Academic literature on the topic 'African American United States Liberia'

William C. Burke, an African American emigrant in Liberia, wrote the following to an acquaintance in the United States on 23 September 1861: This must be the severest affliction that have visited the people of the United States and must be a sorce [sic] of great inconvenience and suffering and although we are separated from the seane [sic] by the Atlantic yet we feel sadly the effects of it in this country. The Steavens not coming out as usual was a great disappointment and loss to many in this country.Burke's lamentation about the impact of the American Civil War on the distant Atlantic shores of Africa underscores a problem—and opportunity—in Liberian historiography. Burke's nineteenth-century world extended past the distinct national boundaries that separated the United States and Liberia. Geographically, this was the vast littoral of the four continents—Africa, Europe, North America, and South America—abutting the Atlantic Ocean. But the Atlantic world, as historians now dubbed this sprawling transnational zone, was much more extensive. Societies near and faraway were also drawn into the web of socioeconomic activities in the basin. The creation of the Atlantic world spanned almost four centuries, from the late fifteenth to the waning decades of the nineteenth century. In this period, an unprecedented multitude of migrants crisscrossed the Atlantic creating a vast network. For example, by the nineteenth century, regular transatlantic packages such as the Mary Caroline Stevens whose delay Burke called “a great disappointment,” transported passengers, provisions, and dispatches between the United States and Liberia.

There is a growing corpus of literature on the critical issue of the various styles used by donors in giving development aid to recipient states in various parts of the world, including Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. This article seeks to contribute to the body of literature by examining the nature and dynamics of the American style of development aid to Liberia and the resulting implications for the latter’s social and economic development. Using the realpolitik model as its analytical framework, the article situates the American style of development aid giving within the broader context of Liberia-United States (US) relations. Based on this foundation, the article then interrogated the flows of US development aid to Liberia from 1946–2013. The findings indicate that the American style of aid giving is ostensibly designed to serve the economic, political, military and strategic interests of the US. In this vein, Liberia is required to serve as a foot soldier in the promotion of American national interests in the former and elsewhere. Accordingly, in terms of the implications for social and economic development, for the past six decades American development aid has not helped to advance the material conditions of Liberia’s subaltern classes. However, in order to change this situation, the US would need to rethink the realpolitik foundation of its development aid programme and the Liberian government would need to press for such a policy rethinking. However, both of these possibilities are highly unlikely, given the US’ determination to prosecute its imperial project and its clientelist relationship with the Liberian government.

In March 1836, nine Hanover College and Indiana Theological Seminary students, almost certainly including Benjamin Franklin Templeton, a former slave enrolled in the seminary, formed an antislavery society. The society’s Preamble and Constitution set forth abolitionist ideals demanding an immediate emancipation of Southern slaves with rights of citizenship and “without expatriation.” Thus they encountered the ire of Hanover’s Presbyterian trustees—colonizationists who believed instead that free blacks and educated slaves, gradually and voluntarily emancipated by their owners, should leave the United States and relocate to Liberia, where they would experience greater opportunity, equality, and justice than was possible here in the United States and simultaneously exercise a civilizing and Christianizing influence on indigenous West Africans. By separating the races on two different continents with an ocean between them, America’s race problem would be solved. The efforts of the colonizationists failed, in part because of a lack of sufficient resources to transport and resettle three million African Americans. Then, too, few Southern slaveholders were willing to emancipate their slaves and finance those former slaves’ voyages, and most free blacks refused to leave the country of their birth. In Liberia, left largely to their own resources, colonists encountered disease, the enmity of local tribes, the threat of slavers, and difficulties in farming that left these former slaves struggling for existence, even if free blacks who engaged in mercantile trade there fared well. In the United States, the trustees’ conviction that American society was racist beyond reform, together with their refusal to confront the system of slavery in the South in hope of preserving the Union and their refusal to allow even discussion of the subject of slavery on the Hanover campus, left their central question unanswered: Would it ever be possible for people of color and whites to reside together in the United States peaceably and equitably? The trustees’ decision exerted another long-term impact as well. Although today the campus is integrated, Hanover College would not admit an African American student until 1948.

One of the most widely researched language varieties in the field of sociolinguistics is African American English (AAE), a term used to describe a range of English dialects, from standard to vernacular, spoken by many (but not all) African Americans as well as by certain members of other ethnic groups who have had extensive contact with AAE speakers. Most linguists agree that AAE developed from contact between enslaved Africans and predominantly English-speaking Europeans (who spoke a range of English vernaculars) during the early to middle period of colonization of what is now known as the United States of America. Consequently, research on the development of AAE is traditionally framed in terms of the degree of contact with white English vernaculars, both during and after AAE genesis, with white vernaculars playing a primary, if not exclusive, role (McDavid & McDavid, 1951; Mufwene, 1996; Poplack, 2000; Poplack & Tagliamonte, 2001). Though some analyses of AAE allow for substrate influence from creole and/or African languages in its development (cf. Winford, 1997, 1998; Rickford, 1998, 2006; Wolfram & Thomas, 2002; Holm, 2004), many studies place a particular focus on Earlier African American varieties or Diaspora varieties, such as the Ex-Slave Recordings, Samaná English, and Liberian Settler English rather than contemporary AAE varieties spoken within U.S. borders (cf. Rickford, 1977, 1997, 2006; DeBose, 1988; Schneider 1989; Bailey, Maynor, & Cukor-Avila, 1991; Hannah, 1997; Singler, 1998, 2007a, 2007b; Kautzsch 2002). This research has helped further linguists’ understanding of AAE yet does not reflect its full history in the United States.

