Edward Wilmot Blyden (3 August 1832 – 7 February 1912) was an Americo-Liberian[1] educator, writer, diplomat, and politician who was primarily active in West Africa.

Blyden became a teacher for five years in the British West African colony of Sierra Leone in the early twentieth century.

[4] Knox encouraged him to go to Liberia, a colony set up for free people of color by the American Colonization Society.

[5] Blyden was born on 3 August 1832 in Saint Thomas, Danish West Indies (now known as the American Virgin Islands), to free black parents who claimed descent from the Igbo people of present-day Nigeria.

[9] According to the historian Hollis R. Lynch, in 1845 Blyden met the Reverend John P. Knox, a white American, who became pastor of the St. Thomas Protestant Dutch Reformed Church.

One year later, Blyden enrolled in Alexander High School in Monrovia, where he studied theology, the classics, geography, mathematics, and Hebrew in his spare time.

[11] Starting in 1860, Blyden corresponded with William Ewart Gladstone, who would later become a significant Liberal leader and Prime Minister of the United Kingdom.

Her paternal uncle, Beverly Page Yates, served as vice-president of Liberia from 1856 to 1860 under President Stephen Allen Benson.

Blyden believed that Black Americans could end their suffering of racial discrimination by returning to Africa and helping to develop it.

He was criticized by African Americans who wanted to gain full civil rights in their birth nation of the United States and did not identify with Africa.

[19] In their book Israel in the Black American Perspective, Robert G. Weisbord and Richard Kazarian write that in his booklet The Jewish Question (published in 1898, the year after the First Zionist Congress) Blyden describes that while travelling in the Middle East in 1866 he wanted to travel to "the original home of the Jews–to see Jerusalem and Mt.

Blyden advocated for the Jewish settlement of Palestine and chided Jews for not taking advantage of the opportunity to live in their ancient homeland.

Blyden was familiar with Theodor Herzl and his book The Jewish State, praising it for expressing ideas that "have given such an impetus to the real work of the Jews as will tell with enormous effect upon their future history".

[22] He became passionate about Islam during this period, recommending it to African Americans as the major religion most in keeping with their historic roots in Africa.

Of course, the Race in which these persons would be absorbed is the dominant race, before which, in cringing self-surrender and ignoble self-suppression they lie in prostrate admiration.Due to his belief in Ethiopianism and that African Americans could return to Africa and help in the rebuilding of the continent, Blyden saw Zionism as a model to look up to and supported the creation of a Jewish state in Israel, praising Theodor Herzl as the creator of "that marvelous movement called Zionism".