Center for the Repair of Historic Harms launches Project 180

In 2027, the Republic of Liberia will celebrate its 180th anniversary of its political independence from the American Colonization Society, which was co-founded in 1816 by prominent Presbyterians seeking to relocate free people of African descent (including descendants from their enslavers) and enslaved people recently emancipated (many on the condition that they become settlers in Africa) from the United States to a new settler state in Africa.

Over 200 years since these first African colonizers were resettled from the United States and installed in positions of authority to form a new nation on Africa’s northwest coast, tensions and unrest between Americo-Liberians and indigenous Liberians continue to fester in the socio-political structure of modern-day Liberia, resulting in centuries of political oppression and violence.

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According to historian Dr. Jeremy I. Levitt, the American Colonization Society was an “American pseudo-humanitarian association governed by white American slave owners” who ruled Liberia from 1822 to 1847. In his book "The Evolution of Deadly Conflict in Liberia," Levitt describes how when settlers declared independence in 1847 from the American Colonization Society to form the Republic of Liberia, it marked “the advent of African settler rule.” According to Levitt, the republic’s political and jurisdictional authority was initially limited, as many indigenous nations — such as the Gola, Bassa and Kru — had no interest in becoming subjects of the settlers’ new state.

Instead, they believed that the African American settlers and their descendants should integrate into indigenous society rather than establish a separate, competing nation. Since Liberia’s settlement in 1822, the country has experienced numerous internal conflicts, including the 1980 coup that overthrew the Tolbert regime, the rise and fall of the Doe regime in the 1980s, the Liberian Civil War of the 1990s and the dismantling of Charles Taylor’s regime in 2003.

“Presbyterians played a key role in the founding and early administration of the American Colonization Society as well as producing theological justifications for this colonization scheme,” said the Rev. Jermaine Ross-Allam, director of the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms. Ross-Allam lifted up the contributions of influential Presbyterians such as the Rev. Robert Finley, who mobilized church networks in support; Bushrod Washington, who served as both a U.S Supreme Court Justice and as the first president of the American Colonization Society; Samuel John Mills, who scouted the west coast of Africa for a location as a Presbyterian missionary; and Dr. Elias Caldwell, who helped draft the proposal for ACS as a U.S. Supreme Court clerk. Finley, Caldwell and Mills, along with other leaders of the American Colonization Society, had strong ties to Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary. They helped to frame the mission of ACS in religious terms galvanizing moderate anti-slavery Presbyterians to see colonization as a way to evangelize Africa and pro-slavery church members who wished to reduce the threat of free Blacks to incite further slave rebellions.

The Center for the Repair of Historic Harms has launched Project 180 to investigate a call to repair sent through a recent petition issued by the Youth Desk of the Liberia Council of Churches to the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.). According to Ross-Allam, the involvement of Presbyterians in positions of power that influenced policy and public support in creating the American Colonization Society as well as the involvement of Presbyterian-affiliated institutions such as Princeton University and Princeton Theological Seminary “is a major reason why it makes sense for the Center for Repair to be engaged in this project and a future overture in 2026 to the General Assembly of the PC(USA).”

“The Youth Desk of the Liberia Council of Churches believes that the Center for Repair can do a great deal to further address the harms that have been done to our African population — especially in Liberia. It is in this we are calling on you to extend your works of reparations in Liberia through the Center for Repair,” stated a formal petition sent in 2024 to the Interim United Agency of the PC(USA).

Antonia Coleman, administrative project manager for the Center for Repair, suggested the name, Project 180, because of the numerical pun’s connection to the anniversary of Liberia’s independence and its symbolic hope of re-righting the wrongs of the past. Ross-Allam has described how “the auspicious date and geometric reference” invokes this opportunity to make “a 180-degree turn away from colonial relations toward relations characterized by mutual respect and a shared future vision.”  

“Members of the PC(USA) have understood for some years now that now is the time to re-encounter the work of Liberia, and the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms understands that in order to truly engage this work in the best possible way and move it forward, we need to go all the way back to the first encounter between Presbyterians and Indigenous Liberians,” said Ross-Allam.

The idea began in 2023 when Ross-Allam, the Rev. Cheryl Barnes and Dr. Dianna Wright visited Monrovia as part of a co-moderators' delegation to meet with the Liberia Council of Churches, which included a devotion based on Romans 12:10-12 and what Ross-Allam called “a Reformed understanding of liberty that involves co-creating forms of freedom that do not require any sacrifice other than the living sacrifice one offers of their own body."

Drawing on another book about Liberia’s historic conflicts, “Slaves to Racism: An Unbroken Chain from America to Liberia" by Benjamin G. Dennis and Anita K. Dennis,” Ross-Allam asked delegates to consider an alternate origin story for Liberia: “What if African Americans released from slavery in the United States first arrived in Liberia, not as colonizers supported by Presbyterians and other Protestants through the American Colonization Society, but as people eager to build a democratic society as equals with Indigenous Liberians?”

“As Christians in the Reformed tradition, we do not need to shed tears over the past without responding to today’s opportunity to do now what could have and should have been done yesterday,” said Ross-Allam. “For that reason, this collaboration is based on a movement of the Holy Spirit, which inspires us to reject a council of despair in favor of spiritual transformation in real time.”

The original letter sent by the LCC’s Youth Desk to the Center for Repair asks to form an “expert commission to study, among other issues, how contemporary legacies of the transatlantic slave trade currently impacting Liberia relate to the Presbyterian denomination’s broad and robust support for the American Colonization Society — the institution through which Presbyterian slaveholders indulged white Protestants’ preference to employ formerly enslaved African Americans as colonizers of indigenous Liberians rather than transform their own nation by faithfully working out the details of post-emancipation multiethnic democracy in earnest in the United States.”

The investigation will also consider how the colonial foundation of Liberia and the reproduction of its settler-nation dynamic through various regimes contributed to the outbreak of two civil wars in the last quarter of the 20th century. The racial wealth gap prevalent in the United States and other colonialist nations has its own legacy in Liberia in the disparities between Americo-Liberians and indigenous Liberians that contribute to another area of concern stated in the letter, which is “increasing difficulty accumulating wealth, gaining access to health care, education, housing, employment opportunities, and exposure to the consequences of environmental damage, predatory policing, declining health outcomes, and other debilitating socioeconomic and political conditions” for indigenous African-descended peoples.

In a video orientation to the purpose and procedures of the research portion of Project 180 on May 13, Brother Victor M. Paasewe, vice chair for operation of the Liberia Council of Churches-Youth Desk and co-signer of the petition, introduced the team of researchers comprising the commission to the staff of the Center for the Repair of Historic Harms.

“Your research will be evidence, both from empirical research and from talking to elders and other people on the ground in Liberia, that will help us understand not only that there is a need for reparatory processes, acknowledgements and apologies, but it will help us understand what it is that the people say is necessary to reencounter one another and make the next 200 years better than the last 200 years,” said Ross-Allam.

“Your research and your work have a planetary significance across generations,” Ross-Allam told the commission during their recent meeting: “Now is our time to recognize that the way we've encountered one another has been both good and harmful. Now is our time to look at the harmful part, learn from all of you what is necessary to make the wrong part right, so that our future engagements with one another will be praiseworthy in the eyes of God, in the eyes of the entire African diaspora and the whole entire planet.”