What was the role of ‘Africa’ in the African American Imagination?

1. What was the role of ‘Africa’ in the African American Imagination?

2. Africa = Home • Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, Felix Holbrook and Chester Joie. Wrote a petition in 1773, in Massachusetts, detailing their desire to return to Africa–James T Campbell Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-200 • Free African Union Society – Americans felt a ‘vital sense of connection with Africa…in which members professed their “Ernest desire of returning to Africa.”’ –James T Campbell Middle Passages: African American Journeys to Africa, 1787-2005 • 75 black individuals from Boston wanted to go back to Africa: “to return to Africa, our native country […] where we shall live among our equals and be more comfortable and happy.”

3. America = Home • ‘The great majority of black Americans had little interest in the scheme [of colonization] and no more wanted to leave for Africa than the Pennsylvania Dutch desired to return to their ancestral villages in Western Germany.’ – Peter Duignan & L.H. Gann, The United States and Africa: A History

4. The Expectations of Africa • Self – Government • Democracy • Equality • Freedom

5. Civilizing Mission? • Isaac Coker influenced by the Old Testament, and particularly Exodus. He believed that ‘African Americans were destined to return to Africa, to carry back to Canaan the culture and religion that they had acquired in the providential school of slavery.’ – Campbell • ‘American black colony in Africa was the prescription for healing the ills of slavery and the slave trade for both Americans and Africans’ according to Benjamin Coates – Emma J Lapansky & Margaret Hope Bacon, Benjamin Coates and the colonization movement in America

6. Just a Cultural Identity? • ‘Even as direct memories of the continent faded – by the civil war, only about one per cent of black people in the United States were African born – African Americans continued to look to Africa, seeking in its dim outlines a clue to the meaning of their own bitter, bewildering history.’

7. “Returning” • Lapansky– “returning” black Americans “home” • James Forten freed slave in Philadelphia. How could he be “retuned” to Africa when he had been so involved in the economy and community of Philadelphia. That was his home.

8. Marcus Garvey UNIA delegation to Calvin Coolidge: • ‘help us in establishing a nation of its own on the continent of Africa’ • ‘no two races can reside side by side unless the stronger rules the weaker’

9. Conclusion