GRIOTS REPUBLIC - AN URBAN BLACK TRAVEL MAG - AUGUST 2016

The Star Spangled Banner is the national anthem of the United States
of America. It is sung at the beginning of every major event in the country
and played whenever a U.S team wins a medal in the Olympics. It was
written in 1814 by Francis Scott Key after witnessing the bombarding
of Fort McHenry in Baltimore, Maryland during the War of 1812. The
eighth lyric of the song reads: “O’er the land of the free, and the home
of the brave.” This line has become synonymous with the idea of what
America is supposed to be. Free.
However, for many freed black American slaves at the time, true freedom
was something that they could only hope for. As those lyrics were being
penned there was a movement to resettle freed slaves in Africa. In 1816
the American Colonization Society (ACS) was formed specifically for this
purpose. The name of that colony would be: Liberia, which ironically
translates to “Land of the free” in Latin. The history of Liberia is unique
in Africa as it started neither as a native state nor as a European colony,
but began in 1821 when the ACS began funding it for free blacks from
the United States.
You see at this time in our country’s history many White Americans
thought that African Americans could not succeed in living in society as
free people. Some were abolitionists and some were former slave owners
alike. Others considered blacks physically and mentally inferior to
whites, and believed that institutional racism and societal polarization