In 1880 J.H. Williamson, a former slave, the longest-serving Black nineteenth-century state congressman (of North Carolina), and the founder of the Banner, a paper advocating for Black industrial education, testified in front of the Senate. As African Americans were leaving the South in droves because “in many of the Southern states the colored people are denied rights,” Williamson made a case for Black Americans’ ability to civilize the West, arguing that whites should support the creation of an all-Black state. Williamson juxtaposed the “civilized” United States where Blacks were murdered “because of their political opinions,” and “where the cry of relief from ‘negro rule’ ” echoed, with the untamed West, where one might be “scalped by the wild Indian,” maintaining that even life there would be preferable to the indignities African Americans suffered in the South with no recourse. Despite the presence of “wild Indians,” Williamson felt that the West offered African Americans the opportunity to “carve out [their] future destiny under the shining sun of heaven.” Williamson felt African Americans would quickly show they were preferable to Indians as neighbors to the United States. He asserted, “The Indians are savage and will not work…[in contrast], we, the negro race, are a working people. Should we emigrate we would endeavor to clear the forests and drain the lowlands, build houses, churches, schoolhouses, and advance in all other industries and work out our own destinies.” Williamson’s argument was couched in the approval of settler colonialism—a process that allowed for hardworking Black women and men to “clear” the lands of Native peoples and then prosper on them.
Williamson continued his argument by comparing the civilizing work African Americans could carry out in Indian Territory with that of “the first settlers at Jamestown and Plymouth Rock,” mentioning that they had encountered difficulties like “disease, starvation, and death” but overcame it all. So, too, Williamson suggested, would African Americans, if given the resources.
A statement made by Frederick Douglass highlights even progressive Black Americans’ willingness to engage in the settler colonial process in order to participate in western settlement. In a speech to the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1869, Douglass argued that “the negro is more like the white man than the Indian, in his tastes and tendencies, and disposition to accept civilization. The Indian…rejects our civilization…It is not so with the negro. He loves you and remains with you, under all circumstances, in slavery and in freedom.” Douglass used logic similar to that of white Republicans who advocated for Indian freedpeople’s land-development skills above those of Indians, positing that people of African descent were more closely aligned with white America’s march of progress than Native Americans. Douglass joined African Americans’ goals and behavior with whites’ by using the term our civilization.