John Kizell Quotes
ßome would not be governed by white men, and some would not be governed by black men, and some would not be governed by mulattoes; but the truth was they did not want to be governed by anybody
In 1820, convoyed by the war-sloop Cyane, American free Negroes (33 men ,18 women and some children) set out for Africa pursuant to a new program authorized by Congress and President Monroe. However, the details of the endeavor had not been worked out and after the Negroes’ experience in the U. S. the would-be settlers were suspicious of all government.
John Kizell Characterization of the attitudes towards government of the first American Negro settlers to Africa Quoted in Benjamin Brawley A Social History of the American Negro 1921
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
Liberia was founded by freed American slaves.
Johnson had a white mistress who accompanied him visibly at a time when Blacks were lynched for dating white women in many parts of the country. He was criticized heavily by whites for going with a white woman and many Blacks for the same.
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Many whites thought that the solution to the problem of free and emancipated Negroes was to send them to Africa. They assumed that the negroes would by desirous of that solution also, but they rarely asked them. When they did, they received answers much like this one from one of the leading Black clergymen in America.
In the early colony of Liberia each man was supposed to work 2 days a week for the community in exchange for public stores. Ashmun was the agent of the colonial society that provided funds to get the colony started, but he became a political issue. While many of the whites of the Colonial Society were abolitionists, many others were not and just wanted to get rid of free Blacks. Ashman however was an outspoken foe of the slave trade and the latter group, in retaliation for his public attacks on the slave trade, withdrew their ‘confidence” in him and refused to honor his bank drafts or even to provide funds for his subsistence and remuneration. The colony was thus in chaos, and a number of men went on a work strike in protest of the political fight in the society affecting them. To prevent complete chaos and maintain some unity and discipline in the colony, Ashmun issued this order. Things calmed down in the colony but the society continues its politicking with different views on slavery the cause of the strife.
John Kizell became known as a leader in Sierra Leone as it was being developed as a new British colony in the early nineteenth century. Believed born on Sherbro Island, he was captured and enslaved as a child, and shipped to Charleston, South Carolina, where he was sold again. Years later, after the American Revolutionary War, during which he gained freedom with the British and was evacuated to Nova Scotia, he eventually returned to West Africa. In 1792 he was among 50 native-born Africans among the 1200 mostly African-American Black Loyalists who were resettled in Freetown.
