The Washington Post - USA (2022-02-20)

SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 20 , 2022. THE WASHINGTON POST EZ RE A

States of America to dine with the
President of the United States at
the White House.”
McCallum was far from the
only racist White leader interest-
ed in sending Black people “back”
to an Africa they had never seen.
The impulse dates to well be-
fore the Civil War, to the early
days of state colonization societ-
ies, which built colonies in what is
today Liberia. The Mississippi
Colonization Society created Mis-
sissippi-in-Africa on the Pepper
Coast, sending several hundred
freed slaves there to face what
became the highest mortality
rates of any society in recorded
human history. Some advocates
of colonization considered it a
more humane option than slav-
ery, but more viewed it as a way to
rid their states of free Blacks who
might encourage rebellions
among enslaved people.
As the Civil War approached,
debates over slavery were not
limited to the two extremes —
continuing and expanding slav-
ery on one hand, and making
African Americans free and full
political citizens on the other.
Some White people argued for
freeing the enslaved but still de-
nying them the vote, just as it was
then denied to most free Blacks in
North and South alike. Others
wanted to create a limited class of
Black voters, restricted only to
the educated or to those who had
fought for the Union. And many
thought the only solution to the
“Negro question” was to send
them away — either voluntarily or
by force — to a new colony in the
Caribbean or “back” to Africa.
Hinton Rowan Helper, the
most prominent anti-slavery ac-
tivist in the South, was nonethe-
less a virulent racist and advocate
of expulsion. As he wrote in the
early weeks of the war: “Death to
Slavery! Down with the Slave-
holders! Away with the Negroes!”
Among those interested in col-
onization was Abraham Lincoln,
who was drawn repeatedly to the
idea. In 1862, Congress passed a
bill allocating $600,000 for the
colonization of formerly enslaved
people living in the District of
Columbia. Lincoln sent a young
free Black man named John Wil-
lis Menard to British Honduras
(now Belize) to scout it as a
potential location; the Danish
Virgin Islands, British Guiana,
and Dutch Surinam also were
considered.
Lincoln struck a deal to set up a
colony in the Chiriquí Province of
what is now Panama, but strenu-
ous objections from Central
American countries led him to
scuttle the plan. He eventually
signed off on a disastrous experi-
ment that sent 453 free Virginia
Blacks to the Haitian island of
Île-à-Vache. High rates of disease
and a mutiny led to its collapse
and 350 survivors sailing back to
Virginia less than a year later.
During Reconstruction and af-
terward, a trickle of Black people
continued to leave the South for
various promised lands: Liberia,
Haiti, Kansas, California. But it
took until World War I for the
Great Migration of African Amer-
icans to Northern and Western
cities to start in earnest, driven by
job opportunities and the desire

to escape Jim Crow.

Still, that was not the end of the

idea of colonization, in the minds

of either White racists of Black

separatists. U.S. Sen. Theodore G.

Bilbo of Mississippi, a proud

member of the Ku Klux Klan,

carried colonization forward to a

new generation, proposing in

1939 what he called the Greater

Liberia Act. It was modeled on

McCallum’s 1922 resolution, of-

fering France and the U.K. relief

for their war debt in exchange for

400,000 square miles adjoining

Liberia’s borders. Greater Liberia

was to be run by a U.S. military

governor.

The bill went nowhere — but it

again drew the support of an

aging Marcus Garvey, as well as

the vocal support of Black sepa-

ratists including Mittie Maude

Lena Gordon, the founder of the

Peace Movement of Ethiopia.

The Mississippi Senate vote

100 years ago was as far as the

state’s attempt to exile its African

Americans would go. After pass-

ing the Senate, the resolution

went to the state House of Repre-

sentatives. Its Committee on Fed-

eral Relations reported the reso-

lution out favorably on March 1,

1922. On March 10, McCallum
      went to the House floor to advo-
      cate for passage.
      “He wanted it understood that
      it was not written, nor was it
      intended as a reflection in the
      least on the negro,” a Biloxi news-
      paper reported, “but was intend-
      ed to settle him in a country of his
      own and where he could make
      himself a home under laws of own
      making. He said he simply want-
      ed to settle for all time to come a
      great problem confronting this
      country and in the interest of the
      negro.”
      But the speech wasn’t enough,
      and the House voted the resolu-
      tion down, 40 to 32.
      Most of the chamber’s debate
      over the bill has been lost to
      history, but a newspaper reporter
      did record a representative

moving back, his response was

clear: “I wanted to get out of

Mississippi in the worst way,

man. Go back? What I want to go

back for?”

named John Holmes Sherard ex-

plaining his opposition: “He did

not like any such propaganda as

this meant the loss of labor of his

part of the state, the Delta, where

the negro was needed. ... He

asserted that he had 500 negroes

on his plantation in Coahoma

County, and had never had a

quarrel with them.”

One of the regulars at Sherard’s

plantation commissary in Coaho-

ma County was a young man

named McKinley Morganfield,

who picked cotton at a neighbor-

ing plantation. At Sherard’s and

elsewhere around Coahoma, men

like Robert Johnson and Son

House were playing what would

become known as the Delta blues.

In 1941, Morganfield found his

own escape from Mississippi —

not to Africa, but to Chicago,

where he became known as Mud-

dy Waters.

Waters’s songs sometimes ro-

manticized the simpler life back

in the Delta, but when asked

directly if he ever planned on

ASSOCIATED PRESS

Marcus Garvey takes part in a parade as the “Provisional President

of Africa” during opening day exercises of the annual Convention of

the Negro Peoples of the World in Manhattan in August 1922.

ROGELIO V. SOLIS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

A statue of the late governor Theodore Gilmore Bilbo in a first floor conference room at the Capitol on

Jan. 22, 2009, in Jackson, Miss. The statue was subsequently moved out of sight.

Thursday, Feb. 24 | 9 a.m.

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Connie Britton, actor and activist

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