The American experiment in Liberia

In 1930, an American sociologist arrived in the capital of Liberia, a small country in West Africa, on an unusual assignment. Charles S. Johnson, trained at the University of Chicago, had never conducted research outside the United States before. Yet President Herbert Hoover chose him to represent the US on a League of Nations mission to study allegations of forced labor in Liberia. The irony was extreme: Liberia was intended as a refuge for Black people in the United States, and now it stood accused of imposing those same conditions on its own soil.

Liberia was founded in 1822, half a century before the Emancipation Proclamation in the United States, as a project of the American Colonization Society – a coalition of politicians and religious leaders – who concluded that if Black people were to live freely, they could not do so in the US. The society believed that it was better to create a new country for this purpose, and named the capital “Monrovia” for President James Monroe. The new republic entered the world with American symbols – a similarly star-studded flag, even a similarly structured government – but little American support.

Washington’s interest in Liberia remained thin in the century that followed. Through World War I, the US largely accepted Europe’s scramble for Africa and, at times, encouraged American capitalists to profit from it. Still, Liberia came to be regarded as a kind of American ward, where influence was assumed, even when responsibility was not. So when allegations emerged that an Americo-Liberian elite was forcing indigenous Africans into slavery, the US supported an international inquiry and sent Johnson to see for himself.

What he found was a Liberia in turmoil. The government compelled Indigenous Liberians to work on private farms, including on the Firestone Rubber plantation built by one of the American titans of the Gilded Age, in exploitative conditions. Johnson’s findings condemned the conditions in blunt terms, putting him at odds with Black leaders in the U.S. like W.E.B. Du Bois, who regarded Liberia as a bastion of Black self-rule. “For those dark thousands who sought a haven from oppression and the fullness of a promised land,” Johnson later wrote, “it has been a bitter Canaan.”

Johnson was my great-grandfather, and I’ve often wondered what it meant to him to represent the United States in that moment. He was born in Virginia, barely thirty years after the end of slavery; his own parents had, at one point, been enslaved. Back home, Jim Crow-era segregation ruled daily life. He’d already tasted that contradiction during World War I, fighting in France with the goal of “preserving” a democracy abroad that did not include him on US soil.

Liberia’s troubles continued long after Johnson left, eventually spiraling into a civil war, in part because of deep-seated tensions between the American descendants and the Liberian natives. Yet he returned home with lasting ties to the people he met. As the family folklore has it, a Grebo chief named Tuweley Jeh, saved him from a lion late one night. As a tribute, he gave his youngest son – my grandfather – the name Jeh, pronounced “Jay.” My grandfather then gave it to his son – my father – and then to my brother. In reading his work, it’s clear Liberia shaped the rest of Johnson’s life – as a scholar, president of Fisk University, and advocate for the civil rights of African Americans.

Forced labor was outlawed in Liberia by 1936, after mounting international pressure. It’s not a chapter of American history we often hear about – the moment the US created a Black republic abroad, only for the same atrocities from home to unfold. I found this story worth reflecting on now, as we ease into Black History Month, because it is a reminder that the face of oppression is not always clear, and sometimes hides in the language of progress and democracy. It sometimes takes multiple generations to make plain and, hopefully, overcome.