Founded in 1858 in response to the 1857 US Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford and a series of national events in the 1850s which negatively impacted African Americans, its mission was to exercise African-American self-determination by establishing a colony of Free Black people in Yorubaland.

Additionally, the organization intended the colony to Westernize Africa, combat the Atlantic slave trade, and create a cotton and molasses production economy underwritten by free labor to undermine slavery in the United States and the Caribbean.

The Society consisted of a coalition of racists, humanitarians, and enslavers, most of whom either felt that Black people did not belong in the US or that they did, but anti-Black prejudice would always keep them from achieving full American citizenship.

[3] Furthermore, there was a series of events which took place during the 1850s which led Black leaders such as journalist Martin Delany and Presbyterian minister Henry Highland Garnet to reconsider emigration.

[4] Most alarming to Garnet and Delany, the 1857 Dred Scott v. Sandford decision by the Supreme Court of the United States denied any claims to constitutional rights for Black Americans.

[4] In 1850, Garnet completed a lecture tour of the United Kingdom, speaking about the possibilities of undermining the economic viability of American slavery by encouraging the production of molasses and cotton using free labor in Africa.

[5] In 1852, Delany published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, in which he argued that Black Americans had no future in their own country.

[2][5] The group envisioned Black colonists emigrating from the US to the West African region of Yorubaland, where they would propagate Christianity and promote Westernization to the indigenous peoples of Africa.

Later that year, Elymas P. Rogers led a group of ACS members to West Africa to scout potential locations for a colony, but he died of malaria shortly after arriving in Liberia.

[15][16] Under the direction of Presbyterian clergyman and newly-selected ACS president George W. LeVere, the organization shifted its focus from colonization to educating formerly enslaved people, who were known as freedmen.

According to Morel, they were "holding meetings, collecting clothes, books, paper" to support freedmen and the organization was "making arrangements to send colored teachers just as fast as they can find the means and persons qualified to go".

[19] According to historian Judith Wellman, the paper's "contributors read like a blue ribbon list of Brooklyn's African American intellectual elite", including Rufus L. Perry, Henry M. Wilson, Morel, Delany and Amos Noë Freeman, minister of the Siloam Presbyterian Church.