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The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia New Edition
Author(s): Claude Andrew Clegg III (Author)
- Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
- Publication Date: 30 April 2004
- Edition: New
- Language: English
- Print length: 344 pages
- ISBN-10: 0807828459
- ISBN-13: 9780807828458
Book Description
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.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“This is a brilliant and fascinating account that has filled in many gaps…. The narrative has a deep human quality, depicting the real predicament that the option of colonization posed for black people. This book will definitely illuminate the Liberia story and enliven an important period of American history…. There is a lot that Liberians can learn from this work that should provide a context for reconciliation and reconstruction.” – Amos Sawyer, Interim President of Liberia (1990-1994) and author of The Emergence of Autocracy in Liberia”
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 Elljah Muhammad.
