Liberia And The Quest For Freedom

Africa's past and present are deeply influenced by the capture and selling of millions of its people over several centuries. To a greater extent, that is true for Liberia, a country to which blacks from the Americas returned. Liberia's recent civil war, the trans-Atlantic slave trade inflicted pains, traumas and losses that cannot be ignored out of existence. Driven beneath the surface, they corrode our conscience and erode our humanity. By pretending they did not happen, we destroy our ability to tell right from wrong, victims from villains. Echoes of the slavery era can be heard in the derogatory names we call each other like "Gio," "Belle," and "ex-slaves." Liberians living today are called upon to build peace by doing away with relations of great inequality. They have no better examples than the first generation of Liberians, both repatriates and indigenous, who worked together to do just that.

Africa's past and present are deeply influenced by the capture and selling of millions of its people over several centuries. To a greater extent, that is true for Liberia, a country to which blacks from the Americas returned. Liberia's recent civil war, the trans-Atlantic slave trade inflicted pains, traumas and losses that cannot be ignored out of existence. Driven beneath the surface, they corrode our conscience and erode our humanity. By pretending they did not happen, we destroy our ability to tell right from wrong, victims from villains. Echoes of the slavery era can be heard in the derogatory names we call each other like "Gio," "Belle," and "ex-slaves." Liberians living today are called upon to build peace by doing away with relations of great inequality. They have no better examples than the first generation of Liberians, both repatriates and indigenous, who worked together to do just that.

This magisterial study, ten years in the making by one of the field's most distinguished historians, will be the first to explore the impact fugitive slaves had on the politics of the critical decade leading up to the Civil War. Through the close reading of diverse sources ranging from government documents to personal accounts, Richard J. M. Blackett traces the decisions of slaves to escape, the actions of those who assisted them, the many ways black communities responded to the capture of fugitive slaves, and how local laws either buttressed or undermined enforcement of the federal law. Every effort to enforce the law in northern communities produced levels of subversion that generated national debate so much so that, on the eve of secession, many in the South, looking back on the decade, could argue that the law had been effectively subverted by those individuals and states who assisted fleeing slaves.

Quest for Freedom

"In this utterly depressing account of the west African nation's history and politics, scholar and diplomat Pham offers a cautionary tale regarding Western intervention in Africa. Colonized by free American blacks in the early 19th century, Liberia has long been beset by tensions, not only among its native populations but between natives and the descendants of its Western colonizers. But Pham is no knee-jerk blame-the-West critic- far from it. As he points out, Western investment, by Firestone and other rubber companies, "served as the principal catalyst for Liberia's infrastructure." The author does, however, acknowledge that the workers were paid little for the labor that enriched the rubber companies, and that tribal chiefs were given a cut for the toil of their villagers. Liberia's worst times have come in the past two decades, with rampant corruption and civil war. In Pham's eyes, nation-states have failed, in Liberia and elsewhere in Africa, for a variety of reasons: tribal and ethnic tensions and the end of the Cold War, which allowed weak states propped up by the superpowers to tumble. Pham argues that these states must take responsibility for their own reconstruction and reconstitution as democratic nations, without Western intervention, if they are ever to emerge from their current struggle"--from Publisher's Weekly, quoted on amazon.com.

Careysburg recounts the story of the freed blacks from America, who settled in the West African St. Paul River settlement of Liberia beginning in 1856. The settlement was greatly influenced by Western culture; however, there were intermarriages with indigenous regional groups, mainly the Kpelle and Bassa tribes. In the following text, two basic research questions are asked: (1) Did settlers who were seeking freedom achieve the true promise of freedom? and (2) How did their pursuit of freedom impact their social and cultural relationship with the indigenous people?

Offers a thorough examination of Afro-Barbadian migration to Liberia during the mid- to late nineteenth century.

This book is a study of the deportation of African-Americans to Liberia and the oppression that this deportation caused. It describes the tensions that developed between indigenous people and settlers. Dolo details the events leading to the civil war.

Examines the impact fugitive slaves had on the Fugitive Slave Law and the coming of the American Civil War.