Department of English

African American opposition to colonizationist projects represents a more significant part of abolitionist discourse in the early nineteenth century than previously credited. African Americans resisted white nationalism they identified in back-to-Africa colonization schemes by advocating for a Black settler state within the United States or elsewhere in the Americas. African Americans debated the American Colonization Society’s platform as a point of departure for imagining how political separatism might redress their curtailed rights of citizenship in the United States. Relying on newspaper reports, letters to the editor, pamphlets, and convention proceedings, this essay examines how Black anticolonizationist sentiment increasingly proposed separatism and emigration as critical strategies to resist white nationalist promotion of Blacks’ emancipation-by-deportation.