ALAO ADEDAYO IS SAVING YORUBA LANGUAGE!-HIS NEWSPAPER "ALAWOYE" CAN SELL UP TO 150.000 COPIES AN ISSUE - MORE THAN ENGLISH PAPERS SELL- YOU MUST DO YOUR PART TO KEEP YORUBA LANGUAGE FROM DYING -BUY ALAROYE EVERY WEEK AND ALL OTHER YORUBA MAGAZINES,TENI-N-TENI MAGAZINE YOU NAME IT SO THAT YORUBA WILL NOT DIE!

from yeyeolade.wordpress.com

Alaroye Newspaper IS SAVING YORUBA LANGUAGE From DESTRUCTION!-ALAO ADEDAYO FOUNDER TELLS HOW HE FINALLY SUCCEEDED IN PRODUCING A FLORISHING YORUBA NEWSPAPER ! –YORUBA IS DYING! —WHAT CAN YOU DO TO SAVE IT??-FROM VANGUARD NEWSPAPER((NIGERIA)

by Yeye Akilimali Funua Olade

 Alao Adedayo-Founder/savior of Yoruba Language thru his GREAT newspaper Alaroye! Do Your own part and BUY it every week, get your children to read it- FIGHT TO SAVE Yoruba Language. FROM DYING!       

                                                                                                                                                                                        I stumbled four times to make Alaroye a success story – Alao Adedayo
July 8, 2011
Musa Alao Adedayo, a.k.a Agbedegbeyo, is the Publisher/Chief Executive Officer, World Information Agents Limited, the publishing company of the popular Yoruba newspaper, ALAROYE. He spoke to BASHIR ADEFAKA about himself and how he stumbled four times to get it right with the vernacular paper that has today become a success story in the newspaper industry in Nigeria. Excerpt
How did you start out in life?
I am a Muslim but I am not a biased person because God Himself never loved a biased person.  But those who know me from the beginning used to call me Alao Agbedegbeyo.  When I talk of people who know me from the beginning, they are people from the  70s, early 80s and so on.
I came from Abeokuta to Lagos in 1980 doing Ewi (lyrics) artist.  In those days as an Ewi person, you must be attached to a particular musician and I was with Dele Abiodun, who was like my master.  Ewi was like side-attraction at a show and it would come on stage while the musician and his band members were taking a rest.
I had also participated in some dramas through the likes of Jide Kosoko, Ishola Ogunsola, (Dr. I. Show Pepper) and Adebayo Salami (Oga Bello).  It was because of the Ewi that I used to present in those days that Jide Kosoko would always come to Dele Abiodun’s shows.  He would say to me, “Alao, we are having an outing somewhere and I want you to perform your Ewi there,” and I would say no problem.
How did Ewi correlated with the broadcaster that you were?
By and large as God would have it, through that channel, as I have mentioned before, I became a broadcaster.  Sometime in 1979, Radio Lagos started a programme called, Kebuyeri, which was mainly for the Awada Kerikeri group that was then run by Adebayo Salami popularly called Oga Bello.  We went to a show at Ebute Metta and Adebayo Salami and his group members had also come to that show.
It was there he saw me and said, “Ah, Alao! Radio Lagos has just given us a programme and we want you to be in it” and I said no problem.  We didn’t even discuss money because what was more important to us at that time was the job.  That was how we started the programme and it became overwhelmingly popular turning me into a celebrity.
Behind that programme, a plan was going on by the management of Radio Lagos and the producer of the programme, Adebayo Tijani, communicated to me that management was talking about me and that was how I became a newscaster with Radio Lagos reading Yoruba news at that time.
I left Radio Lagos in 1981, which was a real year of politicking in the country.  Then, Radio Nigeria Ikeja which was established within that time was located in Ikoyi and in fact when we were there, we were always abusing and calling them, “Agberekusu f’ohun Ikeja” that is, people who were on the Island claiming to be speaking from Ikeja (laughs).  I eventually found myself at the Radio Nigeria Ikeja and later NTA but I did not stay long before I left.
When you left service, where did you go?
When we joined broadcasting, most of us did not get the job because of our educational qualifications and so, when I left the NTA, it was an opportunity for me to now go and improve myself, which then took me to the Nigerian Institute of Journalism (NIJ) and then the universities for my first and later second degrees.
How did Alaroye come into the show?
It was in May 1985 when I was 25 and while I was still working as a Yoruba newsreader with the NTA that I decided to try my hands in publishing, which brought about the Alaroye.  Between May and October of 1985, I was only able to publish four editions of the tabloid that was meant to be weekly.  I was doing it alone because I had no such money to hire people.   It thus became a staggered publication because it was a one-man’s idea and as a result, no prospective partner was willing to support or invest in the business.  It was also like that because Yoruba newspaper business at that time was seen as a barren land.  So, naturally, it died.
Further effort was made at resuscitating the paper in 1990 but it couldn’t get to the vendors,  though it was being published. It was to be launched that year so that some funds could be raised. On the day of the launching, a prominent member of the community who was a friend of both the chief launcher and chairman, Lai Balogun, died. So it was a wrong day for the Alaroye’s show as the whole community was thrown into mourning and no one remembered the launch.
In 1994 when I made the third attempt at the publication, I was convinced that Alaroye would one day emerge a success story because, for four weeks, I was able to publish the weekly paper consecutively and throughtout the period,  it was well circulated and generally accepted.
And because I had acquired more knowledge about all it required to make a successful print media, Alaroye was able to stand and  able to meet the standard of a newspaper. Yet, it couldn’t go far because I could not raise the required fund to keep it going.  And for two years, it remained like that until July 2, 1996, when we were able to revisit it and tried our best to make it what it is today.  That was the fourth attempt and it has now come to stay.
I thank God that today, Alaroye is seen not as a happenstance, but a planned revolution in the newspaper industry in Nigeria.  And it is so because, no Yoruba newspaper has been so successful because most of the earlier issues, people have said, were translataion of English newspapers or repetition of news items already carried on radio and television.
Alaroye is original for its thorough analysis, research works and investigative journalism that many have appreciated as having put the newspaper on a very high pedestal. It informs, educates, entertains and analyses events as they unfold through the Yoruba culture. For this, it circulates in Nigeria, wherever Yoruba domicile, with the print run sometimes as high as 150,000 copies per week.  I have the reason to really thank God today because, in Nigeria, particularly among the Yorubas, Alaroye is a language. It is the culture.
The Conference of Yoruba Leaders showcased by your newspaper, which debuted in 2002, hasn’t seemed to produce any result considering the fact that Yorubas are still intolerably disunited.  What is the problem?
The problem we have in Yorubaland is the way we play our own politics.  What Alaroye is trying to do is to serve as a bridge to bring all the leaders together.  There is need for a connecting point, which will connect all Yoruba people with one another.  We have very, very intelligent, well exposed and highly patriotic sons and daughters of Yorubaland.  We cannot run away from the fact that we are Yorubas; we had been Yoruba people before Nigeria and we will remain Yoruba people within Nigeria.
Yes, political party differences are there but we should be able to know that there is difference between politics and governance.  So, during election, you can abuse and criticize yourselves but once election is over, issue of governance becomes the central point while politicking is set aside for another election season.  And if you are the governor, you should see yourself as the father of all, as the head of government and people should see the governor beyond his party but as the leader that all of us should relate well with as one of our own.
In the year 2002, I went to Papa Abraham Adesanya and I said to him, “E ma bawon se oselu.  Ema bawon da si oro oselu.  Asiwaju Yoruba ni ki’e je” (That Papa should not be part of politics other Yorubas played but that he should be okay with himself as Leader of the Yoruba Nation).
He asked me why.  We talked a lot about it and he agreed with me.  Not only that I went to discuss it with him, we made it a critical editorial issue, which some of the Afenifere members then responded to.

