Leigh Hunt: The Man and His Plan

“Mr. Leigh Hunt is too well known a figure to our readers to need any further introduction,” read the Sudan Times circa 1904. Employing racist language, the Times continued, “The Egyptian papers would have him as a giant who proposes an exodus of the American n[------] to their Canaan.”⁸ Leigh Hunt was born in Indiana on August 11, 1855. In his young adulthood, Hunt traveled to Iowa and became a professor and president of the Ames Agricultural College (today’s Iowa State University). During his time in Iowa he married Jennie Noble, with whom he eventually had two children. In 1886 Hunt moved to Seattle and became owner and editor of the city’s first daily newspaper, the Post-Intelligencer. Although he became a successful entrepreneur, Hunt was hit hard during the Panic of 1893. Traveling to Korea, he established the Oriental Consolidated Mines Company and recouped his prodigious wealth. Without divesting all of his Korean mining interests, Hunt heeded his doctor’s advice and traveled with his family to Egypt’s “kinder climate” for health reasons. He arrived in Cairo in October 1902, and his holiday continued into 1903.⁹

While Hunt was in Egypt, the Sudanese government was encouraging private capital to develop lands along the Nile. In 1821 Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman Turkish viceroy of Egypt, sent his armies south into Sudan to conquer the region. He established a Turco-Egyptian administration in Sudan that remained in place for much of the nineteenth century. In 1881 Muhammad Ahmad, a Sudanese Islamic mystic and self-proclaimed Mahdi who would rid the country of Turco-Egyptian corruption, confronted the regime. The Mahdi’s revolt spread, and in 1885 his troops defeated the Egyptian soldiers under British general Charles Gordon’s command. Gordon was decapitated, and the Egyptians and British were expelled from the country. Although the Mahdi died unexpectedly, his successor the Khalifa ruled for thirteen years. The Mahdist state was beset with difficulties—two droughts in northern Sudan caused major crop losses, and each drought was succeeded by epidemics and famines. The British, who were eager to control the Nile waters, invaded with an Anglo-Egyptian army and met the Mahdists at a decisive battle at Omdurman in 1898. The battle, for the Mahdists, was catastrophic: they suffered eleven thousand dead and another sixteen thousand wounded while the British sustained fewer than two hundred fifty casualties. With the Mahdist state effectively finished, Sudan was subsequently ruled by Anglo-Egyptian administrators in a joint-rule Condominium.¹⁰ While the Mahdist period occupies a brief chapter in the long train of Sudanese history, its impact was cataclysmic. As the former USAID administrator Andrew Natsios writes, “[The Mahdi] created an Islamic political movement rooted in a purist and puritanical interpretation of the Quran, one that sought to cleanse the country from foreign influence. This movement would make periodic reappearances through Sudanese history, with violent consequences for the Sudanese people.”¹¹

The ensuing Anglo-Egyptian Condominium forged in the ashes of the Mahdist regime was a dual form of colonial government. While Egyptians operated in low-level administrative and army posts, British officials wielded decision-making powers (an unsurprising dynamic, given Egypt’s status as a British-occupied province and protectorate from the late nineteenth century until 1953). Sudan—the largest possession in British Africa—was run by a few hundred Brits relying on a plethora of Sudanese, Egyptian, and Syrian tax collectors, judges, and other intermediaries. Importantly, the Anglo-Egyptian colonial authorities officially abolished an economic enterprise that prospered under Mahdist rule—the slave trade. A commercial institution that dated back millennia, it was practiced along a north–south divide in the region (with slave raids occurring in southern Sudan and enslaved persons taken to Egypt and the Ottoman Empire). Slavery became an element of Islamic statecraft with the rise of the Sinnar and Darfur sultanates in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Stateless non-Muslims on state peripheries—particularly in the Upper Blue Nile, Nuba Mountains, and Bahr al-Ghazal regions—were the most common source of enslaved peoples for Sinnar and Darfur. Enslaved persons were transported to places like Egypt and Arabia. During the Turco-Egyptian period and with the growth of the ivory trade, increased slave raiding occurred among Nilotic and equatorial peoples in the southern regions of the Upper Nile and Bahr al-Ghazal, as well as other locations in southern Darfur, the Ethiopian borderlands, and the Nuba Mountains. Some estimate that 20–30 percent of Sudanese were enslaved when the Mahdist state was destroyed in 1898.¹²

