“To Be Called a Free Colored Man in the States Is Synonymous with What We Here Term Slavery”

In chapter 1 Murray establishes the trajectories of several Liberian settlers’ during their travels in the United States, what they wanted to accomplish, and what they actually attained. He traces how the settlers’ whiteness became entangled with arguments regarding their relative “civilization” and the power that discourse provided to certain well-positioned settlers to make claims for an elevated status. These settlers sought a liminal position between antipodal whiteness and blackness; they hoped to remain undefined and unfixed and, in this manner, slip through American society’s racialized norms. The same ships that returned Liberian settlers to America also brought native Africans across the Atlantic to America. The resulting exchange between the two societies shaped racial consciousness not only in the United States but also within the Liberian colonies themselves.