Optimum Liberia
- Thread starter Calgacus
- Start date
Have it not be in Africa. Perhaps have some territory of the Louisiana purchase be set aside for a state of freed slaves.
If they could somehow have started off at the mouth of the Congo (and become established much better than OTL for other reasons) that could do it. Nowhere else on the continent could the potential for growth be as high. Of course, the disease environment is not as good as Jared's placement, but neither is it as bad as that awful stretch of coast next to Sierra Leone.
But it does give them a 'homeland' (of sorts) that isn't filled with disease and misery. Plus, by this point, Black people were as 'American' as whites.That kind of defeats the purpose of sending africans back to, you know, Africa.
Hate to remind you, but the swamps of Louisiana (which would be the kind of worthless land they'd get) are neither happy or healthy.
Also, most blacks didn't become American citizens until the post-Civil War amendments, at which point there was no viable place to put them short of building a railroad nexus in the middle of the Great Plains for the sole purpose of population transferring. Until then, blacks were not citizens, and thus not 'real' Americans to many people.
NapoleonXIV
Banned
Have Chas Goodyear be black and a good businessman. Or have Harvey Firestone be black.
Or have Frederick Douglass get behind the idea, though I think it repelled him. AFAIK one of Douglass' main beliefs was that blacks in America were Americans and had as much right here as anyone else native born
George Washington Carver accepts Edison's offer of a hundred grand salary and then later uses the money to finance his own research lab partnering with Edison into the uses of rubber and other tropical goods in Liberia. This is partially due to his conversion to Marcus Garvey's movement, but when Carver sees Garvey as a mountebank he throws him out in a coup engineered by one Reverend Little, one of Garvey's preachers who in OTL fathered Malcolm X.
American backing to keep the strategic rubber out of Axis hands in WWII results in Liberia becoming the unoffficial US catspaw in Africa. As time goes on their position as the world's black "homeland", based on an American equipped and African manned army second to none in the world, becomes more and more powerful and secure. The American black liberation movement comes much earlier (late 40s') and is much more successful. South Africa and Rhodesia avoid apartheid and follow a Kenyan based model, under Liberian tutelage and control. The Congo and Uganda, unfortunately, fall under socialist dictatorships but even there the main abuses and problems are much mitigated.
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Or have Frederick Douglass get behind the idea, though I think it repelled him. AFAIK one of Douglass' main beliefs was that blacks in America were Americans and had as much right here as anyone else native born
George Washington Carver accepts Edison's offer of a hundred grand salary and then later uses the money to finance his own research lab partnering with Edison into the uses of rubber and other tropical goods in Liberia. This is partially due to his conversion to Marcus Garvey's movement, but when Carver sees Garvey as a mountebank he throws him out in a coup engineered by one Reverend Little, one of Garvey's preachers who in OTL fathered Malcolm X.
American backing to keep the strategic rubber out of Axis hands in WWII results in Liberia becoming the unoffficial US catspaw in Africa. As time goes on their position as the world's black "homeland", based on an American equipped and African manned army second to none in the world, becomes more and more powerful and secure. The American black liberation movement comes much earlier (late 40s') and is much more successful. South Africa and Rhodesia avoid apartheid and follow a Kenyan based model, under Liberian tutelage and control. The Congo and Uganda, unfortunately, fall under socialist dictatorships but even there the main abuses and problems are much mitigated.
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Didn't one timeline 'round here involving no US Civil War have them send freed slaves to the Dominican Republic?
Thande
Donor
But the DoD version is so unlike what we think of as Liberia...
(Look to the West is going to have a more important Liberia than OTL, to have a spoiler)