Two months before Hunt’s arrival in Cairo, the US consul general there (John Lang) advised the assistant secretary of state that the Sudanese government was trying to develop the Condominium’s agricultural resources. It was doing so, Lang continued, by encouraging capital and immigration. Hunt became aware of Lang’s report, and once in Cairo hired a boat and set out to travel south. During the journey his guide spoke about the fact that the Upper Nile would become more valuable once the railroad linking the towns of Suakin and Berber was completed. Hunt began to plan a new enterprise, one that would employ African Americans while ensuring reliable labor for his hitherto nebulous plan to cultivate something in Sudan.¹³

In April 1903 Hunt wrote a letter to James S. Clarkson, whom President Theodore Roosevelt had appointed surveyor of customs for the port of New York the previous year.¹⁴ Hunt, with paternalistic language, expressed the following:

I can help at least a million negroes to happy [and] productive homes, and when once the South realizes that there is a safe and sure way for them to lose the black men who do all their work … they will conclude that the black man is not such a dangerous fellow after all … the poor negro is destined to be ground to atoms … unless something is done for him along new lines… . It must be done if done successfully along business lines. I think I have laid those lines.¹⁵

Hunt informed Clarkson that he was eager to discuss his plans with two individuals: Theodore Roosevelt and Booker T. Washington. The president invited Clarkson and Hunt to join him and the First Lady for a White House dinner on June 15.¹⁶ Roosevelt declared that Hunt’s plan “would help mightily in solving the sad and serious problem of the negro and his present oppressed condition in the south.” He listened to Hunt describe the land along the Nile and stated his hope that African Americans could go to “a country of health and richness and certain fortune if [they] desired to escape from their disenfranchised, segregated, and terrorized status in America.” Hunt clarified his position, informing Roosevelt that his plan was not only humanitarian in nature “but also a great business and money-making enterprise.” This pleased the president.¹⁷

Following the Civil War and amid the Reconstruction South’s violence and destitution, many Black Americans supported emigration schemes with hopes of finding better prospects elsewhere. Some looked to Africa, most commonly Liberia. While figures ranging from the Americo-Liberian educator and diplomat Edward Wilmot Blyden to Frederick Douglass debated its merits, African Methodist Episcopal bishop Henry McNeal Turner was emigration’s most vocal post-Reconstruction advocate. Turner and others believed that they could build a stronger Africa that would in turn demand the just treatment of Americans of African descent. With the rise of Jim Crow, the 1890s witnessed increased interest in emigration. Despite the reality of Black anti-imperialism, some African Americans believed that the race would benefit by operating as colonists in the Philippines. By 1903 the idea of Black settlement of the Philippines was so popular that President Roosevelt sent newspaper editor T. Thomas Fortune to explore the viability of mass Black emigration to the Philippines, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico. Roughly four hundred Black Americans settled on the islands during and after the Philippine-American War, and Fortune wound up supporting Black emigration to the Philippines.¹⁸ On the other side of the world, the Gold Coast chief Alfred Sam established the Akim Trading Company in order to participate in trade, develop industry, and “encourage the emigration of the best Negro farmers and mechanics from the United States to different sections in West Africa.” While the movement successfully transported Oklahoman emigrants to Africa in 1914, Black settlers who reached the Gold Coast faced difficulties with colonial officials, and many of them returned.¹⁹ It is within the context of such contemporary Black American overseas settlement that exaggerated predictions of African American repatriation to Sudan occurred. Indeed, it was during this era when the Black press was occupied with talks of a similar plan in Hawaii and the Philippines that the Sudan scheme found its way onto its pages.²⁰

