Jean-Pierre Boyer was one of the leaders of the Haitian Revolution, and the president of Haiti from 1818 to 1843. He reunited the north and south of the country into the Republic of Haiti in 1820 and also annexed the newly independent Spanish Haiti, which brought all of Hispaniola under one Haitian government by 1822. Serving as president for just under 25 years, Boyer managed to rule for the longest period of time of any Haitian leader.
The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America, was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the repatriation of freeborn people of color and emancipated slaves to the continent of Africa. It was modeled on an earlier British colonization in Africa, which had sought to resettle London's "black poor".
Theodore Frelinghuysen was an American politician who represented New Jersey in the United States Senate. He was the Whig vice presidential nominee in the election of 1844, running on a ticket with Henry Clay.
Black separatism is a separatist political movement that seeks separate economic and cultural development for those of African descent in societies, particularly in the United States. Black separatism stems from the idea of racial solidarity, and it also implies that black people should organize themselves on the basis of their common skin color, their race, culture, and African heritage. There were a total of 255 black separatist groups recorded in the United States as of 2019.
Samaná English is a variety of the English language spoken by descendants of black immigrants from the United States who have lived in the Samaná Peninsula, now in the Dominican Republic. Members of the enclave are known as the Samaná Americans.
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 March 16, 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 Freedom's Journal was superseded in 1829 by The Rights of All, published between 1829 and 1830 by Samuel Cornish, the former senior editor of the Journal.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.
Lewis Woodson was an educator, minister, writer, and abolitionist. He was an early leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME) in Ohio and Pennsylvania. Woodson started and helped to build other institutions within the free African-American communities in Ohio and western Pennsylvania prior to the American Civil War.
A number of colonization societies which promoted the migration of African Americans to Africa have existed in the United States. Thomas Jefferson was a Founding Father who promoted the racial separation of Native Americans and the colonization of African Americans to places far away from Virginia. Jefferson was the most important early advocate of colonization. The Reverend Samuel Hopkins of Newport appears to have originated the idea of colonization in 1770.
The back-to-Africa movement was a political movement in the 19th and 20th centuries advocating for a return of the descendants of African American slaves to the African continent. The movement originated from a widespread belief among some European Americans in the 18th and 19th century United States that African Americans would want to return to the continent of Africa. In general, the political movement was an overwhelming failure; very few former slaves wanted to move to Africa. The small number of freed slaves who did settle in Africa—some under duress—initially faced brutal conditions, due to diseases to which they no longer had biological resistance. As the failure became known in the United States in the 1820s, it spawned and energized the radical abolitionist movement. In the 20th century, the Jamaican political activist and black nationalist Marcus Garvey, members of the Rastafari movement, and other African Americans supported the concept, but few actually left the United States.
Loring Daniel Dewey (1791–1867) was an early 19th-century Presbyterian minister, an agent of the American Colonization Society, an active supporter of colonization societies, a printer, and a reformer.
Prince Saunders was an African American teacher, scholar, diplomat, and author who different sources say was born in either Lebanon, Connecticut, or Thetford, Vermont. During his life, Saunders helped set up schools for African Americans in Massachusetts and also in Haiti, for King Henri Christophe. During his time in Haiti, Saunders also penned the Haytian Papers, which were a translation of the Haitian laws with his commentary. He was a proponent of black emigration to Haiti, where he became a naturalized citizen. Because of his influence in establishing schools for African Americans, Saunders was one of the most significant black educators in the early 19th century in the United States and Haiti. He lived his last days in Port-au-Prince, where he died in 1839.
The Samaná Americans are a minority cultural sub-group of African American descendants who inhabit the Samaná Province in the eastern region of Dominican Republic.
James Redpath was an American journalist and anti-slavery activist.
Thomas Paul (1773–1831) was a Baptist minister in Boston, Massachusetts, who became the first pastor for the First African Baptist Church, currently known as the African Meeting House. He later helped found the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York City. An abolitionist, he was a leader in the black community and was an active missionary in Haiti.
Black nationalism is a nationalist movement which seeks liberation, equality, representation and/or self-determination for black people as a distinct national identity, especially in racialized, colonial and postcolonial societies. Its earliest proponents saw it as a way to advocate for democratic representation in culturally plural societies or to establish self-governing independent nation-states for black people. Modern black nationalism often aims for the social, political, and economic empowerment of black communities within white majority societies, either as an alternative to assimilation or as a way to ensure greater representation and equality within predominantly Eurocentric or white cultures.
James Theodore Augustus Holly was the first African-American bishop in the Protestant Episcopal church, and spent most of his episcopal career as missionary bishop of Haiti.
American Haitians comprise the descendants of free blacks from the United States to Haiti in the early 19th century as well as recent immigrants and expatriates as well as their locally born descendants. At the time of the 2010 Haiti earthquake, there were about 45,000 US citizens living in Haiti.
The African Civilization Society (ACS) was an American Black nationalist organization founded by Henry Highland Garnet and Martin Delany in New York City to serve African Americans. Founded in 1858 in response to the 1857 Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford and a series of national events in the 1850s which negatively impacted African Americans, its mission was to exercise African-American self-determination by establishing a colony of free people of color in Yorubaland. Additionally, the organization intended the colony to Westernize Africa, combat the Atlantic slave trade, and create a cotton and molasses production economy underwritten by free labor to undermine slavery in the United States and the Caribbean. However, the majority of African Americans remained opposed to emigration programs like theirs.
Howard Holman Bell was a scholar of African American history. His book Minutes of the Proceedings of the National Negro Conventions, 1830-1864 was published in 1969. He wrote an introduction to the 1970 edition of Black Separatism in the Caribbean, 1860. Several of his articles were published in the Journal of Negro Education. He worked at the Library of Congress, Texas Southern University, Dillard University, Morgan State University, and Howard University.
Hezekiah Grice was an American and Haitian activist, machinist, and businessman, noted for his political activity in Baltimore during the early 19th century. While working as a machinist in Baltimore, he was either the first person or one of the first people to suggest holding a National Negro Convention to discuss the possibility of mass emigration by African Americans away from the United States. This was the beginning of the Colored Conventions Movement. Grice was also a leading figure in the founding of the Legal Rights Association, which has been credited with helping to clarify citizenship rights in America, as well as with pioneering several important tactics in American civil rights activism. He later moved to Haiti where he could secure full citizenship rights. There he became a prominent tradesman and a confidant of Faustin Soulouque.
