“The United States of Africa”: Liberian Independence and the Contested Meaning of a Black Republic

Abstract

The effort to create a colony of African Americans on the west coast of Africa was one of the most celebrated and influential movements in the United States during the first half of the 19th century. While historians have primarily understood the resulting colony of Liberia within the framework of domestic anti-slavery politics, it can also be understood as one of the United States’ first attempts to engineer democracy abroad, which some proponents imagined might lead to a “United States of Africa.”  By proposing that persons of African descent could eventually become self-governing subjects, the liberal framework behind colonization offered the possibility of black citizenship rights, but only within a racially homogenous nation-state. This talk sheds light on the often-overlooked moment in 1847 when Liberia declared itself an independent republic by investigating the divergent meanings given to the event by Liberian settlers who participated in it and the black and white audiences in the United States who observed it from afar.  Through an examination of the politics of Liberian independence, this talk will illustrate how the African colonization movement allowed many Americans to envision a white U.S. nation that could extend its global power by projecting its own vision of racial nationhood abroad.

About the Speaker

Brandon Mills is a lecturer in the Department of History and Classical Studies at McGill  University and received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.  He is working on a book that explores the role of the African colonization movement in the United States’ emerging identity as both a racialized democracy and an exporter of political liberty throughout the world.