Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s.

Journey of Hope: The Back-to-Africa Movement in Arkansas in the Late 1800s. By Kenneth C. Barnes. The John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, c. 2004. Pp. xvi, 268. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-80785550-2; cloth, $55.00, ISBN 0-8078-2879-3.)

Racial violence was an integral part of New South modernity in the late nineteenth century, and Kenneth C. Barnes's study locates African American resistance to white supremacy in Arkansas's back-to-Africa movement. It is an important addition to the historiography of the state.

The thesis of the book is that African American emigration from Arkansas to West Africa was part of the history of the black Atlantic world. Arkansas was the site of the most intense interest in Liberian migration. More black Arkansans left than from any other state even though Arkansas had a smaller black population than any of its geographic neighbors. Over one-third of all Liberian emigrants hailed from that state. Arkansas had enjoyed a reputation during Reconstruction of being tolerant of black political and economic mobility and was a favored trans-Mississippi River destination for freedpeople from older areas. But the imposition of sectional reconciliation and the return to "home rule," the implementation of segregation and disfranchisement laws, and increased violence compelled some black residents to consider expatriation. Barnes argues that the rapidity of changing conditions, rather than their magnitude, made the back-to-Africa movement a viable choice for many black Arkansans. Within the region, Oklahoma was a domestic alternative for blacks interested in leaving Arkansas.

Barnes points out that because of this movement, Africa loomed large in the minds of black Arkansans. For them the continent symbolized double consciousness and black nationalism, and the movement also helped to sustain interest in Africa as a destination for black Christian missionaries. An important chapter of this study traces the lives of some emigrants once they settled in Liberia. Barnes visited the Liberian communities of farmers whose ancestors emigrated from Arkansas. His study suggests that the importance of movement, that is, freedom from the restricted mobility of blacks' bodies under Jim Crow, extended to Africa. He describes the boundaries of the Liberian government as limited to coastal areas and to the sites of earlier Arkansas immigrants. Later arrivals settled farms in rural areas. Yet permanent residence among black Arkansans was never assured. A recurrent theme among black Arkansans in Liberia was the decision to return to the United States. The study might have benefited from a comparison of immigration patterns among Arkansas settlers to patterns among domestic migrants within United States migration, with special attention paid to the gender dimensions.

Barnes concludes that black expatriation from Arkansas represented resistance, courage, and risk. He charts and compares the relative situations between Liberia and the United States in the century since the back-to-Africa movement. While the racism visited on black Arkansans has been modified by the civil rights movement, ongoing civil war in Liberia has diminished its appeal as a viable alternative.

FON LOUISE GORDON

University of Central Florida