African America and Haiti: Emigration and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Contributions in American History)

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While much has been written about the antebellum African American interest in emigration to Africa, the equally significant interest in Haitian emigration has been largely overlooked. Even supposing free blacks spurned attempts by the American Colonization Society to return them to Africa, all over the 1820s, and again all over the 1850s and early 1860s, as conditions for African Americans became ever more precarious, thousands of blacks left the U.S. for Haiti in search of civic freedom and economic opportunity on the earth’s first independent black republic. Such prospects caught the attention of not only the African American leadership but of the black populace as well. In discussing the growing interest in Haitian emigration, Dixon provides ongoing discussions concerning black nationalism as an ideology.

While Haiti was a potent example of the potential of black liberation, for black leaders such as James T. Holly, the island republic had not reached its true potential and was, therefore, a less than perfect example of black nationalism. By carrying Christian civilization to Haiti, these African Americans hoped to turn into it into an exemplar of black nationhood. There was, as Dixon argues, a clearly emerging ideology of black nationalism all over the nineteenth century. Then again, the main principles of that ideology were marked by definite condescension toward non-American blacks that reflected among the racial values of white The united states. Anticipating material comfort and political equality in their adopted nation, many emigrants instead encountered disease and suffering.

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