A century ago, Mississippi's Senate voted to send all the state's Black people to Africa

[Nevilledog]

Link to tweet

https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2022/02/20/mississippi-black-africa-mccallum/

No paywall
https://archive.fo/0QBKq

One hundred years ago, the Mississippi state Senate voted to evict the state’s Black residents — the majority of its total population — not just out of Mississippi, but out of the country.

The Senate voted 25 to 9 on Feb. 20, 1922, to ask the federal government to trade some of the World War I debts owed by European countries for a piece of colonial Africa — any part would do — where the government would then ship Mississippi’s Black residents, creating “a final home for the American negro.”

The act is a reminder of just how long after the end of slavery some White Southerners were pushing not just to strip African Americans of their political rights but also to remove them from the land of their birth.

What opposition there was to the proposal in the all-White Mississippi legislature came not from people who believed in racial equality but from plantation owners who feared losing their cheap, brutalized labor force. And remarkably, the proposal had a few Black supporters: Black separatists who preferred a move to Africa over the violence and abuse that African Americans faced in Jim Crow Mississippi.

*snip*

[leftieNanner]

1. And they would do it again today.

Thanks for sharing. Interesting article.

[sop]

2. This must be a part of the history they don't want their kids to learn.

[crickets]

9. +1

[Solly Mack]

3. Hush now. You'll hurt some white person's feelings.

Mustn't have that.

[keithbvadu2]

4. from today's toons - erasing history?

[struggle4progress]

5. Filed under: "Things you get called a Communist for remembering"

[VGNonly]

6. Ulysses S. Grant

backed a plan to send black residents to the Dominican Republic.

[left-of-center2012]

7. Among those interested in colonization was Abraham Lincoln ...

From the same linked article …

Among those interested in colonization was Abraham Lincoln, who was drawn repeatedly to the idea. In 1862, Congress passed a bill allocating $600,000 for the colonization of formerly enslaved people living in the District of Columbia.

Lincoln sent a young free Black man named John Willis Menard to British Honduras (now Belize) to scout it as a potential location; the Danish Virgin Islands, British Guiana, and Dutch Surinam also were considered.

Lincoln struck a deal to set up a colony in the Chiriquí Province of what is now Panama, but strenuous objections from Central American countries led him to scuttle the plan.

He eventually signed off on a disastrous experiment that sent 453 free Virginia Blacks to the Haitian island of Île-à-Vache. High rates of disease and a mutiny led to its collapse and 350 survivors sailing back to Virginia less than a year later.

[left-of-center2012]

8. Liberia

Liberia began in the early 19th century as a project of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which believed black people would face better chances for freedom and prosperity in Africa than in the United States. Between 1822 and the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, more than 15,000 freed and free-born black people who faced social and legal oppression in the U.S., along with 3,198 Afro-Caribbeans, relocated to Liberia.

Gradually developing an "Americo-Liberian" identity, the settlers carried their culture and tradition with them; the Liberian constitution and flag were modeled after those of the U.S., while its capital was named after ACS supporter and U.S. President James Monroe.

On January 3, 1848, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a wealthy, free-born African American from the U.S. state of Virginia who settled in Liberia, was elected Liberia's first president after the people proclaimed independence.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberia#Political_formation