41. Show Recruits Black Colonists 2017-06-14T11:54:33+00:00

41. Black Performances

Early African American Media – Liberia

Prof. J. C. Hazeley, (“a Native African”) used Early African American Media to offer a Grand African Sciopticon Panorama. In it his Black American audiences could “see the Heathen African Women, the Hair Dressers, the Heathen African boys going to school, . . . the Heathen African Women with their babies on their backs.” Hazeley sounds like a missionary, but his real purpose was to generate interest in colonizing Liberia.  He convinced a group in Conway, AR to emigrate. The etching shows a group of such Blacks waiting to board a ship for Liberia.

“Pictorial Historian” W. G. Hynes spent a lifetime giving his lantern show, Negro Looking Up. It urged Blacks to stay in America and improve themselves, as the slide of his son so vividly illustrates.

Click here for another Black production, a recreation of Dr. Toer’s Amazing Magic Lantern Show, created after the Civil War to inspire freed slaves.

Archival Notes
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