The Hopes of Black Women Emigrants in 19th-Century British Guiana

This paper follows three African American women from the United States to British Guiana in the 1840s to examine how free African Americans saw British Guiana as a place of hope, and built “freedom dreams” there through emigration. The paper begins with a brief exploration of African American emigration debates during the late 1830s, and then details the lives of three African American women from Baltimore who emigrated, with others, to Georgetown, British Guiana in 1840. These women migrated with their families, but not all with their husbands, which offers a unique view of how women experienced emigration and worked with community structures already in place to build a better future for themselves and their families. The varied nature of the women’s family structures allows for a deeper understanding of the emigration experience through the centering of women’s social and political engagement with each other, thereby forming, and adding to, communal networks that would continue to exist for many years to come. These networks would eventually sustain African American Protestant foreign mission work during the late-nineteenth century.