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.

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.

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 John Brown Russwurm published Freedom's Journal in New York City, writing articles that opposed the colonization movement.

In June 1831, major planters and slaveholders Stephen Duncan, Isaac Ross (1760–1838), Edward McGehee (1786–1880), John Ker (1789–1850), and educator Jemeriah Chamberlain (1794–1851), president of Oakland College, co-founded the Mississippi Colonization Society.

[1] Their goal was to remove free people of color and freed slaves from their state to the developing colony of Liberia on the African continent.

They established plantations and battled local tribes for control of the territory, believing their American culture and Christianity made them superior.