Most white American abolitionists were white supremacists. As I teach my students, they got it right on the evils of slavery & fighting to end it. But most were woefully wrong on considering Black people as full human beings, worthy of dignity & American citizenship rights.

There were exceptions of course. But the vast majority of white abolitionists had no conception of or desire for formerly enslaved Black Americans to live in integrated communities, attend schools & churches with white people, or vote or hold public office.

White people who risked their lives & safety by housing Black fugitives on the Underground Railroad often had no intention of letting those folks settle in their communities, reunite or start families, & thrive.

What to "do" with large numbers of formerly enslaved people was a major preoccupation for early 19th century white abolitionists. Some thought maaaaaaybe all-black communities in the north could work.

Others were happy to make it Canada's "problem" as the ultimate destination for most Black people who escaped enslavement via the Underground Railroad. How that went is another thread (spoiler: not well).

This "problem" laid the foundations for what would become known as the "Back to Africa" movement. It was exactly what it sounded like: the idea that formerly enslaved Black people & their families should return to the African continent.

And it wasn't just racist white people who promoted Back to Africa ideas. Many free Black leaders, recognizing it was unlikely they would ever have real equality or rights in the US, thought establishing an American colony exclusively for free US Blacks in Africa was a good idea.

Why a colony? For one thing, it was the age of colonization. Everybody was doing it, or would be soon. But more importantly, very few formerly enslaved Black Americans knew where on the continent their ancestors had been kidnapped & enslaved.

Even those who might know some of their family's origin, it was complicated. Because enslavers raped &/or forced enslaved women to "breed" babies, & because enslaved folks married for love, most Black Americans had mixed ancestry.

The logistics of even figuring out, much less sending people back to their communities of origin made doing so virtually impossible. There were no DNA tests in 1820, & the records kept by slave ships & enslavers were inaccessible & largely unhelpful.

So a colony it was.

This is how we got the American Colonization Society, which in 1820 sent the first shipload of Black Americans to establish a colony, Liberia. Led by free Black & white abolitionists, the ACS modeled Liberia after Sierra Leone, a colony the UK used as a place to send...

former enslaved people & those rescued from slavers' ships by the British Navy after the UK abolished slavery & the slave trade.

Establishing the Liberia colony did not go well, especially in the early years, when disease killed around 3/4 of the early colonists.

Also (surprise!) in turned out that the inhabitants of that land were not particularly thrilled about the arrival of foreign people who did not look like them, speak their language, or appear to have much respect for their sovereignty.

Over time, the colonists consolidated their power, at least along the coast, where place names like Monrovia, Buchannan, Harper, & Robertsport evince their presence to this day. Liberia declared independence in 1847.

Unfortunately, people have a tendency to mimic what they know. And the Liberia colony's leaders created a caste system with themselves at the top. While not as harsh as what those formerly enslaved folks had escaped, they colonized, oppressing local populations &...

...ensuring that they & their progeny had the best opportunities in education, business, & politics. Some even constructed Southern-style plantation houses. They engaged in colorism, discrimination, the whole nine yards.

Over time, this elite class became known as the Americo-Liberians.

As you might guess, this state of affairs led to all kinds of resentment among non-Americo-Liberians, which finally boiled over in 1980 when a series of coups, power struggles, and civil wars began.

As for the ACS & the Back to Africa movement? It was largely a failure. Only around 20,000 free Black Americans migrated to Liberia. Most formerly enslaved Black people escaped to Canada or northern US cities & built lives there despite the discrimination & danger they faced.

While Marcus Garvey would famously promote Back to Africa in a broader sense in the 1920s, few Black Americans took him up on it, in part because outside of Liberia, moving to Africa at that time meant living under colonial rule.

Garvey's motivation was similar to those of some early Back to Africa proponents: surveying the failure of Reconstruction & the Jim Crow nightmare, Garvey concluded that Black folks would never be truly free in America.

But most Black Americans chose to stay & fight for full equality in the land they & their ancestors built. Their descendents are still fighting today.

This history is a good reminder that white supremacy is a hell of a drug. It convinced abolitionists who knew slavery was wrong to believe segregation was fine. It colonizes. It steals land. It can even convince people who survived enslavement to colonize.

And it can blind us to the agency of Black people in securing their own liberation. Some white people helped, but @jbouie is right: "Slaves freed the slaves."