Atlantic Passages

Race, Mobility, and Liberian Colonization

Robert Murray

• Publisher: University Press of Florida
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813066752
• eBook ISBN: 9780813065755
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

 Tracing the movement of people to and from Liberia in the nineteenth century



Established by the American Colonization Society in the early nineteenth century as a settlement for free people of color, the West African colony of Liberia is usually seen as an endpoint in the journeys of those who traveled there. In Atlantic Passages, Robert Murray reveals that many Liberian settlers did not remain in Africa but returned repeatedly to the United States, and he explores the ways this movement shaped the construction of race in the Atlantic world.



Tracing the transatlantic crossings of Americo-Liberians between 1820 and 1857, in addition to delving into their experiences on both sides of the ocean, Murray discusses how the African neighbors and inhabitants of Liberia recognized significant cultural differences in the newly arrived African Americans and racially categorized them as “whites.” He examines the implications of being perceived as simultaneously white and Black, arguing that these settlers acquired an exotic, foreign identity that escaped associations with primitivism and enabled them to claim previously inaccessible privileges and honors in America.



Highlighting examples of the ways in which blackness and whiteness have always been contested ideas, as well as how understandings of race can be shaped by geography and cartography, Murray offers many insights into what it meant to be Black and white in the space between Africa and America.

Publication of the paperback edition made possible by a Sustaining the Humanities through the American Rescue Plan grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. “To Be Called a Free Colored Man in the States Is Synonymous with What We Here Term Slavery”: Transformative Mobility and Liberian Travels through the United States
• 2. “All Those Things Desirable for a Map to Show”: Space, Cartography, and Control in Colonial Liberia
• 3. “Nearly All Have Natives as Helps in Their Families, and This Is as It Should Be”: The “Civilizing” Mission of Unfree Labor
• 4. “They Would Dearly Learn What It Was to Fight White Men”: Whitening through Violence in Liberia
• 5. “Your Views Cross the Atlantic”: Black and White Responses to Settler Activism
• Afterword
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author