Tens of thousands of antebellum Blacks emigrated to Haiti and Canada

Evidence

Though Draper acknowledges that at least 10,000 Blacks emigrated to Haiti in the early nineteenth century and a similar number to Canada (p. 19); that opposition to colonization was sometimes tactical (to maintain pressure against slavery), sometimes based on distorted images of Africa (p. 18) or class-specific interests of an emerging Negro “middle class” (pp. 45-46), somehow a few dozen instances of anti-colonization declarations and a treatment of emigrationist movements that is dominated by a reconstruction of Delany’s political activity (20 of 33 pages) are allowed more weight than the tens of thousands who emigrated in the early nineteenth century and the untold numbers who took their leaves of the United States (and sometimes the New World) both earlier (see Immanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, Methuen, London, 1974, pp. — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1696

Categorization

• SHARE: The 10,000-plus emigrants to Haiti and similar number to Canada is a solid counter to the myth that Black emigration was negligible pre-Civil War; good for a historian of the antebellum North.