Mississippi-in-Africa

Mississippi-in-Africa was a colony on the Pepper Coast (West Africa) founded in the 1830s by the Mississippi Colonization Society of the United States and settled by American free people of color, many of them former slaves. In the late 1840s, some 300 former slaves from Prospect Hill Plantation and other Isaac Ross properties in Jefferson County, Mississippi were the largest single group of emigrants to the new colony. Ross had freed the slaves in his will and provided for his plantation to be sold to pay for their transportation and initial costs.

These freedmen and other American immigrants to the colony developed as the Americo-Liberians, an ethnic group who formed a political and economic elite. They dominated what became the independent country of Liberia into the late 20th century, having taken power over the indigenous natives. The Mississippi colony was located in what is present-day Sinoe County, Liberia.

The American Colonization Society was founded in the United States in 1817 as a joint project by abolitionists and slaveholders to establish a colony for free American blacks in West Africa. Slaveholders wanted to relocate free people of color out of the South, as they believed that free blacks threatened the stability of their slave societies. Some who supported eventual abolition of slavery believed that transporting freed slaves to Africa would give them a better opportunity to make their own communities. Disheartened by the discrimination faced by free blacks in the North, some abolitionists also supported the ACS, because they thought free blacks might be able to create a better society for themselves in Africa.

Most free blacks did not want to emigrate; they considered the colonization plan to be a means to export them. They believed they had a native-born claim to the United States, were part of the society, and wanted to gain equal rights in their native land. Samuel Cornish and David Walker published Freedom's Journal in New York City, writing articles that opposed the colonization movement.

...
Wikipedia