- Against Wind and Tide: The African American Struggle against the Colonization Movement by Ousmane K. Power-Greene
In the nineteenth century, whites operating under the aegis of the American Colonization Society (ACS) and ostensibly in a spirit of “Christian charity” sought to send blacks from the United States to the colony of Liberia. African Americans expressed an initial skepticism about the colonization movement that quickly transformed into more vehement protest. Ousmane Power-Greene’s Against Wind and Tide outlines how African Americans battled against the colonization movement, exposing its racism, impracticality, and divergence from American democratic principles. In charting the development of African American protest traditions, the author ultimately unveils an anatomy of black radicalism that offers an alternative epistemology of liberty, democracy, and citizenship in the United States.
That blacks and whites could never live in the same country on equal terms undergirded the creation of the colonization movement. On this, colonizationists billed their scheme as a moderate approach to the problems of America’s multiracial democracy and the gradual abolition of slavery. To be sure, much debate surrounds whether the colonization movement originated from antislavery conservatism or from proslavery forces, but slaveholders’ open support of and active involvement in the ACS led blacks to believe that colonizationists were fundamentally racists who sought to secure the institution of slavery by deporting free blacks to Liberia. Yet emigration movements had emerged alongside colonization. The author parses colonization, emigration, anticolonization, and abolition ideologies to show how these movements intersected, diverged, and converged.
For the author, racial composition, leadership, and ideological outlook fundamentally distinguished emigration from colonization. Often operating through black nationalist impulses, emigrationists emphasized black leadership, noninterference from whites, self-actualization, development on black terms, and nation building as a means for black racial redemption and progress. Blacks gravitated toward emigration movements for these reasons, but even more so after several states passed segregation and disenfranchisement laws and after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act and the [End Page 594] Dred Scott decision. Haiti emerged as a destination after its revolution; Canada was a perennial favorite, given its geographic proximity; Liberia held special appeal after its independence in 1847; and a variety of other locales, including Central America, the West Indies, and Abekouta, also held favor. These movements became platforms for African American leaders, including Samuel Ward, James Holly, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Martin Delany, and Henry Highland Garnet, who stood as their various champions. Black emigrationists compared themselves to the French Huguenots and the English Puritans who had emigrated elsewhere to build nations to vindicate themselves. In the same way, emigrationists surmised that uninhibited in their own nation, blacks could elevate themselves to their highest potential. Additionally, a black nation could augment slave emancipation by helping to halt slave trafficking, being a home for runaways, and undermining the institution of slavery in the United States through its own cotton cultivation.
Still, black abolitionists such as Frederick Douglass protested against colonization and emigration in equal measure, casting colonization and emigration as two sides of the same coin. Douglass advocated a stay-and-fight approach, pointing out that leaving the United States in any form meant abandoning those still in chains and an effective vantage point from which to advocate for blacks. The author suggests that differences among black leaders surrounded questions of masculinity. However, these differences also exposed deep-rooted ideological philosophies about black racial destiny and America’s democracy, points Power-Greene could have explored through their intersection with masculinity.
African Americans took anticolonization protests far and wide to white audiences locally and abroad. Blacks traveled to England to debate colonizationists, denounce the scheme, and expose the true nature of racial inequality in the United States. In illuminating the strategies, tactics, force of personality, and oratorical skills blacks used to convert colonization supporters, the author shows the tenor and significance of black voices. For instance, James Forten, a prominent African American, transformed the views of the famed abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, sending anticolonization documents that exposed...