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Tags: AFRICA, African Americans, BLACK CHILDREN, BLACK MEN, BLACK PEOPLE, BLACK WOMEN, NIGERIA, YORUBA, YORUBA IS DYING!..YORUBA, YORUBA LANGUAGE

This entry was posted on December 25, 2011 at 11:35 pm and is filed under AFRICA, AFRICAN AMERICANS, AFRICAN LANGUAGES, AFRICAN LANGUAGES ENDANGERED!, AFRICAN MEN, AFRICAN WRITERS, AFRICAN WRITERS LIST IN YORUBA, AFRICANS IN AMERIKKKA, AKINWUNMI ISOLA, BLACK BOYS .BLACK WOMEN, BLACK CHILDREN, BLACK CULTURE, BLACK GIRLS, Black media, BLACK MEN, BLACK MEN BLACK CHILDREN, BLACK MEN BLACK WOMEN, BLACK NATIONALISM, BLACK PEOPLE, BLACK WOMAN, BLACK WOMEN, BLACK WRITERS, BLACK WRITING IS GROWING, BLACK YOUTH, BLACKS IN AMERIKKKA!, BLACKS IN CUBA, NIGERIA, NIGERIAN LANGUAGES IN YORUBA, NIGERIAN WOMEN, NIGERIAN WRITERS, NIGERIANS ARE THE SMARTEST PEOPLE IN THE WORLD, PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS!. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Edit this entry.

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BACK TO AFRICA ! -JOURNEY OF HOPE- THE BACK TO AFRICA MOVEMENT IN ARKANSAS- A SUMMARY

FROM http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/200

288 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 24 illus., 4 maps, 2 figs., notes, bibl., index $65.00 cloth ISBN 978-0-8078-2879-3 $22.95 paper ISBN 978-0-8078-5550-8 Published: Fall 2004  Add Cloth to cart  Add Paper to cart  View cart  Checkout

Journey of Hope
The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s

by Kenneth C. Barnes Copyright (c) 2004 by the University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.




Introduction

Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to be free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

