Connecting 1800s Black Repatriation to Africa to Current “We Negroes” Robocall in Florida

In the early 1800s, political leaders in the U.S. made a serious push to repatriate freed blacks to Sierre Leone (and later, to form new nations such as Liberia). 

A few leaders actually used the term "deportation."

Listen to the arguments for repatriation—see if they sound familiar.

Referring to a growing number of free blacks in Virginia—former slaves who had been “manumitted” in the wills of compassionate owners— Charles Fenton Mercer, a prominent slave owner and politician offered this justification in 1817:

“What banditti, consisting of the degraded, idle, and vicious free blacks, sally forth from their coverts, beneath the obscurity of night, and plunder the rich proprietors of the valleys. They infest the suburbs of the towns and cities, where they become the depositories of stolen goods, and, schooled by necessity, elude the vigilance of our defective police.”

(Ad from George H.W. Bush presidential campaign, 1988)

Robert Finley, a Princeton educated minister who became the president of the University of Georgia, took this “kinder” view in 1815: “Everything connected with their condition, including their color, is against them; nor is there much prospect that their state can ever be greatly ameliorated, while they shall continue among us.”

One more to consider, Samuel Mills. He preached the Gospel and distributed Bibles, and took a particular interest in “the Negro.” He remarked, “We must save the Negroes or the Negroes will ruin us.” He proposed that the unsettled regions of Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois be set-aside as districts only for free blacks. Once they were Christianized, they would be ready to repatriate to the west coast of Africa.

Racial bigotry, fear-mongering and stereotyping, segregation, and Christian justification for maintaining inequality for blacks was alive and well—particularly in the South-- in the early 1800s. 
The Florida GOP’s approach in the gubernatorial race simply updates a 200-year habit of mind.