Evidence of mass Black rejection of colonization was shaped by white abolitionist orchestration.

Evidence

Draper relies on Louis Mehlinger’s “The Attitudes of the Free Negro toward African Colonization” (Journal of Negro History 1, no. 3 [July 1916]: 176–301) for evidence of mass rejection of the Colonization Society. He might have pointed out that Mehlinger’s basic source is William Lloyd Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization (Garrison and Knapp, Boston, 1832), and Thoughts on Colonization, which recorded protests not entirely uninfluenced by Garrison: “William Lloyd Garrison orchestrated numerous black protest meetings announcing that blacks would not leave the United States” (Miller, op. cit., p. 55). (Garrison, in turn, had been convinced of the society’s purportedly racist duplicity by the Black ex-colonizationists Forten and Allen; see William L. Katz, “Earliest Responses of American Negroes and Whites to African Colonization,” introduction to Garrison’s Thoughts on African Colonization, Arno, New York, 1968, pp. i-xi. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1696

Categorization

• XREF: Relevant to the longstanding scholarly debate this reader tracks — evidence of a mass base for Black nationalism may be skewed by white intermediation of the record. — connects to: White abolitionist films erase black agency and depict slaves as passive recipients of emancipation — Tavengwa Gwekwerere, Davie E. Mutasa, and Kudakwashe Chitofiri, Settlers, Rhodesians, and Supremacists:…, 53