However, the back-to-Africa movement had its detractors. The American Colonization Society (ACS), initially the Society for the Colonization of the Free People of Color of America, had been established in 1816 and was supported by southern whites who wanted to cement slavery by expelling free people of color from the country. Some others, however, attacked the society by arguing that colonization would remove the only people truly committed to abolition. Only twenty-five hundred African Americans settled in Africa in the forty years after the Civil War, a small number representing less than a quarter of those whom the ACS had taken to Liberia in the forty years before the war. Most African American leaders stayed committed to gaining full equality in the United States and sought to highlight progress that had been made since emancipation. Post–Civil War leaders like Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois hoped that Black people would overcome racism over time through education and entrepreneurship.²¹ None other than the venerable Frederick Douglass—described by historian James Campbell as emigration’s most vocal critic—levied the following salvo in one of his final public speeches: “The native land of the American Negro is America. His bones, his muscles, his sinews, are all American. His ancestors for two hundred and seventy years have lived and labored and died, on American soil, and millions of his posterity have inherited Caucasian blood.”²²

In all these ways, conversation concerning Sudan as a potential repatriation site was part of a larger discourse concerning the benefits and pitfalls of US Black emigration. But would African Americans move en masse to Sudan? What impact, if any, would President Roosevelt’s endorsement of Hunt’s scheme have? Finally, would the new Anglo-Egyptian government even be amenable to the idea of Black American laborers entering the Condominium? Within this whirlwind of uncertainties, Leigh Hunt went to work.

The Politics of Post-Emancipation Labor

Having enlisted Roosevelt’s support, Hunt sailed for France and planned how best to approach Evelyn Baring, the first Earl of Cromer (hereafter referred to as Cromer). Egypt’s consul-general, Cromer had begun his career as an artillery officer in Corfu. He was later on the staff of Malta’s governor and commander-in-chief and joined him when that officer directed the inquiry concerning Governor Eyre’s suppression of agrarian unrest in Jamaica.²³

The abolition of slavery in 1838 reduced the labor supply for Jamaica’s sugar industry. Many formerly enslaved persons were unwilling to accept low plantation wages and opted instead to move to the interior and undertake small farming.²⁴ Thomas Holt has noted that during the late 1830s and into the 1840s the idea was pushed forward to recruit Black and white workers who would offer role models for freed Jamaicans. Released from plantation confines before new social values could take hold, freed people had apparently moved into the hills and “reverted to an African barbarism.”²⁵ Longtime administrator Henry Taylor and his contemporaries understood the problem as “cultural regression,” or the contemporary “Quashee syndrome” stereotype. According to this prejudiced paradigm, ex-slaves worked just enough to gratify immediate desires and were endowed with simple hopes that a tropical environment could satisfy. Despite the evidence, Holt continued, the “Quashee” legend arose that included elements of laziness, moral degeneration, and licentiousness. This stereotype coursed through special magistrates’ reports in the 1850s.²⁶

Sudan had a longer experience of slavery than its Caribbean counterpart. Sudanese slavery dated back to the Egyptian dynastic era and persisted into the early colonial period. During the Turco-Egyptian period, slave merchants of various nationalities became notorious, and many enslaved persons worked in several capacities for the regime. In the mid-nineteenth century, forty to sixty thousand people were sold in Khartoum each year. Although the trade was officially abolished in 1856, it continued until the regime’s downfall. The Anglo-Egyptian conquest was made partially in the name of crushing slavery, and the 1899 Condominium Agreement abolished the slave trade once again. However, the British were hesitant to upset the country’s economy and tended to ignore most of slavery’s continued evidence.²⁷

It is possible that Cromer’s language concerning the labor situation in early twentieth-century Sudan was informed by his prior experience in Jamaica. In his “Report for the Sudan” in 1903, Cromer cited the heavy loss of life at the Battle of Omdurman and other conflicts. “Under these circumstances,” he wrote, “it is certainly desirable to encourage immigration into the Soudan. In view of the large tracts of land, capable of cultivation, which are now uncultivated, there need be little fear that by the adoption of this course harm will be done to future generations of Soudanese.” In his estimation, the most natural supply for more labor was Egypt, where some areas were apparently becoming congested. However, for Cromer, immigration’s utility was not only linked with the diminished Sudanese labor force. There was also the question of “whether the inhabitants of the Soudan are able and willing to work,” he said, a racist shot at Sudanese work ethic. While there was apparently a consensus belief among local officials that the Sudanese were not “industrious,” Egyptians were by contrast “a singularly industrial race.” In bigoted language that evoked sentiments concerning labor in post-emancipation Jamaica, Cromer provided the following description:

It can be no matter for surprise that the Soudanese should be unwilling to work. Their wants are few and simple. They scarcely need any clothing… . Education has not yet stimulated them in any desire to improve their positions in life… . The slaves, for the most part, consider that the best use they can make of their newly-acquired liberty is to labour as little as possible. The lesson … that a man must work or starve, has not yet been brought home to the mass of the inhabitants of the Soudan.

Rather than expressing discouragement, Cromer followed, “Somewhat similar conditions existed at one time in the West Indies. It is some forty years since I was in Jamaica… . I used to be told that, even in the most difficult times, planters who paid fair wages and treated their men well could generally obtain labor without much difficulty.” Cromer assessed that the situation in Sudan was quite similar.²⁸

It was to this man that Hunt drafted a letter on his plan to send African Americans to Sudan. “In doing so,” Hunt wrote, “I would … be promoting the best interests of our investment. I am confident the Sudan would become a place of refuge for the American negro.” Hunt was keen on not having Cromer believe that he supported the removal of any African Americans from the United States; instead, enough could be moved “to serve our purpose of teaching the Sudanese how to raise cotton.” Still, Hunt offered that once it was proven that Black Americans could prosper in Sudan they would have “what they [did] not … possess—a country to which they [could] safely migrate.”²⁹ Aside from whatever Cromer may have thought about Hunt’s designs regarding Black Americans, this much was sure: England’s cotton industry was in bad shape, a reality largely rooted in its overreliance on expensive American raw cotton. America’s cotton vanished from markets during the Civil War. For cotton industrialists and European statesmen, this cemented the danger of depending on the States for raw cotton. British, French, and Russian manufacturers after 1861 began to pressure their governments to get more cotton from their colonial possessions in India, North Africa, and Central Asia. In the early twentieth century, they undertook a renewed effort to grow more colonial cotton. British cotton manufacturers founded the British Cotton Growing Association in 1902, and it was this group that eventually hired Tuskegee graduates to support a cotton-growing enterprise in Sudan.³⁰

Hunt and Cromer met on October 12, 1903. Cromer shared admiration for Hunt’s plan and was confident, in part, in his awareness that Hunt was ready to spend thousands of dollars on an exploratory trip to the area. Cromer indicated that Hunt’s investigations should be supported and that, once he had decided what he wanted, Hunt should see Sudan’s governor-general, Reginald Wingate. Wingate would then negotiate with Hunt. Cromer conveyed interest in the African American element of the scheme but cautioned that the right workers would have to be selected.³¹ In the same annual report in which he vilified Sudanese labor, Cromer referenced Hunt’s scheme to employ Black Americans. “It is quite impossible to say beforehand how a bold experiment of this sort should answer. I see, however, no reason why it should not be tried on a small scale.”³²

Hunt’s boat departed Cairo on October 29. He traveled up the Nile, going as far as southern Sudan. On his return he discussed the possibilities of cotton growing with the governor-general. In the end, both Wingate and Cromer were apparently impressed by Hunt.³³ Hunt wrote a letter from the Blue Nile on November 20 and conveyed sentiments that not only mirrored the annual report but also typified the racist hauteur of imperialism. “Believing that any and all races of men will work if properly handled and directed, I am convinced that the few surviving natives of the Soudan will in time become as good workers as they were once good fighters,” he said. “When they are taught a broader and better use of money, when they are taught by example that industry pays, and when they begin to appreciate fair treatment and security of life and property, you will see a marvelous change in the lives of these shiftless, simple, lazy people.” In a comment that evoked Cromer’s earlier position that the right type of worker would have to be selected for the plan, Hunt made it clear that his supposed altruism was only aimed at certain African Americans: “No amount of argument could convince me that industrious, hard-working negroes would be averse to improving their condition … the political negro, the crap-player and the cake-walker are not the individuals I seek to influence. They naturally would remain where they are.”³⁴

To find “industrious, hard-working negroes,” Hunt looked to Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute.

