An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States

white people were interested in removing Black folks from the US because
it clearly offered a way for them to form their own white nation-state.
Major supporters included Senator Henry Clay and President James
Monroe, author of the “Monroe Doctrine,” which sought to expand the
borders of the young settler nation. Clergyman and ACS cofounder Robert
Finley, who had major fears of a Black planet, did not want a Black
republic in the West because he feared it would be a haven for fugitive
slaves, Native peoples, and others, which, having lived in South Carolina,
he had witnessed happen in neighboring Florida, a state where enslaved
Africans had recently found refuge and formed Maroon communities. 42
The logic of the ACS was rooted in the persistent idea of Indigenous
dispossession and enslavement. This again prompts us to ask: What is
settler colonization? It is the violent removal of people from land, replacing
them, and also imagining their replacement, using language, writing, and
other forms of displacement narratives. It is both overt and subtle. In
general, the imagining happens before the removal or, at times, the two
things happen concurrently. However, in the case of the ACS, that process
was different. The ancestors of some African people who were stripped of
their Indigenous identities would be forced to return to a land of which they
knew very little about. In other words, they, after having been colonized,
would then participate in the project of colonization. This is not to suggest
that they would be without agency in the consequences of colonization.
They were stuck between the racism of a white nationalist democratic
project and the possibilities of returning to Africa.
When African Americans did leave the US for a place like Liberia, and it
appears around fifteen thousand settled there between 1822 and the Civil
War, how they “reimagined themselves as Liberians, as free people, and as
settlers once they left the United States remained informed by their black
American past.” 43 Unfortunately, they engaged in forms of colonization that
they had seen in the US, often dispossessing Africans and advancing the
same Christian civilizing mission as the whites who they had learned it
from. Still, Black folks in general did not agree with the ACS. It only
reinforced their desire for citizenship and belonging in the US. 44
DAVID WALKER’S APPEAL