Friday, December 10, 2010
Back To Africa
9:43 AM
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black Arkansans sought a more distant homeland overseas in Africa. In
the 1880s and 1890s more Arkansans migrated to Liberia than from any
other state. In 1891, the year of the Separate Coach Act and the
Election Law, the American Colonization Society’s Arkansas applications
for immigration to the African nation of Liberia peaked at more than
3,000 (out of a total African American population of 309,117 in 1890).
According to historian Kenneth C. Barnes, of the 3,000 applications,
approximately 600 black Arkansans emigrated—representing over one-third
of black American immigrants to Africa between 1879 and 1899. Due to
the high illiteracy rate of African Americans (55 per cent of Arkansas’s
African American males in 1890 were illiterate), schoolteachers and
preachers wrote many of the 3,000 applications for large groups. The
3,000 letters, therefore, represent a greater percentage of Arkansas’s
300,000+ African Americans. These migrations and desires to leave
Arkansas are telling evidence of rural and urban unrest in the state’s
black communities.
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