On February 20, 1922, Mississippi’s Senate voted 25 to 9 to deport all Black residents of the state to Africa — an easy solution for whites who viewed Black Americans as disposable. By colonizing land exchanged from European countries in debt from World War I, the resolution aimed to create “a final home for the American negro.”
Eighteen hundred members of Congress had enslaved people themselves. Sixty-three were Mississippi senators. The resolution was penned by a senator whose grandfather accumulated $2.5 million bloody plantation dollars. Even before the Civil War, the Mississippi Colonization Society sent several hundred freedpeople to Liberia where they faced the “highest mortality rates of any society in recorded human history.”
Black newspapers nationwide opposed and ridiculed the 1922 proposal, warning that it would meet more resistance. The resolution died in the House. Still, there’s a throughline to today with Mississippi's recently tabled Senate Bill 2047. Members of a Senate committee opted to keep Parchman Prison open — to the chagrin of local activists.
Parchman was built in 1901 by Black prisoners who were forced to pick cotton under the supervision of armed guards who meted out brutal punishment. Though the 1922 vote was to deport us, and the Parchman vote was to detain us, they are two sides of the same coin.
In a country that values our exploitation but denies our humanity, decisions are continuously being made about us, not with us. But we’ve never not resisted racial control.