A01=Andrew F Hammann
abolition
Abraham Lincoln
African colonization
anti-immigration laws
Author_Andrew F Hammann
Black suffrage
Category=NHK
Category=NHTB
Category=NHTS
civil rights
coerced consent
colonization
colonization movement
Colony of Liberia
disenfranchisement
emancipation
eq_bestseller
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
fifteenth amendment
fourteenth amendment
Frederick Douglass
Henry Clay
Jim Crow
racial prejudice
racial separatism
racism
Thirteenth Amendment
Thomas Jefferson
voting rights
Product details
- ISBN 9780813953694
- Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
- Publication Date: 30 Nov 2025
- Publisher: University of Virginia Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Paperback
Secure
checkout
Fast Shipping
Easy returns
The long history and lasting impact of the rhetoric of Black exclusion in American politics and culture
In 1787, Thomas Jefferson declared that the United States was destined to become a nation free of slavery - and of its entire Black population. Following his cue, Henry Clay and other prominent politicians founded the American Colonization Society in 1816, launching the Black expatriation ('colonization') movement, a political force that, over the next eighty years, promoted the removal, with federal support, of the nation's Black population. Throughout this time, Frederick Douglass and the overwhelming majority of Black Americans opposed the colonization movement with great vigor and conviction, characterizing it as one of their greatest enemies, second only to slavery itself.
Words Colliding offers the fullest account to date of this political debate, highlighting its dramatic impact on the national conversations regarding enslavement and Black civil rights. Colonization advocates claimed that centuries of racialized bondage had made civic equality impossible. Black activists vehemently rejected this claim, denying that Black freedom was a national problem and warning that colonization rhetoric encouraged and justified racial oppression, in its varied forms, both during the pre-Civil War decades and the long era of Jim Crow, the afterlives of which persist to this day.
In 1787, Thomas Jefferson declared that the United States was destined to become a nation free of slavery - and of its entire Black population. Following his cue, Henry Clay and other prominent politicians founded the American Colonization Society in 1816, launching the Black expatriation ('colonization') movement, a political force that, over the next eighty years, promoted the removal, with federal support, of the nation's Black population. Throughout this time, Frederick Douglass and the overwhelming majority of Black Americans opposed the colonization movement with great vigor and conviction, characterizing it as one of their greatest enemies, second only to slavery itself.
Words Colliding offers the fullest account to date of this political debate, highlighting its dramatic impact on the national conversations regarding enslavement and Black civil rights. Colonization advocates claimed that centuries of racialized bondage had made civic equality impossible. Black activists vehemently rejected this claim, denying that Black freedom was a national problem and warning that colonization rhetoric encouraged and justified racial oppression, in its varied forms, both during the pre-Civil War decades and the long era of Jim Crow, the afterlives of which persist to this day.
Andrew F. Hammann is a Senior Historian of the New American History initiative at the University of Richmond.
