Paul Cuffee--->Led the 1st Back-to-Africa Effort Cuffe became politically active in his early 20s. In 1780, against the backdrop of the American Revolution, Cuffe led a group of free blacks to petition the Massachusetts government either to give African Americans and Native Americans voting rights or cease taxing them. Although the petition failed to sway the Massachusetts General Court (legislature) the campaign helped pave the way for creation of a new Constitution in 1783 which granted equality to all Massachusetts citizens. Cuffe, who married at the age of 25, was a devout and evangelical Quaker who early on developed a reputation as a philanthropist. He donated the funds to create a school in his hometown of Westport, Massachusetts, and was supportive of other educational endeavors. A staunch opponent of slavery and the slave trade, he united with other emancipated African Americans in the Northern states in their abolitionist campaigns, using his Quaker connections with sympathetic co-religionists to support his efforts. Cuffe, first a whaling ship captain, eventually became a ship owner, operating a number of vessels which sailed between ports along the coast of Massachusetts. By 1811 he was reputedly the wealthiest African American in the United States and the largest employer of free African Americans. Despite his commercial success, Cuffe became increasingly disillusioned with the racial status of African Americans, and believed the creation of an independent African nation led by returnees from the United States offered the best prospects for free blacks and for African modernization. Inspired by British abolitionists who had established Sierra Leone, Cuffe began to recruit blacks to emigrate to the fledgling colony. On January 2, 1811, he launched his first expedition to Sierra Leone, sailing with an all-African American crew to Freetown. While there Cuffe helped to establish “The Friendly Society of Sierra Leone,” a trading organization run by African Americans who had returned to West Africa. Cuffe and others hoped the success of this enterprise would generate a mass emigration of free blacks to West Africa who, once there, would evangelize the Africans, establish business enterprises, and work to abolish slavery. In 1815 Cuffe led 38 African American colonists to Sierra Leone. The colonists established new homes and integrated into the small community of former English residents and refugees from Nova Scotia. Cuffe hoped to organize larger groups of black emigrants. Cuffe’s efforts, however, were soon eclipsed by the larger and much better funded American Colonization Society, founded in 1816, which promoted a similar scheme that eventually created the colony of Liberia. As white and black Americans debated the merits of the ACS’s mass emigration program, Cuffe’s earlier efforts were soon eclipsed. Paul Cuffe died on September 9, 1817. When Paul Cuffee died just a month later, on Sept. 7, 1817, the dream of a black-led emigration movement, Dorothy Sterling concludes, ended with him. However, the cause of black emigration would be taken up by a succession of black leaders, including Henry Highland Garnet, Bishop James T. Holly, Martin R. Delany, Bishop Henry McNeal Turner and, of course, Marcus Mosiah Garvey.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Dec 2014 06:18:11 +0000