African Civilization Society facts for kids
Preamble to the constitution
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| Formation | 1858 |
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| Founders | Henry Highland Garnet Martin Delany |
| Dissolved | 1869 |
| Type | Black-led organization |
| Purpose | Education and self-determination for the African diaspora |
| Headquarters | New York City |
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Main organ
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Freedmen's Torchlight People's Journal |
The African Civilization Society (1858–1869) was a Black nationalist organization founded by Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany in New York City to serve people of the African diaspora. Formed in response to the US Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857) and a series of national events in the 1850s jeapordizing the safety of Black Americans, its mission was to exercise Black self-determination by establishing a colony of free Black Americans in Yorubaland. Additionally, they meant to Westernize Africa, combat the Atlantic slave trade, and create a free labor cotton and molasses production economy there to undermine slavery in the United States and in the Caribbean. However, the majority of Black Americans remained opposed to emigration programs like theirs. After the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), the organization shifted its focus and became the only Black-led organization to educate freedmen in the American South. At their height in the 1860s, they supported Freedmen's Schools with a collective student body of 8,000 throughout the Northeastern and Southern states, employing 129 teachers with an annual budget equivalent to $1,180,595 in 2022 dollars. Though most of their supporters lived in the New York City and Philadelphia areas, auxiliaries and affiliates formed in England, Ohio, Connecticut, Ontario, and Washington, D.C. They published weekly and monthly newspapers with contributions from nationally-recognized Black leaders. After 11 years of service, the organization ceased operations in 1869.
Background
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The American Colonization Society was founded in 1816 with the mission of helping enslaved and free Black Americans emigrate to the Western African colony of Liberia, which was founded in 1821. It represented a coalition of racists, humanitarians, and enslavers, many of whom either felt that Black people did not belong in the US or that they did, but prejudice would always keep them from achieving full American citizenship. Black Americans broadly opposed the organization and the broader movement of African colonization with which it was affiliated. However, some Black community leaders began to look upon both more favorably after Liberia declared independence and adopted exclusively Black leadership in 1847. Further, there was a series of events over the 1850s that led national leaders like Martin Delany and Presbyterian minister Henry Highland Garnet to reconsider emigration. The Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 compromised the safety of free Black Americans by making them susceptible to kidnapping. The Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854 repealed the Missouri Compromise by opening up the possibility of expanding slavery into US territories north of the 36°30′ parallel. Most alarming to Garnet and Delany, the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by the US Supreme Court (1857) denied any claims by Black Americans to constitutional rights. In 1850, Garnet completed a lecture tour of the UK, speaking about the possibilities of undermining the economic viability of slavery in the Americas by encouraging the production of molasses and cotton using free labor in Africa. In 1852, Delany published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, in which he argued that Black Americans had no future in their own country. He asked "What can we do? What shall we do?" and "Shall we fly, or shall we resist?" His conclusion was emigration.
1858–1863: Colonization
Garnet and Delany collaborated with other Black New Yorkers to establish the African Civilization Society (ACS) in September 1858. The group envisioned a group of Black colonists emigrating from the US to Yorubaland in West Africa, where they would spread Christianity and Western economic and political systems to Indigenous Africans. In particular, the group was interested in undermining the Atlantic slave trade and the agricultural slave economies of the US and Caribbean. They sought to do this by training Africans to produce cotton and molasses to compete with slave-produced products in European and American textile manufacturing and other global markets. They also promoted self-determination among all people of the African diaspora, advocating in their constitution the "civilization and evangelization of Africa, and the descendents of the African ancestors, in any portion of the earth, wherever dispersed." In 1859, Delany led a group along the Niger River in West Africa to explore possible sites for a colony. This expedition developed into a separate project called the Niger Valley Exploring Party.
