“Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” ~ George Bernard Shaw
Today, I worked with a collection of oral history interviews from a family whose ancestors were enslaved in Fayette County (Kentucky). Some ancestors stayed in the area, but others left the U.S. for Liberia in Africa. In the early 1800’s, Kentucky Stateman Henry Clay, a slaveholder, and others started the American Colonization Society. Some founders were abolitionists, but others, like Clay, were slaveholders. The ACS offered passage to freemen out of the U.S. for their safety and to colonize Liberia, a country designed specifically for colonizing… by Africans who were born in America and worked to build America and were, for all intents and purposes, Americans but were not recognized as American citizens. Nothing convoluted about that, huh? Others offered passage to the recently freed, fearing that their sticking around being free and all would incite those still in bondage to revolt. (There had been one such revolt in Haiti that had slaveowners panicked). Fast forward many generations and the families in Kentucky and Liberia have managed to find one another. In July, they held a family reunion on land where their ancestors once worked in bondage near Lexington. It was such a tremendous event that the New York Times sent down a reporter to cover it. Before today, I vaguely knew there was an American connection to Liberia, but I had no idea exactly how it came to be and I really had no idea how steeped in Kentucky history it is. As just one example, most of today’s interviewees were born in the Liberian town called Clay-Ashland, as in Henry Clay’s estate here in Lexington called Ashland. The local colony of that area was called “Kentucky in Africa,” or “Kentucky in Liberia,” and almost everyone there was a former slave from Kentucky. There is so much more to learn about this history and about the families that have bridged the Atlantic to reconnect. What an incredibly inspiring story, and I’ve really enjoyed working to learn more about it.
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