Emma Lazarus, a Jewish immigrant from Russia, penned these famous lines in 1883 for the Statue of Liberty, then being constructed by the French Republic as a gift to the United States of America. Nearly a decade later, Lady Liberty would witness an ironic scene unfolding in New York Harbor. On the rainy afternoon of 10 March 1892, the Dutch steamer Werkendam arrived after a two-week voyage from Rotterdam on the North Sea. The 569 passengers speaking Dutch, German, Russian, Polish, Italian, and a host of other European languages must have chattered excitedly about their hope for a better life in America. One can imagine that many eyes became misty as they beheld Lady Liberty, torch held high, next to Ellis Island, which had opened just two months before. As the Werkendam made its way into the bay, it passed a much smaller, old-fashioned sailing ship, the Liberia, which had left Pier 6 on the East River earlier in the day. The Liberia was packed to the brim with black families from Morrilton, Arkansas, who were leaving the United States to return to their ancestral homeland of Africa.[1] Perhaps the passengers of the Werkendam and the Liberia waved to each other as they passed in the bay. This image sums up the paradox of American society in the 1890s. While millions of Europeans were coming to the United States to follow their dream of political freedom and economic opportunity, thousands of black Americans, especially in Arkansas, were equally anxious to get out of this county. The hope for many African Americans centered on the Republic of Liberia in West Africa.
As Africa's only independent black republic, Liberia encouraged and symbolized race pride for African Americans in the late 1800s. With an elected black government that offered American settlers free land, Liberia represented a chance for a better life for the South's black farmers. Interest in African emigration peaked among black southerners in the 1890s, a time when cotton prices hit rock bottom and white racism reached its zenith. The 1890s saw the greatest number of lynchings in American history. As it became increasingly clear that black Americans would not get a seat at the table, Liberia posed an alternative to integration, an escape to an all-black world. One black man from central Arkansas asked in 1890: "Ar tha any White People over in liBery? if there is—none [of us] ar going there."[2]
Of all areas of the South, Liberia emigration fever was most intense during the late 1800s in Arkansas. More Liberia-bound emigrants left from Arkansas than from any other state—more than a third of all known black American emigrants to Africa in the years from 1879 to 1899—despite the fact that Arkansas's black population was smaller than that of any of its southern neighbors.[3] And for each one of the approximately 600 who left Arkansas for Africa, hundreds more applied unsuccessfully to go. To understand the back-to-Africa movement in the post-Reconstruction and Jim Crow years, one must examine Arkansas. Ironically, before the 1890s, Arkansas had served as a destination for black migrants leaving other southern states. A high percentage of African American men voted in Arkansas elections, and many held public offices on the county level. But Jim Crow measures, disfranchisement, and a wave of brutal racial violence dramatically changed the situation for black Arkansans. I will argue that the rapidity of this shift from relative well-being to subjugation, rather than the magnitude of the oppression, convinced many African Americans to leave not just Arkansas or the South but the entire United States. The Arkansas counties with the most competitive political environments, where white elites most targeted black voters, saw the most intense interest in African emigrations. Among sharecroppers and country preachers there swelled a remarkable wave of fascination with Africa—as a place of refuge from white oppression and as an ancestral land that helped define a black national identity. While middle-class blacks were more resolved to live as black Americans, many rural poor folk gave up on the United States and looked to Liberia to construct a better life. This study will compare the Liberian dreams to the reality Arkansas emigrants found in their African fatherland. For those who left, and for those who stayed behind, the meaning of Liberian emigration was simple: it was a journey of hope.
Earlier in the nineteenth century, Liberia evoked mixed images in the minds of black Americans. People of color must have pondered a return to Africa as soon as they arrived in the New World, but an organized back-to-Africa movement began in the late 1700s. British abolitionists worked together with free black immigrants to found Sierra Leone on the continent's west coast as a place for the return of black people from British territory. The first black settlers arrived from England in 1787, and others came afterward from Nova Scotia and Jamaica. Sierra Leone became a British crown colony in 1808.[4] In the United States, black Americans' discussion of African colonization originated among New England religious circles that opposed slavery and the slave trade. Paul Cuffe, a prosperous half-black, half-Indian Quaker of Massachusetts who owned a small fleet of whaling ships, transported thirty-eight free blacks to Sierra Leone, largely at his own expense, late in 1815. Cuffe died two years later, but he had inspired a movement.[5]
Humanitarian concerns, like those of Cuffe, joined with very different motives to found the American Colonization Society, just before Cuffe's death. Slave owners in the South had become increasingly worried about the presence of a free black population clustering in southern towns. Some whites thought the very existence of a free black community undermined the slavery system and inspired slaves to revolt. In 1816, the Virginia legislature, dominated by slave owners, asked the U.S. Congress to find a territory on the African coast to become a place of asylum for free blacks and emancipated American slaves. Slave owners and antislavery forces gathered at the Davis Hotel in December 1816 in Washington, D.C., and founded the American Society for Colonizing Free People of Color in the United States, a name later shortened to the American Colonization Society (ACS). At this first meeting, antislavery leaders, such as Daniel Webster, promoted the idea of an African colony as a place of protection for a persecuted people while slave owners, such as Henry Clay, who chaired the first assembly, saw an African colony as a dumping ground for free blacks who had no place in America. Through its early years, the ACS struggled with this tension between humanitarian and racist motivations. Black Americans stood divided on the issue of emigration. A few black church leaders gave signals of support for the ACS, and free blacks in Richmond, Virginia, made the first public pronouncement in January 1817 favoring emigration. But most free blacks in northern communities such as Philadelphia, New York, and Boston united against emigration, seeing it as a ploy to expel free blacks from the United States.[6]
On 21 January 1820, the ship Elizabeth sailed from New York carrying a party of eighty-six free blacks from the Illinois Territory who had volunteered to resettle in Africa. The ACS had received financial and moral support for this expedition from President James Monroe. Nearly a decade after Congress had outlawed the slave trade, American ships were still capturing and confiscating cargoes of illegal slaves bound for the New World, and by 1819 a new slave trade act had authorized the president to establish a place in coastal West Africa where recaptured slaves could be returned. Thus, the ACS began its resettlement work as a private agency carrying out a public policy. The Elizabeth arrived in Sierra Leone, where the settlers waited for more than a year while white agents acting on behalf of the U.S. government and the ACS located a site for a colony. They found one at Cape Mesurrado, more than 200 miles south of Freetown, Sierra Leone, where a rocky promontory juts out into the sea near the mouth of the mighty St. Paul River. After much discussion with the local African ruler—the agents ultimately put a gun to his head to encourage cooperation—the ACS received the cape in exchange for an assorted package of rum, muskets, beads, tobacco, and other items worth in total less than $300. The settlers in Sierra Leone, augmented by another group recently arrived from the United States, first set foot in the colony on 25 April 1822. The ACS named the colony Liberia, after the Latin liber, meaning free man. The colonists choose the name Monrovia for their first permanent settlement, in honor of the president's support for the colonization effort.[7]
The first settlers, and virtually all the emigrants from America, struggled to survive in their new environment. The ACS agents had chosen one of the most inhospitable locations in West Africa for their colony. Beyond the rocky hill overlooking the coast, mosquito-infested swamps surrounded the new town of Monrovia. Settlers invariably came down with malaria in the first months after arrival. Nearly a quarter of the early settlers to Liberia died within the first year of settlement. Those who survived the "seasoning" found it difficult to make a living. The thin, leached soil did not easily yield American food crops, and settlers found local foods unpalatable. The early settlers eschewed agriculture and largely subsisted on imported foods. They searched in vain for some commodity in demand on the world market, first looking for gold or ivory, then finding camwood, used in the dye industry. But the venture never became economically profitable.[8] Nevertheless, yearly reinforcements brought settlers to Liberia, which remained a colony of the ACS for the next twenty-five years. The society's resident agent in Monrovia presided over the colony, assisted by an elected council of settlers.
