Monrovia is the capital city of the West African country of Liberia. Founded in 1822, it is located on Cape Mesurado on the Atlantic coast and as of the 2008 census had 1,010,970 residents, home to 29% of Liberia’s total population. As the nation's primate city, Monrovia is the country's economic, financial and cultural center; its economy is primarily centered on its harbor and its role as the seat of Liberian government.
Joseph Jenkins Roberts was an African-American merchant who emigrated to Liberia in 1829, where he became a politician. Elected as the first (1848–1856) and seventh (1872–1876) president of Liberia after independence, he was the first man of African descent to govern the country, serving previously as governor from 1841 to 1848. Born free in Norfolk, Virginia, Roberts emigrated as a young man with his mother, siblings, wife, and child to the young West African colony. He opened a trading firm in Monrovia and later engaged in politics.
Maryland County is a county in the southeastern portion of Liberia. One of 15 counties that comprise the first-level of administrative division in the nation, it has two districts. Harper serves as the capital with the area of the county measuring 2,297 square kilometres (887 sq mi). As of the 2008 Census, it had a population of 136,404, making it the seventh most populous county in Liberia.
The Pepper Coast or Grain Coast was a coastal area of western Africa, between Cape Mesurado and Cape Palmas. It encloses the present republic of Liberia. The name was given by European traders.
Harper, situated on Cape Palmas, is the capital of Maryland County in Liberia. It is a coastal town situated between the Atlantic Ocean and the Hoffman River. Harper is Liberia's 11th largest town, with a population of 17,837.
The Republic of Maryland was a country in West Africa that existed from 1834 to 1857, when it was merged into what is now Liberia. The area was first settled in 1834 by freed African-American slaves and freeborn African Americans primarily from the U.S. state of Maryland, under the auspices of the Maryland State Colonization Society.
Freedom's Journal was the first African-American owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. Founded by Rev. John Wilk and other free Black men in New York City, it was published weekly starting with the 16 March 1827 issue. Freedom's Journal was superseded in 1829 by The Rights of All, published between 1829 and 1830 by Samuel Cornish, the former senior editor of the Journal. The View covered it as part of Black History Month in 2021.
John Brown Russwurm was an abolitionist, newspaper publisher, and colonizer of Liberia, where he moved from the United States. He was born in Jamaica to an English father and enslaved mother. As a child he traveled to the United States with his father and received a formal education, becoming the first African American to graduate from Hebron Academy and Bowdoin College.
Mississippi-in-Africa was a colony on the Pepper Coast founded in the 1830s by the Mississippi Colonization Society of the United States and settled by American free people of color, many of them former slaves. In the late 1840s, some 300 former slaves from Prospect Hill Plantation and other Isaac Ross properties in Jefferson County, Mississippi, were the largest single group of emigrants to the new colony. Ross had freed the slaves in his will and provided for his plantation to be sold to pay for their transportation and initial costs.
The Grebo or Glebo people are an ethnic group or subgroup within the larger Kru group of Africa, a language and cultural ethnicity, and to certain of its constituent elements. Within Liberia members of this group are found primarily in Maryland County and Grand Kru County in the southeastern portion of the country, but also in River Gee County and Sinoe County. The Grebo population in Côte d'Ivoire are known as the Krumen and are found in the southwestern corner of that country.
The McGill family of Monrovia, Liberia, was a free African-American family from Baltimore, Maryland, who emigrated to Monrovia in the 19th century. Among the early American settlers in Liberia, the McGills became established as one of the most prominent early Americo-Liberian families. Daguerreotypes of the McGill family can be found in the Library of Congress. Members occupied colonial offices, and they are mentioned in the African Repository magazine published by the American Colonization Society.
Hilary Teague, sometimes written as Hilary Teage, was a Liberian merchant, journalist, and politician in the early years of the West African nation of Liberia. A native of the state of Virginia in the United States, he was known for his oratory skills and was prominent in early Liberian colonial politics. A leading advocate for Liberian independence from the American Colonization Society, he drafted the Liberian Declaration of Independence in 1847, serving as both a senator and the first Secretary of State for the new nation in the years that followed.
The Maryland State Colonization Society was the Maryland branch of the American Colonization Society, an organization founded in 1816 with the purpose of returning free African Americans to what many Southerners considered greater freedom in Africa. The ACS helped to found the colony of Liberia in 1821–22, as a place for freedmen. The Maryland State Colonization Society was responsible for founding the Republic of Maryland in West Africa, a short lived independent state that in 1857 was annexed by Liberia. The goal of the society was "to be a remedy for slavery", such that "slavery would cease in the state by the full consent of those interested", but this end was never achieved, and it would take the outbreak of the Civil War to bring slavery to an end in Maryland.
Boston Jenkins Drayton (1821–1865) was a Liberian politician and Lutheran minister who served as the 3rd Chief Justice of Liberia from 1861 until 1864. He had previously served as the final Governor of the Republic of Maryland from 1855 until its annexation by Liberia on 18 March 1857.
John Leighton Wilson, an alumnus of Columbia Theological Seminary, and his wife Jane Bayard Wilson were the first missionaries to West Africa by the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions.
Elizabeth Mars Johnson Thomson was an African-American missionary in Liberia, "a major figure in Liberian education and religion."
Thomas John Jackson was an African-American former slave from Frederick County, Maryland, United States, who emigrated to Cape Palmas in the 19th century. Thomas Jackson was one of the most prominent early Americo-Liberian and was among the early American settlers of Liberia. Thomas Jackson is mentioned in the African Repository by the American Colonization Society and the Maryland State Colonization Society.
Samuel Ford McGill was a Liberian physician and politician who served as governor of Maryland in Liberia from 1851 to 1854. Born free in Baltimore, Maryland, he emigrated to Liberia in 1826.
Charles H. Harmon was the tenth vice president of Liberia from 3 January 1876 to 7 January 1878.
James Hall was an American physician who founded the colony of Maryland-in-Africa. Hall served as its governor from 1833 to 1836.
