Why former slaves did not leave the US back to Africa (11 photos)

They even created a separate state for them on the black continent. But they couldn't really attract anyone there.





Today, about 40 million descendants of slaves from Africa live in the United States. They were brought to America en masse to work on plantations.



Then the civil war broke out in the USA - the Northerners won and in 1865 the slaves were officially freed. But that was on paper. In reality, they were oppressed and segregated for another hundred years. In the South, they were considered second-class citizens.









So why did they stay in the US then? Especially since they tried to send former slaves back to their homeland back in the 19th century?

For this purpose, the “American Colonization Society” was created, it appeared back in 1816. The purpose of the office was to return freed blacks to Africa. Note that this was before the war between the North and the South. So, the Society founded its colony on the Black Continent - Liberia. And wanted to send there first the former slaves, and then all the rest of the slaves. And thus get rid of feudal slavery in the USA.



But the majority of American blacks flatly refused to return to the place from where their ancestors were forcibly dragged to America a hundred or two years ago. They said that it was better to be oppressed in their native Louisiana, Alabama or Mississippi than in Africa, which they had no idea about.



The “Colonization Society” poked around for a while and even sent several tens of thousands of former slaves to Liberia. Although, having already returned to Africa, they encountered aggression from the locals - they looked at them as strangers.



Besides, the US never had a unified program for the resettlement of former slaves: officials shifted the task to philanthropists, who shifted it back to bureaucrats. And so on in a circle.



Currently, about 150 thousand descendants of former slaves live in Liberia - out of a total population of 5,214,030 people. They have not become one of the locals: they settle in communities and regularly have clashes with the army and police. Sometimes it comes to a real civil war.



And the rest remained in the USA, now they are officially called African Americans. They say that they have lived there for several generations and consider America their homeland. And let anyone try to dispute this.