Enlisting Washington

In 1881 Booker T. Washington founded Alabama’s Tuskegee Institute. Within twenty years’ time, the institute boasted an all-Black faculty and staff of three hundred and had approximately fifteen hundred students. Dancing, drinking, smoking, gambling, and unregulated dating were prohibited, and Washington deemed virtues like individual responsibility, self-discipline, and cleanliness more significant than academic erudition. In the wake of the European powers’ late nineteenth-century partition of Africa and the rise of the Pan-African movement, Africa’s role in the Black American imagination grew. Washington involved himself in African affairs in several ways. In addition to corresponding with several Africans, he enrolled Africans at Tuskegee and supported the development of industrial education on the continent. Washington was also involved with the 1893 Chicago Congress on Africa and helped the first Pan-African Congress come to fruition in London in 1900. That year a Tuskegee faculty member and three institute graduates arrived in Germany’s West African colony of Togo to work for a private German concern. The goal was to increase agricultural productivity using Tuskegee’s methods.³⁵

Washington believed that freedom rested on economic power. In this paradigm, people of African descent had to become part of the global capitalist economy while keeping their capacity to provide for themselves if they were to remain free. Historian Angela Zimmerman has noted that the collaboration between Tuskegee and Germany’s government in Togo reflected both an emancipatory attempt to improve Black conditions on both sides of the Atlantic and an opposite effort to establish Black cotton farming in Africa that would financially benefit white economic elites in America and Europe. In the end, the German administration was led to away from the project due to the tension between their reliance on Black knowledge and their need to see people of African descent as inferior.³⁶

When Hunt and Clarkson returned from Washington to New York, Clarkson, a friend of both Hunt and Washington, arranged a meeting between the two. When they met over dinner, Hunt informed Washington that he wanted skilled workers and was contemplating Tuskegee graduates for employment.³⁷ In a January 19, 1904, letter to Hunt, Washington expressed his opposition to Black colonization in Africa (or anywhere else). But he noted, “The opportunities which you suggest the Sudan offers are opportunities which, it seems to me, large numbers of our Negro people should take advantage of.”³⁸

The Media Catches Wind

While Hunt was in Khartoum, he received a letter and newspaper clippings from George Roberts, director of the US Mint. A September 27, 1903, article from the Seattle Times reported: “[Hunt and Washington have joined] in a colonization undertaking which promises to go a long way towards solving the negro question in this country.” The paper said that Washington had informed Hunt that thousands of southern Black families “would gladly embrace the chance of going to the Sudan and making new homes.” The article ended by noting that President Roosevelt, upon hearing of Hunt’s plans, had become excited and pledged any help he could provide.³⁹ This was just one example of the newspaper coverage that the enterprise received. During the fall of 1903, several American newspapers published articles on the venture. Under the headline “American Negroes Will Remove to Africa,” the African American Trenton Evening Times reproduced a Publishers Press wire out of Tacoma that claimed that Hunt and Washington were banding together in “wholesale colonization.” The project, it said, involved “reclamation of several hundred thousand acres tributary to the river Nile in the Soudan and the cultivation of the land by negroes who are to be taken from the United States.”⁴⁰ The Worcester (MA) Daily Spy of October 3, 1903, posited that Washington would become increasingly important on the global stage, noting that it had emerged from Paris that he would provide Hunt with educated Black men from Tuskegee to introduce skilled agricultural methods to the Sudanese. “If an experiment like this succeeds in the Sudan,” the Spy continued, “the educated American negro may yet become the teacher of the black race of the earth, leading them back into the civilization that they possessed thousands of years ago, [putting] into their hands the power to create better lives.”⁴¹ On November 29, 1903, Hunt replied to Roberts and stated that, while he didn’t mind the attention, he had issue with Roosevelt’s and Washington’s names being “inexcusably dragged into [a] newspaper scheme for the wholesale deportation of the American Negro.” He continued, “I am here in the Sudan for selfish purposes, not as a philanthropist. It is true that I am interested in the negro, but for business and not charitable reasons.”⁴²

