Prometheus 6   

Was Liberia Founded By Freed U.S. Slaves?
By Mary Kay Ricks
Posted Thursday, July 3, 2003, at 7:49 AM PT

In Tuesday's Washington Post, an editorial urging President Bush to send peacekeepers to civil war-wracked Liberia noted that the country was "founded by freed U.S. slaves." Is that true?

Not quite. Although some freed American slaves did settle there, Liberia was actually founded by the American Colonization Society, a group of white Americans�including some slaveholders�that had what certainly can be described as mixed motives. In 1817, in Washington, D.C., the ACS established the new colony (on a tract of land in West Africa purchased from local tribes) in hopes that slaves, once emancipated, would move there. The society preferred this option to the alternative: a growing number of free black Americans demanding rights, jobs, and resources at home.