The emigration of free blacks to Liberia particularly increased after the Nat Turner rebellion in 1831. During the next year in Maryland, for example, the state legislature passed laws restricting the liberties of free people of color and even appropriated money to pay for their resettlement outside the state's boundaries. In 1832, the American Colonization Society resettled 796 emigrants to Liberia, more than in any year of its history, and the Maryland auxiliary of the ACS itself sent another 146. As the movement became increasingly dominated in the 1830s by slave owners who wanted Liberia to absorb the free blacks of the South, antislavery forces largely turned against the society. William Lloyd Garrison led the charge, decrying African colonization as a plot to continue the slave system in America. Prominent free black leaders, such as David Walker, loudly and consistently denounced the colonization enterprise through the emerging black press, from pulpits, and at every national Negro convention of the 1830s. In a time of conflict within the ACS, state auxiliaries, such as the one in Maryland, began to go their own ways and even establish their own resettlement colonies along the coast southeast of Monrovia. Despite this internal dissension in the society, some free blacks, mostly from slaveholding states, continued to apply for emigration. A few slave owners emancipated slaves with the expressed goal of sending them to Liberia. In addition, more than 5,000 African slaves, confiscated by the U.S. Navy on the high seas, were returned to Africa and left in the colony of Liberia.[9]
Liberia's status changed when the colony gave way to an independent republic on 26 July 1847, a day still celebrated as Liberia's national holiday. It had become evident that a colony owned by a private philanthropic society had little legal and diplomatic standing. Under ACS direction, the settlers drew up a constitution based on that of the United States and designed a flag, again emulating the American model. Thus, beginning in 1847, an elected president and congress of black American settlers governed Liberia, and the ACS's role became virtually that of an emigration agency, transporting settlers and assisting them once they arrived in country.
Emigration picked up in the 1850s when the new Fugitive Slave Act encouraged runaway slaves to seek a destination outside the United States. And then the Supreme Court's Dred Scott decision in 1857 demonstrated that people of color possessed no rights that white people of America were obligated to respect. Many free blacks became even more pessimistic about any future in the United States. Free black leaders, still viewing the ACS as a racist organization in league with white slave owners, sought other locations for black emigration. Martin R. Delany, a prominent black physician, tried to establish a colony in the Yoruba region of today's Nigeria as an area for American settlement. Others looked to Haiti or Central America as destinations. But these movements had leaders but few followers. No settlers actually emigrated to Delany's Nigeria colony, and only a few North Americans moved to Haiti.[10] However, by the beginning of the Civil War, nearly 13,000 black American settlers had come to Liberia, and the black republic controlled a strip of English-speaking settlements scattered along 250 miles of coastline, a few miles deep. Indigenous Africans, who always formed the majority of Liberia's residents, were considered neither "Liberians" nor citizens, and they had no voice in the republic's affairs.
By 1861, the Republic of Liberia had emerged as a symbol that could unite or divide black public opinion. Some black Americans, as well as white abolitionists, believed Liberia's very existence suggested that persons of African descent had no place in America outside of slavery. Prominent black leaders saw the American Colonization Society as a white man's movement that was part of America's racial problem, not its solution. Others saw in the Liberian Republic a symbol of black nationalism, a place where "civilized" black people ruled themselves. At the end of her famous novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe sent George and Eliza off to Liberia with their family but kept some of her black characters home in the United States. George, the strong and angry black man, cannot live in America but expresses his black nationalist feelings by building up the black Republic of Liberia. Likewise, in real life, some emigrants applied to the ACS every year willing to trade in their residence in the United States to follow their African dreams.
Black interest in Liberia emigration plummeted when the Civil War promised the end of slavery and meaningful change to the status of black Americans. Ironically, President Abraham Lincoln's administration suddenly became interested in colonizing freed slaves, especially those who trailed behind occupying Union armies throughout the South. Looking past Liberia, Lincoln's officials searched for locations closer at hand, in the Caribbean or Central America, for the resettlement of freed persons. Despite a congressional appropriation for colonization, the Lincoln administration mustered only one small unsuccessful colonization expedition to Haiti. Likewise, the ACS during the war had difficulty finding emigrants for Liberia and ultimately had to recruit settlers from Barbados instead of the United States.[11]
The end of the Civil War saw significant change in the fortunes of the American Colonization Society and the idea of African colonization. By the time the society celebrated its fiftieth birthday in 1867, its revenues had sharply declined, its loyal following of wealthy white men had largely grown old and died, and the state auxiliaries for the most part had ceased their operations. The ACS had really become the work of one man, William Coppinger, the society's corresponding secretary, who after 1872 worked out of an office on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C. Coppinger, a white Quaker, had begun work with the colonization movement in 1838 as a ten-year-old office boy in the Pennsylvania auxiliary. By 1864, he became corresponding secretary of the ACS and devoted the rest of his life, until his death in 1892, to the work of Liberia emigration. He single-handedly administered the ACS's dwindling resources, edited the society's quarterly journal, the African Repository, corresponded with the people who desired to resettle in Liberia, and made the arrangements for those accepted for emigration. A dedicated, humble, self-effacing man, Coppinger appeared to believe sincerely that freed people of the American South could better their lives through emigration to Liberia, and he worked tirelessly to that end. No longer a big-budget institution, the American Colonization Society had become virtually a one-man show.[12]
But at the same time, the momentum in the back-to-Africa movement was shifting from white northerners to poor black farmers in the South. Freedom's rewards were slow in coming and fewer than expected. The Liberian government promised twenty-five acres of free land for each emigrant family, ten acres for a single adult, who came to the black republic. After the war's end, Secretary Coppinger made yearly trips to Georgia and the Carolinas recruiting emigrants. Between 1865 and 1869, the ACS expended much of its remaining funds and transported a record number of 2,394 emigrants to Liberia, more than the society would send over the next thirty years. Through the 1870s, with even less money in its treasury, the ACS sent a yearly average of only ninety-eight emigrants, and that average dropped to seventy-four in the 1880s. Finally, in 1892, the society decided to stop sending groups of emigrants entirely.[13] However, the decline in the number of emigrants in the post-Reconstruction years reflects the dwindling financial resources of the society, not motivation among African Americans. In fact, the most intense black interest in emigration, as measured by the volume of the ACS's incoming correspondence, came in the late 1870s and early 1890s. Both of these periods were moments of sharp racial conflict, and nowhere was the desire for African emigration greater than Arkansas.
African Americans' desire to move out of the South swelled as Reconstruction came to a halt in 1877. Reconstruction had been winding down gradually before its final closure. White Democrats had reclaimed state governments in Tennessee by 1869; in North Carolina, Georgia, and Virginia by 1870; in Arkansas, Alabama, and Texas by 1874; and in Mississippi by 1875. By 1877, the party of Lincoln controlled only the statehouses of Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana. Public opinion in the North had begun to sour on military occupation of the South, and business interests in the Republican Party pushed for the reintegration of southern states into the national economy. The election of Rutherford B. Hayes as president in 1876 signaled the end of federal oversight of local affairs in the South. Ironically, Hayes's campaign platform called for strong protection of black citizens in the South. But when the election mired down in controversy because of disputed returns in Florida, South Carolina, and Louisiana, Republicans worked out a compromise that gave them the presidency in exchange for measures formally ending Reconstruction. In an extremely complex turn of events, the necessary electoral votes went to Hayes while the statehouses in the disputed states went to the Democrats. Hayes withdrew the federal troops from South Carolina and Louisiana and included some southern Democrats, even ex-Confederates, in his federal patronage and cabinet appointments. Historians have debated whether Hayes's policy reflected a genuine attempt to heal sectional strife or a mere ploy to win a disputed election and consolidate power. In any case, Reconstruction, with its use of force to protect the rights of black citizens, had come to an end.[14]
