Project Overview

Welcome to the Liberia Migration Project produced by 13 students over two Columbus State University courses (Advanced Community Geography in fall 2019 and Introduction to Digital Humanities in spring 2020).

Who are We? This project is a reciprocal partnership between the documentary film company Azilia Films, who plans to produce a history of our long-lived connections between Liberia and the Lower Chattahoochee River, and the Columbus Community Geography Center at Columbus State University.

Students in Community Geography courses and have a community project at the heart of each course. In our work in fall 2019, students used mix methods to engage local residents in a Oral History Harvest and GIS technologies to identify folks in our region who might be related to 100 families who left the Lower Chattahoochee Region fo rLiberia in 1867 and 1868.

In spring 2020, students analyzed digitalied data from The African Repository and Colonial Journal published by the American Colonialism Society to help place the 100 familes that left our region in a broader context of all emigres who left the region during 1867 and 1868. We share that data (in spreadsheet form) along with date of numbers of emigres from all sailings, and the maps of the locations that emigres left and their first place of settlement.

This digital publication shares that information, along with a timeline of events and a discussion of the social, economic and political context in which folks from columbus  Georgia found themselves in as they made the decision to leave the region and the United States for a new life in West Africa.   

Authors: Dr. Amanda Rees, Ariatna Perez Riveria, Jonathan Gunn and Laura Schneider (Fall 2019) and Caleb Brawn, Claire McCoy, Derringer Kuriatnyk, Justin Cole, Madeline Hodgkins, Melinda Kennedy, Melissa Hebert-Johnson, Paisley Armstrong, Steven Castillo and Sunshine Sandefur (spring 2020).