The arc of the relationship starts in the late 1700s with a budding U.S. political movement led by Thomas Jefferson. It held that people of African descent didn’t belong in America and should be removed “back” to Africa. By 1820, the U.S. Congress provided funds to help facilitate that removal.
Harriet Beecher Stowe popularized the idea in what became one of the best-selling novels of all time, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” In it, her heroic characters made dramatic escapes from slavery and bounty hunters and then set sail to the promised land of Liberia, which she called “a refuge in Africa” provided by “the providence of God.”
The idea had traction because the United States was growing increasingly unsafe for free Black people, especially after the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 made kidnapping a widespread threat. Those wishing to leave were financed by the American Colonization Society, which raised money for transportation, food supplies and construction materials for building schools, government offices and other structures in the African colony.
The society recruited some of the country’s most accomplished Black people for Liberia. They had exceptional leadership skills. Some were journalists, entrepreneurs and tradesmen whose ambitions had been strangled by racism.
Once in Liberia, these leaders struggled against the colonization society’s racist White agents and became strong Africanists and Pan-Africanists. Among them was John Brown Russwurm, who was the first Black graduate of Bowdoin College and editor of the first African American newspaper, Freedom’s Journal. Before departing the United States, he helped build “a powerful and united black political force” that had helped launch the “Negro Convention Movement.”
He and others staked their future on peace with the local people. They found common cause in trade relations, and especially in ending a still-thriving slave trade that put them all at risk of capture.
Russwurm and others, including Hilary Teage (also spelled Teague), inspired a generation of leaders to see Liberia as a hub of African-run commerce, capitalizing on bountiful commodities plucked from the country’s vast forest belt and coastal waters. But those aspirations fizzled with the turn of the century and the global explosion of plantation capitalism. American industrialists looked at Liberia’s land for its moneymaking potential.
Their model for resource extraction was the United Fruit Co., which operated plantations in Latin America based on the racist idea that developing countries contained vast pools of Black and other non-White people who could be pressed into “forced labor” — which was acceptable to the League of Nations, as long as it didn’t devolve into slavery.