One of the most boldly conceived assaults on benighted Africa during the nineteenth century was that undertaken by mainline Protestant denominations in the United States. With the brash confidence characteristic of the age, hundreds of American missionaries were dispatched from New York and Baltimore to convert the heathen tribes of Africa and wrest a continent from ruin. If the experience of the Protestant Episcopal church is at all typical, however, these efforts not infrequently aroused suspicion and open hostility. In fact, Episcopal penetration of Liberia in the second half of the second century was remarkable for a long and bitter contest with black nationalists who were intent on using the church as a vehicle for their own personal and racial ambitions.

Abstract This article argues that two prominent antebellum Black physicians—James McCune Smith and Martin Delany—developed competing scientific theories of nature’s impact on the human body in response to the climatic theories of the American Colonization Society, polygenist race scientists, and southern defenders of slavery. It further argues that the physicians’ divergent conclusions regarding nature’s agency played a significant role in underwriting arguably the most important and consequential political debate in antebellum Black America—namely, the dispute between integrationists who advocated remaining in the United States and fighting for equality and emigrationists who argued that America was so hopelessly racist that African Americans should evacuate and even form their own nation. McCune Smith’s rejection of Liberian colonization, his call to stay in the United States and fight for inclusion, and his hopeful vision of the American future rested in large part on his climate science. Employing statistical evidence, he argued that all humans were healthiest in temperate rather than tropical climates and that a beneficial North American natural environment was slowly eliminating the racial distinctions that underwrote American racism and slavery and giving all Americans, regardless of ancestry, the physical features of Native Americans. Delany’s politics were also profoundly shaped by climate science, but, unlike McCune Smith, he agreed with polygenist race scientists that climate could not alter biological race. He further concluded that, while Black people remained healthy in all climates, white people degenerated physically, mentally, and morally when they migrated from a temperate to a subtropical or tropical climate. Since the North American natural environment could not eliminate the racial features referenced by white racists and slaveholders and because enfeebled whites would always need Black labor in the subtropical South, Delany took a pessimistic view of the American future and advocated that African Americans emigrate and form a new Black nation in a tropical location fatal to white people. The article demonstrates that, long before the rise of the environmental justice movement, prominent abolitionists wed the Black freedom struggle to sophisticated and even proto-ecological scientific models of the body’s place in nature.

The article considers the so-called new nationalism that has been developing in the United States and other Western countries since the last decades of the 20th century as a system of ideas about nations, sovereignty, racial and national relations, and also currents of nationalism. Recent forecasts of the ideologists of globalism about the inevitable departure from the political scene of nation-states, nations and nationalism are opposed by the contemporary nationalism which became a real political factor, primarily in the United States. The authors show the variety of concepts of nationalism, which allows its supporters in the United States to follow both openly chauvinistic ideas and liberal ideas of solidarity that makes up the nation. Among the reasons for the rise of nationalism, the authors consider the interaction of two trends in the public-political life - politicization of ethnicity and ethnicization (or nationalization) of politics. The authors believe that the emphasis on ethnic nation and ethnic nationalism (as opposed to civil nation and civil nationalism) reflects the exacerbation of inter-ethnic tensions in the United States and other Western countries. Based on the analysis of the new nationalism, the authors distinguish its right direction, whose supporters nominally renounce Nazism and racism but promote similar ideas, and a moderate liberal direction which often equates nationalism with patriotism. Representatives of both trends appeal to national interests and values of the nations historic core, and criticize migration policy and multiculturalism. In addition to white racism and its evolution, the article considers the scope of nationalism and patriotism of African-American movements, in particular Black Lives Matter and the results of the study of the dual consciousness of African Americans as combining the concept of nation within a nation and a new, completely American identity. Despite many American theorists idea of the absence of the American nation as such, the authors consider the concept of a new identity of the American nation, which M. Lind defines as a unity of language and culture, regardless of the racial composition, i.e. as an expression of liberal nationalism and a renewed concept of the melting pot. Lind and his colleagues believe that the factor of the current split of the American nation is not racial or ethnic confrontation (Balkanization) but the social gap between rich and poor. The authors consider the criticism of the policy of the American ruling class as a means for the sociological study of the racial problem and for the development of ways for solving it.

This article is an attempt to present (and thereby to come to terms with) an important aspect of the meaning of race as it relates to the experience of black people, especially in America. It commences with Edward W. Blyden because his ‘color complex’ is of a kind that brings us back, not without much embarrassment, to the realisation that while colour may be a state of the mind, it is also and even primarily a matter of the body. Blyden is particularly appropriate as a starting point, for he is an epitome, in many ways, of the African experience in the later nineteenth century, linking (as he does) the multiple experiences of the Caribbean, the United States, and mainland Africa. He wrote at a time when the intellectual and other currents in ‘Negro’ America flowed easily to the new centres of influence in Liberia and colonial West Africa. He was thus the product of the history of Africanity in his period, and for a long time after.