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The African Civilization Society was an emigration organization founded in 1858 by several prominent members of the historic African-American Weeksville community located in central 
Following the Civil War and emancipation of slaves, it changed its focus to helping provide basic needs to the millions of freedmen in the South, and to establishing schools to educate them. It recruited 129 teachers to go to the South to teach.
Brooklyn
Brooklyn () is a borough of New York City, coextensive with Kings County, in the U.S. state of New York. Kings County is the most populous county in the State of New York, and the second-most densely populated county in the United States, be ...
, New York.
Following the Civil War and emancipation of slaves, it changed its focus to helping provide basic needs to the millions of freedmen in the South, and to establishing schools to educate them. It recruited 129 teachers to go to the South to teach.
History
Founded in 1858, the organization was intended to promote emigration to Liberia, which gained independence in 1847, and create a competing "free-labor" cotton industry to the slavery-based cotton industries of the United States. In part the emphasis on emigration was prompted by great disappointment about the US Supreme Court'sDred Scott decision
''Dred Scott v. Sandford'', 60 U.S. (19 How.) 393 (1857), was a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court that held the U.S. Constitution did not extend American citizenship to people of black African descent, enslaved or free; th ...
, which ruled that blacks had no standing as citizens in the country. This decision resulted in the disenfranchisement of many tax paying, landowning, and successful black and African American professionals and entrepreneurs.
While its philosophy was similar in some ways to the "Emigration to Africa" concept of such 19th-century groups as the American Colonization Society
The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of Free People of Color of America until 1837, was an American organization founded in 1816 by Robert Finley to encourage and support the migration of freebor ...
, the African Civilization Society was founded and led exclusively by blacks or African Americans.
Leadership
"The Society is composed of ministers and gentlemen of known and tried integrity..." includingHenry Highland Garnet
Henry Highland Garnet (December 23, 1815 – February 13, 1882) was an African-American abolitionist, minister, educator and orator. Having escaped as a child from slavery in Maryland with his family, he grew up in New York City. He was educat ...
, Martin Delany
Martin Robison Delany (May 6, 1812January 24, 1885) was an abolitionist, journalist, physician, soldier, and writer, and arguably the first proponent of black nationalism. Delany is credited with the Pan-African slogan of "Africa for Africans."
...
, Junius C. Morel, Rev. R. H. Cain, Rev. A. A. Constantine, Robert Campbell, Theodore Cuyler (European American), George W. LeVere, James Myres, James Morris Williams, Peter Williams, Rev. Amos N. Freeman, Rufus L. Perry
Rufus L. Perry (March 11, 1834 - June 18, 1895) was an educator, journalist, and Baptist minister from Brooklyn, New York. He was a prominent member of the African Civilization Society and was a co-founder of the Howard Colored Orphan Asylum, whi ...
, John Sella Martin, Henry H. Wilson and many others. Abolitionist leader Fredrick Douglass
Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, February 1817 or 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, abolitionist, orator, writer, and statesman. After escaping from slavery in Maryland, he became a ...
strongly opposed such colonization, but he was otherwise close to several members of the society, with whom he had collaborated on efforts to gain rights for American blacks.
"Self-Reliance and Self-Government on the Principle of an African Nationality..." was featured as a founding value statement in the original constitution of the society. Following the Civil War and emancipation of slaves, the mission of the organization shifted to providing basic needs to freed people. The Society raised funds to establish schools and sent some 129 teachers to the South to take up educating the freedmen.
Publications
The institution was also known for printing two publications that circulated among communities of blacks and African Americans, a monthly called the ''Freedman's Torchlight'' and a weekly called the ''People's Journal.''References
{{Reflist African-American organizations