The symbolic meaning of Hayes's policy seemed clear to white southern Democrats. The federal government, while it would use troops to fight Indians in the West and to break a railroad strike in northern cities in the summer of 1877, would not intervene in southern affairs. In black-majority areas, white Democrats had already begun using terror tactics against black Republican voters in the elections of 1875 and 1876. Before the state elections in Mississippi in 1875, white military companies in Yazoo and Coahoma Counties, deep in the delta, attacked black Republican meetings and murdered several black leaders.[15] In South Carolina's piedmont area, gangs of white men rode through the countryside before the 1876 election terrorizing black neighborhoods and keeping Republican voters home on election day. Obviously, Hayes's actions of 1877 further emboldened white Democrats. The violence and fraud in the next election, the state and congressional races of 1878, shocked many northern Republicans into admitting the failure of the president's southern policy. Again the atrocities were greatest in black-majority states where white Democrats needed to suppress black Republican votes to get or maintain power. Reports from Louisiana suggested that animals preyed upon the unburied bodies of African Americans slain on election day. The number of Republican ballots cast in South Carolina dropped from 90,000 in the fraudulent 1876 election to a mere 4,000 in 1878. The Republican Party thus crumbled in the Black Belt southern states that had the largest number of potential Republican voters.[16]
The pattern would continue in the 1880 elections. Only two Republican votes were recorded in Yazoo County, Mississippi, a county that was 75 percent black. The Republican presidential candidate of 1880, James A. Garfield, received his lowest percentage of votes in states that had the highest proportion of black residents, while he polled the greatest percentage of southern votes in border states with the lowest black populations.[17] Thus, African Americans virtually lost voting rights in the areas where their numbers threatened white control.
African Americans understood the meaning of the president's retreat from Reconstruction. In the same areas where Reconstruction's end brought sudden change to their political status, a black migration movement took root quickly and sprouted in the last three years of the 1870s. The day after President Hayes withdrew federal troops from South Carolina, John Mardenborough, a black lawyer in Edgefield County, wrote to the American Colonization Society's office in Washington begging the society to send a group of seventy-five local black residents to Liberia. Edgefield County, in fact, was known throughout South Carolina for the most extreme political violence against black citizens. Mardenborough explained why his group wished to leave Edgefield County: "While I write a colored woman comes and tells me her husband was killed last night in her presence by white men and her children burned to death in the house; she says her person was outraged by these men and then she was whipped—such things as these are common occurrences. In the name of God can not the Society send us to Africa or some where else where we can live without ill treatment?"[18]
By the summer of 1877, interest in Liberia emigration had spread throughout South Carolina. One of the black leaders from Edgefield County, Harrison N. Bouey, traveled to Charleston to serve on a federal jury, and there he linked up with others interested in emigration. When Bouey arrived in Charleston, "Professor" J. C. Hazeley, a native African, was in town to deliver lectures promoting African emigration at the Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Apparently displeased with the ACS's response to prospective emigrants, leaders at these meetings proposed the formation of a joint stock company to purchase their own ship and to transport emigrants to Africa. Thus was born the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company, which sold stock at ten dollars a share. By early 1878, the company had raised $6,000 and purchased a ship in Boston, the Azor, which arrived in the port of Charleston in March. Five thousand people turned out for the worship service that consecrated the vessel into service. The elderly Martin R. Delany, eminent Charlestonian and longtime promoter of African emigration, spoke, as did the Reverend Henry McNeal Turner, future bishop of the AME Church and the coming generation's spokesman for the emigration cause. A month later, the Azor finally set sail with 206 passengers, and 175 more remained behind awaiting a second voyage. But the Azor would never sail again. Upon its return, bills from the first voyage came due, and the ship was sold at auction the next year to pay the company's debts.[19]
At the same time that black South Carolinians were organizing for African emigration, a similar movement broke out in Louisiana. As early as December 1875, a group of black clergymen from Louisiana, Texas, Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia had held a conference in New Orleans to assess the situation for southern blacks. The group discussed migration to the western territories or to Liberia. One of the delegates to the meeting, Henry Adams, a tireless political organizer from Caddo Parish, in northwest Louisiana, returned home and founded the Colonization Council to plan a way to go somewhere, anywhere, outside of the South. In July 1877, Adams's council drew up a petition to President Hayes asking for the government either to protect rights of black citizens or to give them a territory of their own. If Hayes could do neither, the petition asked for a federal appropriation of funds to send them back to their own land, Africa. The next month, Adams wrote to the American Colonization Society claiming to speak for 69,000 African Americans in Louisiana, southern Arkansas, and eastern Texas who wished to move to Liberia. The aspiring emigrants even proposed to send a delegation to Liberia to investigate the conditions there and report back to the group. Coppinger made it clear that the ACS could not fund a mass migration to Liberia and that any investigative delegation must travel at its own expense. He encouraged the group to keep organized, collect dues, and send a few settlers each year. Given the impoverished conditions under which they lived, this advice could hardly satisfy. Only seven known emigrants left Louisiana for Liberia, a group from New Orleans settled by the ACS in 1876.[20]
As possibilities for emigration to Liberia were waning, interest shifted to a destination closer at hand: Kansas. Benjamin "Pap" Singleton, a former slave from Tennessee, had arrived in Kansas in the mid-1870s and immediately begun work to promote the state as a haven for black settlers. Singleton and other land developers circulated handbills throughout the South encouraging black people to consider Kansas. Political actions further inspired black southerners to move west. In January of 1879, Senator William Windom of Minnesota introduced a resolution calling for a U.S. Senate committee to study the feasibility of federal aid for migration of black citizens from areas where their rights were denied to western territories where they would be respected. After much debate in the Senate, the Windom resolution eventually died from inaction, but rumors about the resolution swept through the South and further inspired black interest in migration and the possibility of governmental assistance. By spring 1879, Liberia fever in the lower South had become Kansas fever, and hundreds of migrants camped along the Mississippi River waiting for steamboats to take them north. Reports of a mass migration from Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas in particular aroused much interest among politicians and newspaper editors. The U.S. Senate even established a select committee to investigate the situation. However, informed estimates suggest that only around 8,000 black migrants actually moved to Kansas in 1879 and 1880. Poverty rather than lack of interest probably best explains the modest numbers, for few rural blacks could afford the steamboat and railroad passage needed to get to Kansas.[21] The Kansas exodus of 1879, like the Liberia emigration movement, illustrates the keen interest among African Americans in escaping political oppression in the South. While in antebellum years, free black Americans had criticized the American Colonization Society as a racist organization hell-bent on removing the country's free black population, one can only wonder what slaves may have thought or said about Liberia in the years before freedom. After Reconstruction's end in 1877, most prominent black leaders continued to oppose African migration, but for ordinary black Americans, many whose lives had begun as slaves, Liberia became a symbol of a new life, free from white oppression. These men and women were more than willing to work with the ACS to get to Africa. During the late 1800s, as the back-to-Africa movement shifted from being a white man's institution to a black grassroots movement, interest would be no greater anywhere than in Arkansas. The story of Arkansas's African emigration movement will illustrate not just the severe realities for black southerners in the late 1800s but also their hopes and dreams for a better life.

