The African American's relationship to Africa has long been ambivalent, at least since the early nineteenth century, when 3,000 black men crowded into Bishop Richard Allen's African Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia to protest noisily a plan to recolonize free blacks in Africa.
“For several days after my first book was published, I carried it about in my pocket and took surreptitious peeps at it to make sure the ink had not faded.”