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In 1860, ACS director Theodore Bourne (1821–1910) traveled to England to raise interest and funds for the proposed Yorubaland colony. Local supporters created an affiliate group called the African Aid Society. Because Delany was in England at the same time promoting his Niger Valley Exploring Party, British audiences were confused and found the two organizations in competition. Later that year, Elymas P. Rogers led a group of ACS members to West Africa to scout potential colony locations, but he died of malaria shortly after arriving in Liberia. In April 1861, the ACS held a meeting to raise $10,000 to fund an emigration party of 20 Black Americans, led by Garnet, to Yorubaland. In August of that year Garnet traveled to England to build interest in the project. In November, ACS supporters met with Delany, who offered a supplement to the organization's constitution to codify that the ACS would be controlled by the "colored people of America", though "their white friends" were welcome as "aiders and assistants". The adopted supplement affirmed that "the basis of the Society, and ulterior objects in encouraging emigration shall be: Self-Reliance and Self-Government on the Principle of an African Nationality–the African race being the ruling element of the nation, controlling and directing their own affairs." In 1864, the ACS moved their headquarters to Weeksville, Brooklyn, which was a free Black community established decades earlier as an alternative to Liberian emigration.
National Black leaders like Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, and James W. C. Pennington were suspicious of the ACS because of their association with the white-led American Colonization Society, which was similar in mission, and opposed by the majority of free Black Americans. A local chapter, the New York State Colonization Society, kept their offices in the same building and provided several members on the eighteen-member ACS board of directors. However, Garnet announced in 1860 that the ACS had no connection to the American Colonization Society, asserting that their mission did not disrupt slavery, whereas ACS worked against it explicitly. At a May 1863 meeting of the ACS, Douglass charged that their constitution was "the fruits of the same vine as colonizationists" and "'the same Robfit Colonization' with a new skin". He said in a speech four years earlier: "The African Civilization Society says to us, go to Africa .... To which we simply reply, 'we prefer to remain in America;'".
1863–1869: Education
The American Civil War, particularly after the Emancipation Proclamation (1863), disrupted colonization projects like the ACS and caused many of their supporters to focus on mobilizing military support for the Union Army in order to end slavery in the US. Garnet joined the army as a chaplain and Delany as the Major of a Colored Troops unit. Under the direction of Presbyterian clergyman and newly-selected ACS president George W. LeVere, the organization shifted its focus from emigration to educating formerly enslaved people, called freedmen. In 1863, they broadened their mission to include helping and educating folks recently freed from slavery in the American South, Central America, South America, the British West Indies, and Africa. The new constitution, adopted January 2, 1864, outlined a mission of ending the slave trade and civilizing, uplifting, and Christianizing Africa and all members of the African diaspora. Their programming reflected Black nationalist ideals: helping Black Americans educate themselves, lead their own education programs, and create their own political and social institutions. Between 1863 and 1867, they were the only Black-led organization opening Freedmen's Schools in the South.
During the war, Black activist and educator Junius C. Morel claimed: "The African Civilization Society is fully in the field". They are "holding meetings, collecting clothes, books, paper" to support freedmen and "they are making arrangements to send colored teachers just as fast as they can find the means and persons qualified to go". By 1866, the group employed 69 teachers with a collective student body of 2,000 throughout the Northeastern United States. By 1868, they employed 129 teachers and supported schools in Virginia, Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Washington, D.C., with a collective student body of 8,000 and an annual cost of $53,700. Among those teachers was Maria W. Stewart, Laura Cardozo, Hezekiah Hunter, and his wife, Lizzie hunter.
The ACS supported their educational efforts with a monthly newspaper, the Freedmen's Torchlight, which said it was "devoted to the temporal and spiritual interests of the Freedmen". According to historian Judith Wellman, the paper's "contributors read like a blue ribbon list of Brooklyn's African American intellectual elite", including editor Rev. Rufus L. Perry; Henry M. Wilson; Junius C. Morel, Martin Delany; and Rev. Amos Noë Freeman, minister of the Siloam Presbyterian Church. The organization's other publication was a weekly newspaper called People's Journal. ACS supporters lived primarily in Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia, but auxiliary groups formed in Ohio, Connecticut, Ontario, and Washington, D.C. Leadership and supporters grew to include Richard H. Cain, J. Sella Martin, and Theodore L. Cuyler. However, the ACS started declining financially in 1866 and disbanded in 1869.
See also
- Niger expedition of 1841
- Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor
- Nova Scotian Settlers
- Back-to-Africa movement
- Free African Society
- African Americans in Africa
- Haitian emigration
- Colonization societies