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BACK TO AFRICA! -BLACKS IN ARKANSAS WERE SMART IN 1868-THEY WENT BACK AND BUILD UP THEIR NEW COUNTRIES IN BLACK FREEDOM!-FROM ENCYCLOPEDIAOF ARKANSAS.NET

from encyclopediaofarkansas.net

Home / Browse / Back-to-Africa Movement Back-to-Africa Movement The Back-to-Africa Movement mobilized thousands of African-American Arkansans who wished to leave the state for the Republic of Liberia in the late 1800s. Approximately 650 emigrants left from Arkansas, more than from any other American state, in the 1880s and 1890s, the last phase of organized group migration of black Americans to Liberia. As early as 1820, black Americans had begun to return to their ancestral homeland through the auspices of the American Colonization Society (ACS), an organization headquartered in Washington DC, which arranged transportation and settlement. The ACS founded the Republic of Liberia in 1847, with its flag and constitution emulating American models, and nearly 13,000 redeemed slaves and free blacks had settled there before the Civil War. With the Civil War and abolition of slavery, the Back-to-Africa movement declined. However, interest in an African migration rekindled after Reconstruction ended and conditions for black Americans worsened in the late 1870s. In several Delta counties of eastern Arkansas, white Democrats used extraordinary measures during the 1878 elections to keep African Americans from voting. In Phillips County, which was approximately seventy-five percent black, Democrats even stationed a heavy cannon in front of the main black polling place. Anthony L. Stanford, a black physician and Methodist preacher who also served as Phillips County’s Republican state senator, contacted the ACS, requesting assistance with emigration of a number of black citizens to Africa. In 1879, he led twenty-three residents of Phillips County to Liberia, and another 118 emigrants followed the next year from Phillips and Woodruff counties. Whereas Phillips County had polled a Republican majority in the 1876 presidential election, by the gubernatorial election of 1880, only ten Republican votes were cast in the county that had more than 15,000 black residents. Clearly, the Back-to-Africa movement was motivated by the deterioration in status of black citizens in the Delta in the late 1870s. Conditions improved somewhat in the 1880s. Black men appear to have regained the franchise in the 1882 elections, and black Republican officials were elected to local offices in Delta counties through the rest of the decade. The 1880s also saw a massive in-migration as African Americans from the Deep South, especially South Carolina, fled their own oppressive conditions and looked to Arkansas as a place of plentiful work and cheap land. The 1880s seemed to be a time of promise for black Arkansans, and interest in African emigration waned but never went away. The Reverend Henry McNeal Turner of Atlanta, the foremost advocate nationally for African emigration, was elected bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in 1880 and was appointed to the eighth district, composed of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Indian Territory. Throughout the 1880s and early 1890s, Turner made yearly trips to Arkansas to preside over annual church meetings, and he always used the pulpit to promote emigration and missions to Africa. In 1886 and 1887, an African man, self-proclaimed “professor” Jacob C. Hazeley, traveled around the state giving lectures accompanied by picture displays about Africa. Hazeley encouraged interested parties to apply for emigration to the ACS. A farm family from Lee County and a schoolteacher from Fort Smith (Sebastian County) emigrated to Liberia in 1882. Three more left from Conway County in 1883, a family of eight from Phillips County emigrated in 1887, and a Faulkner County family of eight moved to Liberia in the spring of 1889. However, it would be the return of political and racial violence in the late 1880s and early 1890s that made Liberia fever rage through black precincts of Arkansas. In the 1888 and 1890 elections, the Democratic Party faced opposition by a biracial alliance of the rural poor with the cooperation between the agrarian populist movement and the Republican Party. To win the elections, fraud and terror tactics eclipsed those used in 1878 in degree and scale. The Democratic-controlled state legislature in 1891 passed laws aimed at disfranchising black and poor white voters. Before the session ended, the General Assembly crafted Jim Crow segregation laws. In the year that would follow disfranchisement, some of the most horrific lynchings in American history occurred in Arkansas. In response, black Arkansas sharecroppers and small landowners flooded the ACS office in Washington with letters begging for passage to Africa. As more information circulated back to Arkansas, interest only swelled. Would-be emigrants formed at least forty “Liberia Exodus” clubs that elected officers and held regular meetings, often disguising their true purposes from white neighbors hostile to the movement. Applications for emigration came in from the majority of Arkansas’s seventy-five counties, but interest was particularly keen in areas where political conflict was most intense—in Woodruff, St. Francis, Lonoke, and Jefferson counties in east-central Arkansas and the Arkansas River Valley from Little Rock (Pulaski County) to Atkins (Pope County). In Conway County alone, which experienced some of the most spectacular political violence, nearly 1,500 African Americans, about twenty percent of the county’s black population, formally applied to emigrate to Liberia. Most of the emigrants sent by the ACS to Liberia in the early 1890s hailed from Arkansas, including nearly 100 from Morrilton (Conway County) and Plumerville (Conway County) and forty-four from Little Rock and Argenta (now North Little Rock in Pulaski County). A group of thirty-four would-be emigrants from Woodruff County sold their possessions and traveled to New York City in 1892 to beg unsuccessfully for passage to Africa. Their unexpected arrival created a refugee crisis for the ACS, leading it to end its seventy-five-year long resettlement program. The society got out of the emigration business just at the time demand was greatest in Arkansas. To address this interest, some white businessmen in Birmingham, Alabama, formed a company that transported to Liberia more than 200 Arkansans, mostly from Jefferson, St. Francis, and Lonoke counties, in three voyages between 1894 and 1896. A few additional black Arkansans booked commercial passage on steamers that traveled to Liberia from New York via ports in Europe. The interest in Africa spilled over into missionary work. Approximately a dozen black Arkansans and their families traveled to Africa in the 1890s as missionaries, a number representing nearly a quarter of known black missionaries to Africa in that decade. For the black Arkansans who emigrated, their African Promised Land brought great challenges and some rewards. The Republic of Liberia granted each emigrant family twenty-five acres of free land and settled most of the Arkansas arrivals together in two communities, Brewerville and Johnsonville, a few miles into the interior from the capital, Monrovia. In the heart of the tropics and one of the wettest places in Africa, Liberia hosted a variety of diseases, especially potent strains of malaria that ravaged the emigrant population. People struggled with illness just when they had the most work to do—clearing land, planting crops, and building homes. Settlers had to adjust to new foods and lifestyles and learn to grow a new cash crop, coffee, instead of cotton. The Arkansas emigrants of 1879 and the 1880s prospered through coffee cultivation. However, the coffee trees planted by settlers of the 1890s began to produce berries just in time for the cataclysmic drop in coffee prices, as production in Brazil began to glut the world market in the late 1890s. Several Arkansas emigrants returned to America; perhaps more wished to return but lacked the money for passage. But many of these new Liberians apparently were pleased with their new home. In the words of one Arkansas settler, William Rogers, who wrote back to family in Morrilton, Liberia was “the colored man’s home, the only place on earth where they have equal rights.” What Rogers liked best about Liberia, he said, was that “there are no white men here to give orders; and when you go in your house, there is no one to stand out, and call you to the door and shoot you when you come out. We have no foreman over us; we are our own boss. We work when we want to, and sit down when we choose, and eat when we get ready.” Some of the Arkansas families became prominent in the black republic. Victoria David Tolbert, Liberia’s former first lady whose husband, President William Tolbert, was murdered in the violent coup of 1980, was the daughter of Isaac David, who left Little Rock in 1891 with his family at the age of five. For additional information:Barnes, Kenneth C. Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Redkey, Edwin S. Black Exodus: Black Nationalist and Back-to-Africa Movements, 1890–1910. Yale University Press, 1969. Patton, Adell, Jr. “The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas.” Arkansas Historical Quarterly 51 (Summer 1992): 164–177. American Colonization Society Records. Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington D.C. Kenneth C. Barnes University of Central Arkansas Related Butler Center Lesson Plans: Charting Changes (Grades 5-8) Last Updated 6/21/2010 About this Entry: Contact the Encyclopedia / Submit a Comment / Submit a Narrative

