Colonization became a major movement devoted to keeping Black Americans from citizenship

Evidence

Lawmakers again and again fumbled when called upon to settle the question of Black citizenship, leaving the country’s elite politicians, merchants, lawyers, and philanthropists to devise their own approach. Their most popular “solution” was known as “colonization,” a plan to remove Black Americans from the United States. The American Colonization Society (ACS), founded in 1816, committed to preserving the United States as a white man’s country by ensuring that Black Americans would not become citizens. The ACS recruited supporters, raised funds, won public appropriations in some places, and built a network that made colonization one of the largest political movements of the time. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 702

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘colonization’ as the period-specific solution to Black citizenship — removal rather than integration.
• XREF: Connects to the book’s core reframing thesis: citizenship denial as designed infrastructure, not incidental racism. — connects to: Black institutional separatism aimed at transforming, not escaping, America — Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s…, 245