During Richmond’s unhealed history, one topic that really stuck with me was the discussion around how if maybe the “deportation of free blacks, would help strengthen society” surrounding the conversation of the colonization movement. On page 87, I found a source and then looked it up in the library. I went to the basement and spent about twenty minutes searching for a copy to find out it was not available, and after that I found it online. My source is from volume 7 of the Journal of Negro History, section 4 titled Lott Cary, the Colonizing Missionary.

This reading was about the formation of the African Missionary society.

“Feeling of sympathy for the African was high. Many slave-holding Baptists felt that they owed the Negro a debt which they should pay. Moreover, the board of the Convention felt that the interest in Foreign missions manifested by the Negro Baptists of Richmond was a providential plan whereby the slaves brought from Africa might be converted and returned to evangelize that continent.” (386).

What was interesting to me was that this was the first time throughout history that have ever seen someone saying that the feeling for sympathy for the African was high, and that they had a debt to pay. And even more ironically, this seems to be only said if it benefits white people in some way. They are benefitted because they do not have to deal with free blacks in the United States, and that they were going to Africa to spread the Christian faith.

There has never been an hour or a minute, no, not even when the balls were flying around my head, when I could wish myself again in America.” (395). Here Cary described how they were attacked by 1,000 natives, and how they lived in impoverished conditions and were told to leave, yet still said that he preferred this to living in America, which says a lot.