The Horsa Departing for Liberia
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LOOK WHAT THIS WHITE BOY SAID ABOUT US BLACKS GOING BACK TO AFRICA!-FROM NEWS.STANFORD.EDU

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2006/march1/colonize-030106.html

Stanford Report, March 1, 2006

Historian situates 'back-to-Africa' movements in broad context

L.A. Cicero David Brion Davis, foreground, responded to a question during a discussion session connected to the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, which he delivered on campus last week. Panelist Walter Johnson looks on.

BY BARBARA PALMER
The so-called "back to Africa" movements, which sent American blacks, willingly and unwillingly, as colonists to West Africa and elsewhere during the 19th and 20th centuries, often have been considered as a kind of sidebar to American history.
In presenting the Tanner Lectures on Human Values on campus last week, noted slavery historian David Brion Davis made the experience of African American colonists in Liberia, and the symbolic meaning of colonization, the centerpiece of his talks. In two lectures titled "Exodus, Exiles and Promised Lands," Davis, the Sterling Professor of History, Emeritus, at Yale University, also put African American colonization within the broader context of the global history of mass deportations of groups of unwanted people by linking it to the archetypal story in Exodus of the Israelites fleeing Egypt. And he described a circuitous route by which colonization fueled black nationalism and played an ironic but crucial role in the development of the civil rights movement.
Davis is the author of many books, including the seminal works The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution: 1770-1823 (1975). His two lectures were based on three chapters of an upcoming third volume, The Problem of Slavery in an Age of Emancipation, which will complete the series.
Davis' talks, and the public discussions that followed them, underscored the broad support of colonization by African Americans in West Africa and elsewhere at various moments in the 19th century and the persistence of the idea into the 20th century. Virtually every national leader from Thomas Jefferson to Abraham Lincoln held the conviction that blacks and whites could not coexist as free and equal citizens, Davis wrote in his 2003 book, Challenging the Boundaries of Slavery.
A list of supporters of African American colonization would include "John Marshall, James Madison, Daniel Webster, Andrew Jackson, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney, Stephen A. Douglas and even Harriet Beecher Stowe," Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University, pointed out in a discussion session on Friday.
The motives of whites for supporting the colonization movement were themselves complex and contradictory, Davis demonstrated. The American Colonization Society (ACS), which was founded in 1816, had the support both of white philanthropists who sought a refuge for blacks from degrading living conditions and slave owners who were living under the "nuclear threat" of the Haitian revolution. Slave owners wanted free blacks removed from the nation for fear that they might ignite an insurrection among slaves.
Historians understandably have treated the ACS with hostility, Davis said. But the inherent racism in the ACS should not obscure the fact that 19th-century colonizationists were, on many points, more realistic than the abolitionists, Davis said.
It's not that colonization was the right solution, the historian said, but colonizationists believed—with good reason, it would turn out—that "white racial prejudice would remain intractable for generations, that progress would depend on black solidarity and collective effort, and that emancipation could not be divorced from the crucial need for a social and economic climate in which freed people could exercise their full capacities for human development."
'A city on a hill'African American settlers in Liberia, who took to Africa with them American political, social, cultural and legal conventions, were frequently likened to the founders of Jamestown and Plymouth colonies, Davis said. Nineteenth-century supporters of colonization envisioned a role for settlers in Liberia of "civilizing" Africa and building a society that would be as attractive to American blacks as the United States had proved to be for immigrants, Davis said. Liberia was to be, as John Winthrop imagined Puritan settlements, "a city on a hill," he said.
Black immigration to Liberia was framed within the Exodus narrative, much as the first English colonists in North America had conceived of their migration as a journey to the Promised Land, Davis said. Supporters of British colonization to Virginia promoted it as a way to bring civility and Christianity to the "savages" of North America, and to redeem England of the idleness and crime of its unemployed masses, Davis said. "The failure of all these expectations did not kill the initial dream or deter Virginians and other Americans from applying a very similar formula, over two centuries later, to the colonization of Africa."
In Liberia, with limited aid from the United States, the Americo-Liberians built churches, schools and colleges, maintained stable political parties, managed to assimilate Africans liberated from slave ships by the U.S. Navy and established a constitutional republic in 1847, Davis said. The survival of their nation made an important though often overlooked contribution to black pride and hope, Davis said.
Achievement in Liberia also underlined the futility of progress for blacks in a society dedicated to white supremacy, he said. Slave emancipation in the northern states had led to a black population living in abject poverty and deprived of education, civil rights and any hope of meaningful improvement, he said.
Although colonization was in many ways disastrous—malaria decimated the colonists and Americo-Liberians engaged in bloody battles with tribes who were already living in West Africa—the experience of African Americans in Liberia helped nourish black nationalism and, in turn, an increasingly popular domestic demand for equal civil rights, he said.
In the 20th century Marcus Garvey championed colonization and compared immigration to Liberia to the Jewish recovery of Palestine, Davis said. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., Davis said, Garvey was the first man "on a mass scale and level to give millions of Negroes a sense of dignity and destiny and make the Negro feel he was somebody."
A glaring defect of colonization ideology was its failure to recognize that "from the very beginnings of American history, the lives of blacks and whites had been intertwined on the most complex social, cultural, economic and psychological levels," Davis said. Whites themselves were yoked to the blacks they had enslaved, he said. "The nation as a whole, modeled on ancient dreams of deliverance and fulfillment, could march no farther forward than all the victims of its self-betrayal."
Efforts to remove African Americans from society have not ended, suggested sociologist Larry Bobo, the Martin Luther King, Jr. Centennial Professor, at a discussion session Thursday. "Are we not in the process of creating incredibly harsh new 'internal colonies' with our vast prison industrial complex?" he asked.
In the United States today, there are more African American men in prison than in college; half of all those in jail or in prison are African American, though blacks are only 12 percent of the U.S. population, and one in three black men in their twenties is under some form of criminal justice supervision by the state, Bobo said.
"There is no other way to view this than as a form of social removal," Bobo said. "It borders on the sort of 'social death' [Harvard sociologist] Orlando Patterson once characterized as accompanying slavery."
The Tanner Lectures were established in 1978 by Obert Clark Tanner, an industrialist and legal scholar who studied philosophy at Harvard and Stanford and later served as a member of the Stanford faculty in religious studies. The lectures were presented by the Barbara and Bowen McCoy Program in Ethics in Society and the Office of the President.