Newspaper coverage of the Sudan scheme dovetailed with another issue of the day: emigration. “There is always something in the race question,” stated a writer in Topeka’s African American Plaindealer. “If it is not in the troublesome lynching, burning and flaying so vigorously advocated … it leads to the other extreme of emigration.” They stated that it was not their purpose discuss in detail the virtues or dangers of African emigration; rather, they aimed to present excerpts from one of Hunt’s letters that had recently been published in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.⁴³ The letter was his November 20, 1903, correspondence to Roberts. In it, Hunt embarked on a grandiose explanation of the project’s potential impact and placed it in relation to other noteworthy emigrations:

If I can demonstrate that the industrious negro’s improvement is assured by moving to the Sudan, no amount of preaching, teaching and voting could stop the endless stream of immigration that would follow. The influence of the first settlement, if successful, would supply sufficient power, to set the natural law which controls the destiny of man in motion… . Just as the little band of Germans that settled in Germantown, Pa., is responsible for the German population of America, just as the story of John Ericsson’s success drifted over … to influence and affect the Scandinavians, just as the tale of Tim Hooley’s good fortune on the banks of the Delaware served as a beacon light to his needy and anxious friends on the Emerald Isle, so would the results of the first American community in the Sudan either brand me as an “irridescent [sic] dreamer” or give to our needy colored countrymen a new star of hope.⁴⁴

Hunt’s comparison of African American migration to Sudan with European migrations to the United States reads as duplicitous. On one hand there is the sense of national othering: African Americans—citizens of the United States—are positioned in their migratory actions with foreigners (Germans, Irish, and Scandinavians) rather than with, for example, white Americans who migrated to Oklahoma, California, and elsewhere in the West. On the other hand, Hunt’s use of the phrase “our needy colored countrymen” suggests a sense of solidarity or co-citizenship with African Americans despite the racial difference. Finally, his reference to historical migrations rather than to European immigration to America occurring at the time makes one wonder whether he held them in different esteem. What is clear, however, is that Hunt believed in the long-term value that the project could have for both Sudan and Black America, a significance that rivaled other historical exoduses.

The daily Portland Oregonian, which also published Hunt’s aforementioned letter, noted that Hunt’s plan had been described as a general emigration scheme. Many emigration plans “of an impracticable character” had been presented—leading to an assumption that every Black emigration idea was similarly impracticable. But Hunt’s proposal, the Oregonian said, “ought not to be confused with the philanthropic dreams that have had for their purpose the solving of the race problem in the United States.” On the contrary: “His is a cold business proposition.”⁴⁵ A number of factors may explain the Oregonian’s skeptical if not critical assessment of Hunt’s intentions. Hunt had proven to be a successful businessman in America and Korea, and the idea that his focus on Sudan was principally driven by a desire to help Black Americans rather than the goal of acquiring more wealth may have been silly to some. With what African American causes had he previously shown an interest, and to what meaningful effect? Was he generally interested in the work of Tuskegee, or did he simply view it as a ready-made source of agriculturalists who could help him become even wealthier with the fruits of Sudanese cotton cultivation?

The Montgomery (AL) Advertiser published a dispatch from Paris reporting that Washington had been “besieged” by reporters there who wanted his views on “the negro question.” Washington, the Advertiser claimed, refuted the report that he was in Europe for the purpose of an African American emigration scheme. While he acknowledged that he had talked with Hunt about helping him with some Tuskegee men, Washington offered that based on his observations abroad he believed that “the best place for the negro” was the United States. “My belief,” he said, “is based on the fact that he has there better industrial opportunities and is better off than people in the same walk of life in Europe.”⁴⁶ His views on emigration notwithstanding, wild estimates circulated on the number of African Americans that would be purportedly involved in the Sudan project. The Juneau, Alaska, Daily Record-Miner conjectured that Washington would probably meet with Hunt in Egypt and there “perfect the plans for the colonization of the hundreds and thousands of negroes in Africa,” while the Cleveland Gazette reported that Hunt “hoped to secure 700,000 Afro-American families for settlement in the Soudan.”⁴⁷

