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.
Departure of African Americans to Liberia, 1896
The Province of Freedom from Voyages to the River Sierra Leone by John Matthews, 1788
African Americans depart for Liberia, 1896
Abolitionism in the United States
In the United States, abolitionism, the movement that sought to end slavery in the country, was active from the colonial era until the American Civil War, the end of which brought about the abolition of American slavery, except as punishment for a crime, through the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution.
Collection box for the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society, c. 1850
Thones Kunders's house at 5109 Germantown Avenue, where the 1688 Germantown Quaker Petition Against Slavery was written
Samuel Sewall (1652–1730), judge who wrote The Selling of Joseph (1700) which denounced the spread of slavery in the American colonies
Grave of Benjamin Kent, lawyer who freed a slave in America (1766)