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BACK TO AFRICA! -THIS SISTER IS NOT SURE ABOUT GOING BACK!- SISTER VISIT AND SEE!-FROM SHESNOTBLACK.BLOGSPOT.COM

from shesnotblack.blogspot.com

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Saturday, June 11, 2011

Pan-Africanism & Going Back To Africa

Good Afternoon beautiful people, it's kind of chilly here in Chicago hope the weather is much warmer where you all are.. So a few weeks ago I finished reading Malcolm X Speaks which was a compilation of his selected speeches and statements made in his last year of life, edited by George Breitman.. This book only helped to fuel my love for this man, it's definitely a great read if you support what brother Shabazz stood for.. I don't understand how anyone could have listened to the media at that time and actually believed with their whole heart that he was this terrible person.. A lot of what people thought, negative thoughts and ideas they thought brother Shabazz was about have been disputed and clarified in this book by brother Shabazz himself in his speeches and interviews.. This is a must read for all conscious no....all black people or African Americans (don't want to offend anyone)..

I'm sure you all know or have heard of Pan-Africanism so you know what it means, for those of you who don't: "Pan-Africanism is a sociopolitical world view, philosophy, and movement which seeks to unify native Africans and those of African heritage into a "global African community". Pan-Africanism calls for a politically united Africa.", now that you know what it means and do further research if you care to you can determine whether you support or are against this philosophy.. A lot of my friends think I support pan-Africanism whole-heartedly, I did once upon a time but once I started looking at the cold hard facts my perspective began to change once again.. 

How can we unite with a group of people who don't get along with themselves, let alone us.. It doesn't make sense especially when that philosophy is attached to Garvey's "Go Back to Africa" philosophy.. It was made clear to me that we could never unify successfully if the people on the continent couldn't unify on their own.. It just doesn't make sense to unify with a group of people who themselves are unified.. Once they unify and as a whole learn to accept us we could then put into action the idea and philosophies of pan-Africanism, until then it seems like a fairytale, something you'd read about in books but never truly experience in life.. To those who support this philosophy I'm not saying it's impossible because I don't know that, it's just not going to happen overnight it could happen if it's worked on as a collective effort and not individual..

In Malcolm X Speaks in the chapter Last Answers and Interviews, on page 210 brother Shabazz was asked about his thoughts/stance "On Going Back To Africa" and this is a snippet of what he said: "And I believe this, that if we migrated back to Africa culturally, philosophically, and psychologically, while remaining here physically, the spiritual bond that would develop between us and Africa through this cultural, philosophical and psychological migration, so-called migration, would enhance our position here, because we would have our contacts with them acting as roots or foundations behind us. You will never have a foundation in America.".. After I read that I was like that makes a lot more sense then just trying to get up and go back to Africa without having made a foundation with our sisters and brothers in the Mother Land.. A friend once said that to me "we could never rebuild a civilization (foundation) here in America....until America falls down in ruins", something along those lines but this was said to me before I read this book.. It really made me reflect on my idea and stance on pan-Africanism and Going Back to Africa, but that's healthy for our ideas and beliefs to change as we learn and understand more.. I definitely appreciate the knowledge I gain as I read and learn more about my culture and the struggle.. Alhamdulillah..

I hope you all really do get a chance to read this book, my friends already know they can give me a call if they'd like to borrow my copy but no keepsies.. You all enjoy your day today and I hope you learn something new..

Peace & Blessings, That Black Girl

Sources:

Malcolm X speaks: selected speeches and statements By George Breitman
Pan-Africanism 
Pan-Africanism 1  
Picture of Malcolm X