When Joe Stinnett retired in 2014 after nearly 35 years as a newspaper editor, his main priorities were to get out of the office and spend more time outside.
But with one foot out the door, he stumbled across one of those threads journalists spend their careers looking to pull and knew he couldn’t just walk off into the sunset — or in Stinnett’s case, an off-grid cabin he planned to build in the first few years of retirement.
He’d uncovered a tale with all the makings of an epic: harrowing sea voyages, false promises, hostile lands, courageous leaders and an underlying spirit of resilience. A hidden sliver of the past rooted in his hometown of Lynchburg where he’d worked as the editor of The News & Advance for 33 years.
It started with an old newspaper article from the Lynchburg Daily Virginian that Stinnett found while researching a feature series on the Civil War for the News & Advance. Dated Oct. 19, 1865, the article announced the emigration of 172 local freedpeople to the colony of Liberia in West Africa. It was just a brief aside in the paper, but the editor and lifelong history buff was immediately intrigued.
“I never heard of these people, and several local historians I talked to didn’t know anything about them either, so that just piqued my journalistic interest basically,” Stinnett said. “I’m like, ‘Holy cow, this is a hell of a story.’”
He learned that the 172 African Americans from Lynchburg constituted the largest single group of the roughly 12,000 people who emigrated from the U.S. to Liberia in the 19th century. And Virginia, more than any other state, sent more Black emigrants prior to the Civil War, largely because of a law passed in 1806 prohibiting emancipated African Americans from living in the commonwealth.
Stinnett was aware of the story’s broader context. A national movement to send Black Americans to Liberia emerged during the first half of the 19th century, which was largely spearheaded by the American Colonization Society. Founded in 1816, the coalition of Southern slaveowners, state and federal politicians and Northern churches were united in their belief that Black people could — and should — never integrate into freed American culture. The organization sponsored ships and supplies with promises of a liberated, more prosperous life in order to entice both freedmen and enslaved to move half a world away.
Book launch
The official launch of “Out of Virginia: Black Americans’ Search for Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Liberia” will be held at 2 p.m. Sunday at the Lynchburg Museum and Visitor Center.
When such persuasion didn’t work, the colonization society used more coercive techniques.
“Because very few free Blacks wanted to leave their homeland, most Virginia emigrants after the 1820s were enslaved people freed on the condition they emigrate, or move to another state. Regardless, the American Colonization Society’s main focus was always on getting as many Black people as possible out of the United States,” Stinnett wrote in a 2022 article.
But what he didn’t realize was the prominent role the area and the people of Lynchburg had played. He began to dig, combing through the society’s voluminous collection of letters, advertising documents and ship manifests along with census records, news articles and any other materials he could find on the subject. In total, about 350 people emigrated from or through Lynchburg from 1829 to 1865. Lynchburg and three of its surrounding counties counted roughly 65,000 residents in 1860, 43% of whom were Black.
Fascinated by this untold legacy of his hometown, Stinnett initially thought he’d be able to research and draft a book manuscript within the first year or two of his retirement.
“When I started this, I literally thought, ‘Hmm, book, 80,000 words. I can write pretty fast, pretty sure I can write 2,000 words a week, 40 weeks, book done,’” he said with a laugh. “‘Four months left for research. Boom, I’m finished.’”
That was 10 years ago. This week, though, he’s finally unveiling the fruits of his retired labor with the launch of “Out of Virginia: Black Americans’ Search for Freedom in Nineteenth-Century Liberia.”
Published by the University of Virginia Press, Stinnett’s 288-page book chronicles the journey of the hundreds of freed and enslaved African Americans who left behind the tobacco fields and factories of Virginia for the ports of Baltimore and Norfolk. There, packed alongside meager provisions and equipment for their new lives, they sailed east, likely along the same routes their shackled ancestors had taken only a century earlier, toward foreign lands and unknown fates.
They made it out of Virginia, but they weren’t out of the fire just yet.
In Liberia, they were met with swampy lowlands unsuitable for farming yet ideal for the hordes of anopheles marsh mosquitoes whose parasitic bite was the end of the road for many newcomers. Malaria was the main cause of death; roughly half of the American emigrants didn’t survive longer than a few years after leaving the U.S. Others didn’t even lay eyes on the African coast, dying on board from measles outbreaks.
One group of more than 50 Black residents of Franklin County made the intercontinental trip in 1830. Only three of them lasted a full year: two young boys and an elderly woman.
Despite receiving word of the illness and poverty that Black emigrants faced, the American Colonization Society continued to promote the colonization of Liberia. Aided by local news outlets, the society touted “the country as a near-utopia,” according to Stinnett’s book. Yet internal correspondence reveals the organization’s primary focus of expunging the U.S. of its Black population.
“When you read all these records and all these letters, that’s all the colonization society talked about day to day. I mean, literally, it was almost like a reverse slave voyage,” Stinnett said.
Carving opportunity from coercion
The racist schemes of white public officials, newspapers and religious groups to rid their counties of African Americans is part of the narrative. But through his research, Stinnett discovered an equally compelling aspect of the story: how this marginalized demographic turned the colonization movement into an opportunity to boost their own autonomy and economic mobility.
Such was the case of John McNuckles and Levi Norvell, a craftsman and a minister respectively, who organized and led the party of 172 from Lynchburg in 1865. Although both had been emancipated, they saw Liberia as a chance to escape the oppressive environment that still restricted the rights of freedmen as well as secure better economic, educational and political opportunities for themselves and their descendants.
“They were independent men who stood up for themselves but also knew how to accommodate white people,” Stinnett writes in “Out of Virginia.”
This initiative is evident in an October 1865 letter signed by McNuckles, Norvell and several of their companions that was published in a couple of Lynchburg newspapers as well as The New York Times. Written less than a month before their departure, the letter was one last appeal to the Christian generosity of “our former masters,” hoping to solicit a few more dollars before their venture:
“None of us will carry with us the prejudices and ill-will that might arise from our being held in bondage by you, as slaves. We know that you have been our best friends, and we feel it now the more, though we are free. We know that your generous and sympathetic hearts will not let you stand aloof from us in our endeavors to do good for ourselves and people. … The smallest sums you can afford to contribute to our scheme will be very acceptable to us.”
The journey of McNuckles and Norvell is just one of many stories of resilience and resourcefulness told in the pages of “Out of Virginia.” And while he’s admittedly “not a big lesson person” — “I’m just a reporter here. I’m writing all this stuff, you decide” — Stinnett said he intentionally focused the book on these personal accounts as they shed a light on an underreported yet remarkable piece of history.
“The main lesson I would hope people take away from it is how determined Black Americans were to determine their own lifestyle and destiny, despite being enslaved, despite … having no rights, despite everyone in Lynchburg saying they should move out of town or the newspapers trying to push them away — that they were so determined to have … their basic human rights that they were willing to move to another country,” he said. “I think that’s really something that ought to be remembered and even celebrated.”