Such exorbitant, unfounded estimates not only spoke to the power of rumor but may have also shed light on the contemporary state of American race relations. Black American desires to move out of the South increased following the conclusion of Reconstruction (when Black people were the target of vigilante violence). African Americans lost voting rights in places where their numbers threatened white control, and the day after President Hayes withdrew federal troops from South Carolina, a Black lawyer named John Mardenborough wrote to the American Colonization Society begging the organization to send a group of seventy-five Black residents from South Carolina to Liberia. The historian Kenneth C. Barnes writes that during the late nineteenth century the back-to-Africa movement shifted from being a white man’s institution to a Black grassroots movement. Barnes argues that Arkansas’s African emigration movement shows not only the harsh realities for Black southerners but also their hopes for a better life. “Interest in African emigration peaked among black southerners in the 1890s,” Barnes writes. "White racism reached its zenith. The [decade] saw the greatest number of lynchings in American history. As it became increasingly clear that black Americans would not get a seat at the table, Liberia posed an alternative to integration, an escape to an all-black world.”⁴⁸ While the prospect of life in Sudan never possessed the potency that Liberia did among African Americans, speculation as to the number of Blacks interested in moving to Sudan—particularly in the Black Cleveland Gazette—could be read as encouraging the idea of Africa as an escape and “refuge from white oppression.”⁴⁹

On November 8, 1903, the Sunday Leader of Port Townshend, Washington, republished an account from Collier’s Weekly concerning Hunt. “Here [Sudan], if reports be true, negro colonization in Africa takes practical shape, for the first time, with the backing of considerable capital. It has been much written and talked about. It has received the support of black as well as of white leaders of thought.” Using language infused with racist stereotypes, the article noted that President Roosevelt was aware of and supported the plan and that Washington had pledged “all the field hands” Hunt desired. “There is no cotton picker like [the African American man]. But he has never been successful or happy when transplanted in large numbers, as the West Indian blacks have.” To support this contention, the writer pointed to Liberia as a failed experiment in US colonization of Africa. Many of the descendants of the pioneering colonists had “unquestionably returned to the ways of savagery,” the writer asserted. “The others are not the equals of their kinsmen in America.”⁵⁰

Thus, by the middle of 1904, various newspapers ensured that Leigh Hunt and his plan to send Black laborers to Sudan received a considerable amount of attention. There were wild estimates about the scope of the project and comments from Hunt about the project’s potential that bordered on the absurd. Several significant questions remained unanswered. How many would actually answer the call? When would they go, and for how long? Would these workers be “successful or happy,” paving the way for future streams of emigrants to travel to their “Canaan,” or would the venture end in failure?

The Project Begins

Hunt developed a mixed farming operation with some cotton growing. To further develop the project, he traveled to London and formed the Sudan Experimental Plantations Syndicate in 1904. Also that year, the ambitious businessman who had reached out to Booker T. Washington for assistance set foot on Tuskegee’s campus. Hunt leased a private Pullman car and traveled there with George Roberts, Roberts’s wife, and another family. The group arrived in Tuskegee on May 24, two days before the institute’s commencement. Washington greeted Hunt and informed him that several graduates had expressed interest in working with him in Sudan. Washington explained that he and the institute’s executive council would meticulously screen these applicants and share their findings with Hunt.⁵¹ The African American Freeman (Indianapolis) reported on the commencement exercises and noted that among those present was “a special party of capitalists and promoters, including Mr. Leigh Hunt, the developer of the Soudan … Mr. George E. Roberts, director of the United States Mint and Mrs. Roberts, Mr. Grosvenor Clarkson, son of Gen. James S. Clarkson, also Major Charles R. Douglass, son of the lamented Frederick Douglass.”⁵²

