Black Loyalists, 1792: After fighting for the British during the American Revolution, the Black Loyalists moved to Nova Scotia after the Brits served up broken land promises, starvation wages, sharecropping, or indentured servitude.
One of these former Black Loyalists, Thomas Peters, cut a deal with the British-run Sierra Leone Company of London to settle thousands of Nova Scotians in Freetown. More than 500 Jamaican Maroons followed in 1800.
American Colonization Society, 1822: Fifty years before the abolition of U.S. slavery, white politicians and enslavers secured land and relocated 12,000 freeborn and formerly enslaved people to Liberia. Many Black people criticized the white-led migration, arguing that having built this country, we had every right to remain on U.S soil.
Marcus Garvey, 1919: Garvey created the Black Star Line to realize his vision of a self-reliant, global Black economy in the Motherland. His steamships never journeyed to Africa because J. Edgar Hoover opened an investigation of the steamship line. The investigation led to Garvey’s possibly unjust imprisonment for mail fraud and subsequent deportation.
We must remember that indigenous Africans inhabited all these places throughout history. Today, it’s okay for the diaspora to return to our ancestral lands—many countries welcome it—but we must do so with respect and consideration for our continental kin. There’s no denying that we’re stronger together, and reconnection is a necessary part of our collective liberation.