Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture Series

Bill Hart, Associate Professor of History will give this week’s Carol Rifelj Faculty Lecture.

“To ‘construct a virtuous…community in Africa’: Extending the Great Redeemer’s Kingdom through the American Colonization Society”

By the third decade of the nineteenth century, many white Americans believed increasingly that the United States was not the nation for free blacks, whom they regarded as “idle and useless” and “ignorant and depraved.” Hence, many white Americans – as well as some African Americans — supported the efforts of the American Colonization Society (1816 – 1964), whose mission was to resettle free-born blacks and emancipated slaves in Liberia. There, the black emigres, the ACS contended, would bring “civilization” and Christianity to Africa. Herein lies a paradox in the ACS’s project: the ACS expected the black settlers, whom they regarded as depraved, to be the instruments of God and preach a “pure Christianity” to indigenous Liberians. Many colonizationists overlooked this contradiction, for they believed that preaching was the one profession for which free black men were best fitted. Furthermore, many ignored this irony by focusing on their racial millennial thought: Christ would smile upon the SPG and the United States for not only bringing light to Africa but also for cleansing the republic racially of Indians (removal), free blacks (colonization), and Jews (evangelize).