The Price of Liberty - Softcover

Clegg III, Claude Andrew

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0807855162 ISBN 13: 9780807855164

Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004

Synopsis

In nineteenth-century America, the belief that blacks and whites could not live in social harmony and political equality in the same country led to a movement to relocate African Americans to Liberia, a West African colony established by the United States government and the American Colonization Society in 1822. In The Price of Liberty, Claude Clegg accounts for 2,030 North Carolina blacks who left the state and took up residence in Liberia between 1825 and 1893. By examining both the American and African sides of this experience, Clegg produces a textured account of an important chapter in the historical evolution of the Atlantic world.

For almost a century, Liberian emigration connected African Americans to the broader cultures, commerce, communication networks, and epidemiological patterns of the Afro-Atlantic region. But for many individuals, dreams of a Pan-African utopia in Liberia were tempered by complicated relationships with the Africans, whom they dispossessed of land. Liberia soon became a politically unstable mix of newcomers, indigenous peoples, and "recaptured" Africans from westbound slave ships. Ultimately, Clegg argues, in the process of forging the world's second black-ruled republic, the emigrants constructed a settler society marred by many of the same exclusionary, oppressive characteristics common to modern colonial regimes.

About this title

Book Description:

"Clegg . . . reveal[s] how cherished myths about Africa and America ran aground on the shoals of political and cultural realities."-- The Chronicle of Higher Education

About the Author:

Claude A. Clegg III is associate professor of history at Indiana University at Bloomington. He is author of An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad.

About this edition

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Publication date: 2004
• ISBN 10: 0807855162
• ISBN 13: 9780807855164
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 344