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Except for addresses given at reunions of abolition or benevolent societies, or perhaps the postbellum annual meetings of the American Colonization Society (ACS) itself, the ACS received scant attention from the historically inclined for fifty years after the Civil War ended. The only significant publication was a participant’s account of the Maryland Colonization Society by J. H. B. Latrobe, written in 1885. This general disinterest was to be expected, as the people who were once active in abolitionism or colonization reminisced, while another generation of white Americans , weary of the question of race, generally considered the issue closed with the end of Reconstruction. In post-Reconstruction politics and society, North-South reunion sentiment was dominant everywhere at the expense of attention to any aspect of the black experience.1 In the second and third decades of the twentieth century, deep into the age of Jim Crow segregation and lynching commonly regarded as the nadir of race relations, some members of a generation of university-trained American historians turned their attention to early colonization schemes. A series of articles written between 1913 and 1926 investigated the origins and founding of the ACS and brought renewed attention to questions of race and citizenship. The only monograph published on the topic in this period, deeply influenced by Lost Cause and Dunning school perspectives, examined the early years of the ACS and suggested that the society might have prevented the Civil War, had it not been for the abolitionists. By contrast, the Journal of Negro History began publication in 1916 and was a hospitable site for a more complex interpretation of this topic, publishing most of the scholarly articles produced on African colonization in these years, many by black scholars.2 The early twentieth century was a time in which popularized scientific racism and racial eugenics purported to prove the inferiority of the African American even as social and biological sciences moved toward a new environmentalism. White supremacist groups in the 1920s and 1930s evoked Liberia as they sought to introduce congressional bills that would provide financial aid to blacks emigrating to Africa. They sought--successfully--rapprochement with black nationalist movements , especially that of Marcus Garvey. The ACS had become simply a channel for missionary and educational bequests to Liberia by the 1920s, and the almostmoribund society did not respond to overtures by the white racial supremacists, who essentially co-opted the history and existence of Liberia for their own purposes . Although in decline through much of the 1930s and 1940s, advocates of racial separation received new energy after Brown v. Board of Education. The 1954 Supreme Court decision that declared racial segregation inherently unequal both fueled white supremacist efforts and powered a civil rights movement of almost two decades. For scholars beginning their careers in the 1950s with the twentiethcentury civil rights movement, this was part of the intellectual baggage that accompanied a consideration of African colonization.3 Bibliographical Essay The mid-1950s, when the black civil rights movement became visible to the larger world, marked a pronounced shift toward an interest in African American history and, ultimately, the ACS. African American historians had already explored much of this ground, but their work did not find outlets in the major historical journals until the 1950s. Most of the researchers of that period stressed the impracticality of the ACS, not its racism, and very few saw the ACS as central to their research. Only two monographs directly related to African colonization were published in the 1960s and early 1970s--one examined the institutional and political history of the American Colonization Society and one did the same for the Maryland Colonization Society.4 Research on African American topics grew exponentially in the 1960s and 1970s and included a new interest in the abolitionists and the history of antislavery. Among scholars examining these topics in the 1960s was Benjamin Quarles, who gave black abolitionists their central place in antislavery history. Merton Dillon, in an influential judgment that would echo through the decades, said that the ACS wanted to expunge blacks from the historical record through emancipation and emigration to Africa. But, he believed, the sin of slavery must be acknowledged and retribution made to African Americans. And Dwight Dumond spoke for many scholars when he wrote that colonization was “either an attempt to remove from society an element in the population believed to be incapable of progress, or an attempt to avoid the expense and effort of compensating, by special devotion...

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