century and other folklore about members of the Grebo ethnic group living in Gedebo, Maryland County, in the Republic of Liberia. Their oral history of Paramount Chief Wrea "Coffee" Musu, who ruled Gedebo from 1928 to 1965, gives important insight into local politics and government and the changes from traditional rule to Western-style governance. The authors also discuss Musu's successor, Paramount Chief William Duyou Poka, Gedebo's amalgamation into the Karluway Chiefdom, and the creation of the Karluway Statutory District. ... Read more

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High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articlWomen of Liberia Mass Action for Peace is a peace movement started by women in Liberia, Africa that brought an end to the Second Liberian Civil War in 2003. Organized by social worker Leymah Gbowee, the movement started with local women praying and singing in a fish market. Thousands of women mobilized their efforts, staged silent nonviolence protests and forced a meeting with President Charles Taylor and extracted a promise from him to attend peace talks in Ghana ... Read more

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Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork. ... Read more

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This digital document is an article from Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History, 2nd ed., brought to you by Gale®, a part of Cengage Learning, a world leader in e-research and educational publishing for libraries, schools and businesses.The length of the article is 6926 words.The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase.You can view it with any web browser.The Early Civilizations in the Americas Reference Library provides a comprehensive overview of the history of the regions of the American continents in which two of the world's first civilizations developed: Mesoamerica (the name for the lands in which ancient civilizations arose in Central America and Mexico) and the Andes Mountains region of South America (in present-day Peru and parts of Bolivia, northern Argentina, and Ecuador). In both regions, the history of civilization goes back thousands of years. ... Read more

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Dr. Park explores the experience of 73 black and 24 white Americans who served as missionaries of the Methodist Episcopal Church in the colony-turned-republic of Liberia prior to 1875.Tracing their social background, motivations, minds, and work, this book contributes to restoring the first generation of missionaries to their rightful place in history providing a fuller understanding of the early American Protestant missionary enterprise. A rich and original study, this compelling book brings to light a disillusioned experiment of biracial missionary labors that were expected to carry the beliefs and cultural values of 19th century white Americans to the black continent of Africa. ... Read more

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What are the intrinsic differences between the literate and the illiterate mind? The Vai, a small West African group, developed their own system of writing that flourishes today, althought no body of written literature exists and about half of those literate in Vai have never had formal schooling. Given this situation, Scribner and Cole were able to test mor than 1,000 subjects over a four-year period to measure the mental advantage of literates over nonliterates.

"An ambitious and important book—ambitious in scope and its continual reevaluation of aims and methods . . . and important for putting heretofore unexamined presumptions regarding the gognitive effects of literacy to empirical test."—Language and Society ... Read more