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The epilogue looks ahead to the reemergence of black discussions of African identity and black emigrationism during the 1850s. It examines the efforts of Martin R. Delany, sometimes called the “father of African nationalism”, to encourage black emigration from the United States during the 1850s, and to the sense of African identity that he articulated while advocating emigration. The epilogue suggests the persistence of many ideas initially offered by the first generations of self-styled “Africans”, and some of the costs of the demise of the remarkable vision that activists like Equiano, Allen, Coker, and Cuffe had developed.

This chapter explores the ways that black elites engaged with U.S. foreign policy toward Africa between 1816 and 1900. During this time, the federal government frequently promoted policies that encouraged black emigration to Liberia. Moreover, the black elite rejected any association with the African continent and worked hard to block policies that sought to stimulate the growth of Liberia. There are, however, several notable cases in which the black elite broke from this pattern and worked to assist the development of Liberia. The conventional wisdom is that the black elite's commitments to a transnational sense of community trumped their concerns about their black U.S. citizenship status. But the archival materials show that members of the black elite entered the foreign policymaking arena in support of Liberia only when they calculated that doing so would shift the national discourse about the capacity of the black race for U.S. citizenship.

W. E. B. Du Bois’s blueprint for an alternative global democracy—“the fourth dimension”—finds its fullest articulation in the aftermath of two world wars. In Darkwater and Dark Princess, Du Bois outline for socioeconomic and governance reform squarely locates the politically marginalized and colonized “colored world” at the center of a new global democracy. A proponent of republicanism, Du Bois rejects a “tyranny of the Majority,” and celebrates meaningful political participation by every member of society irrespective of race or gender. Du Bois’s critically cosmopolitan vision acknowledges the interrelation between intranational race conflicts and colonial and imperial projects practiced throughout the world. Addressing the primacy of race within domestic and international debates over national security, employment, resources, poverty, and health, Du Bois cites global democracy as a predicate for sustainable peace. Both governance strategy and critique, Du Bois’s “fourth dimension” revises the concept of citizenship and civil obligation, focuses on hinges on educational reform and the wellbeing of (black) American children. Prefiguring the arguments of mid and late 20th-century political philosophers, Du Bois insists that the disenfranchisement of one community within a society (specifically black Americans in the U.S.) risks the well being of the entire polis.

On July 26, 1847, Liberia declared independence from the American Colonization Society. From the beginning the republic of Liberia enjoyed the support and unofficial cooperation of the United States government. Yet the United States refused to recognize the republic until Abraham Lincoln, in December 1861, urged Congress to establish official relations with the republic. Lincoln argued that recognition would spur commercial advantages as well as increase black emigration. By this time, black American emigrants, known as Americo-Liberians, had asserted their authority over the native African population and had established their cultural, political, and economic domination. The symbols of the republic—its flag, motto, and seal—as well as its government was modeled after that of the United States. Its leaders declared Liberia the “Promised Land” for African Americans. But the republic was far from paradise. Wars between natives and Americo-Liberians plagued the infant nation. This essay will examine how Americo-Liberians, who in emigrating had given up hope for black civil rights in America, reacted and responded to the events transpiring across the Atlantic when the tide of freedom swept the United States during the Civil War.

This chapter examines the peculiar history of Tougaloo College from its founding during the Reconstruction Era to the turn of the century. Tougaloo, is best known for being a haven for black militancy during the modern civil rights movement and one of the few safe spaces for Freedom Riders, marchers, and sit-in activists in the most notoriously violent state in the south – Mississippi. Yet its early years illustrate an institution in constant flux, trying to survive economic hardships, and under the thumb of conservative administrators and teachers who exposed Tougaloo students to the expectations of respectability politics. Nevertheless, black students carved out vital spaces for expression and utilized the pages of their student newspaper to display their expanding social and political consciousness and their desire to resist the oppressive and often violent hardships of America’s lowest point in race relations.