Today in Black History – Black History Pt 2

Today is February 6, 2012. On this day in 1820 the Back-to-Africa Movement mobilized thousands of African-American  who wished to leave the states for the Republic of Liberia.

Approximately 650 emigrants left from Arkansas, more than from any other American state, in the 1880s and 1890s, the last phase of organized group migration of black Americans to Liberia.

Gen. Robert E. Lee freed most of his slaves before the Civil War. He offered to pay the expenses of those,  who wanted to go to Liberia. One of Ge. Lee’s freed slaves, William Burke,  went to the seminary in Monrovia and became a Presbyterian minister in 1857. A year later, he wrote a friend back home:

Persons coming to Africa should expect to go through many hardships, such as are common to the first settlement in any new country. I expected it and was not disappointed or discouraged at any thing that I met with; and so far from being dissatisfied with the country, I bless the Lord that ever my lot was cast in this part of the earth.

Below you will find other events that took place today…

1820 First Emigration from New York back to Africa – First organized emigration of U.S. Blacks back to Africa, from New York to Sierra Leone, takes place.

1867 Peabody Fund – The Peabody Fund is established to promote Black education in the South.

1882 Anne Spencer – (poet) is born in Henry County, Virginia

1945 Bob Marley– (reggae god) Born

1993 Arthur Ashe – (first Black male to win Wimbledon) dies

“A little learning, indeed, may be a dangerous thing, but the want of learning is a calamity to any people.”
        – Frederick Douglass, Address, Washington, D.C

Love, Peace, and SOOOOOOUL!!!