History

It’s a vibrant two-hour experience, alive in a tradition that no doubt began in Richmond’s First Baptist Church at the turn of the 19th century and later spread to converted slaves and free blacks in Virginia. They in turn carried their Christian beliefs with them when they established a colony of their own in Africa. In 1821, Lott Cary, a Baptist-educated preacher and leader of the African Baptist Missionary Society, brought the gospel to a struggling enclave that would later become the nation of Liberia, in western Africa.

It was the start of a very deep connection between Virginia and an African country. Liberia’s first president, Joseph Jenkins Roberts, was an ambitious businessman from Petersburg. Early Liberian homes show the influence of Virginia architecture. And 186 years later, the historical ties are still visible to some degree.

Cary learned to read and write in Richmond, at a night school conducted by William Crane, a deacon of the First Baptist Church of Richmond. Crane, along with the Richmond Baptist Missionary Society and the newly formed American Colonization Society (ACS), which was founded by both slave owners and anti-slavery proponents (including Virginians), helped to subsidize the mission of Cary and Colin Teague—a free black preacher who shared Cary’s passion to start a new, gospel-inspired life in Africa.

The ACS was created essentially to encourage freed slaves to resettle in Africa. Though the U.S. government had outlawed the importation of slaves in 1807, the slave trade was slow to die. Traders smuggled Africans into the country, and some were seized on ships by Federal troops before reaching American soil. Resettlement, then, seemed a way to untangle a Gordian knot: What to do with black people who, though free, weren’t exactly welcome in white society and its institutions?

Liberia, which means “Land of the Free,” declared its independence from the U.S. in 1847. Black, American-born immigrants and their descendants, including at least three Virginians, ran the country until 1980. It was then that the country began to slowly disintegrate: Samuel Doe, an indigenous African with an English name, led a military coup. President William Tolbert was assassinated, and Doe took power, becoming Liberia’s first leader to have no genealogical ties to the United States. He represented the aspirations of the ethnic majority in the country, who claimed they’d been excluded from power by the Americo-Liberian hierarchy. Fearing for their safety, Americo-Liberians began fleeing the country. Many settled in Virginia, Maryland, Indiana and Minnesota. One of them is Ida Ma-Musu, who escaped from Liberia in 1980, leaving her children and all her possessions behind. She landed in Richmond and later opened a popular restaurant.