On June 6, the Grey River Argus in New Zealand published an article titled “Cotton Growing in Sudan.” It reported the Reuters finding that “as a result of an important agreement which has just been signed at Cairo, between the Sudan Government and Mr Leigh Hunt … work has been commenced which is expected to have great influence on the development of the Sudan and on the cotton industry of the world.” Hunt, the report continued, had purchased a large tract of territory located at the mouth of the Atbara River, opposite Berber Province’s capital and was situated on the new railroad route intended to connect Berber and Suakin.⁵³ Hunt was given the only large concession on the Nile: ten thousand feddans (one feddan is slightly more than one acre: forty-two hundred square meters) at Zeidab, roughly 150 miles north of Khartoum.⁵⁴ The Argus continued that various preparations for construction were being made and that work had already commenced. Though Hunt already had sufficient labor for the project’s immediate needs, the paper did not neglect to inform its readers, “His staff will be reinforced by expert negro planters later in the season.”⁵⁵

On June 11, the Freeman reported, “The [authorities] of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute have been empowered by Mr. Leigh Hunt to select a committee of three colored people to go to the Soudan … for the purpose of making an examination as to the conditions existing in that country and report on their return.”⁵⁶ In truth, however, the three men had already been chosen. Washington had written to Hunt earlier in the month that the Executive Council had reviewed the list of interested men and agreed on Cain Triplett, Poindexter Smith, and John P. Powell. “We give their selection our heartiest endorsement. I have also talked to the men and find them in entire sympathy with your proposition.”⁵⁷ Cain Washington Triplett was a carpenter from Mashulaville, Mississippi; Poindexter Smith was a blacksmith who hailed from Winona, West Virginia; and John Perry Powell of Blakely, Georgia, was an agriculturist. Hunt offered to pay each of them $50 a month in the first year, $62.50 for the second, and $75 for the third year.⁵⁸ Washington offered his parting advice to the Sudan-bound students on December 12—advice that Louis Harlan characterized as being “amusingly similar to what one would expect from a Victorian parent, a warning against ‘going native.’”⁵⁹ “A great many persons going to a warm climate,” Washington wrote, “go to ruin from a moral standpoint. I hope you will keep this in mind and remember that if you yield to the temptation and lower [yourselves] in your moral character, you will do yourself, the school and the race the greatest injustice; but I feel sure you are going to stand up and be men.”⁶⁰

Washington’s comments provide insight into his thinking about Africa, colonialism, and gender. To begin, his framing of Sudan as a place that could tempt the men to sacrifice their morality speaks both to his understanding of their refinement and, conversely, the comparative baseness of the people they were about to encounter. History scholar Tunde Adeleke has argued that African Americans had visions of Africa and Africans that were intrinsically saturated with Euro-American stereotypes and appropriated many of the same sentiments of social, political, and religious superiority over Africans.⁶¹ Elsewhere in the imperial fold the British, French, and Dutch defined their civilities through understandings of sexual virtue and racial purity. Power was maintained through sexual prohibitions delineating the rulers from the ruled, the elite from the lower class, and those seen as racially virile (“white” and/or “European”) from the racially weak.⁶² These realities bring Washington’s warnings into greater relief. From his perspective, the Sudan project was about much more than cotton; it was an opportunity for Black American men of a certain class to display their cultural and masculine superiority. Facing racism on the home front, they too could prove themselves as colonial masters. The Sudanese cotton field, therefore, would be a proving ground.

Triplett, Smith, and Powell arrived in Zeidab on January 14, 1905. Triplett wrote Washington the following day and expressed that they were pleased with a day’s observation and were confident that success would come if they were careful and worked patiently. He began to teach carpentry to Sudanese youth, Smith taught them how to forge iron, and Powell showed them how to plant wheat and other crops. In addition to such labor, the Tuskegee men showed the youth how to swim and play tug-of-war (among other games) during the daily midday break. They also organized foot races and other games on Muslim holidays.⁶³ Powell also wrote to Washington and informed him that when he arrived he had been put in charge of a garden that covered roughly two acres. After two months of this work, he continued, he had been transferred to lead the company’s farm. Leading an average crew of thirty men and boys each day, his main work there was harvesting the crop. “As there was no one here for me to converse with in English, I soon learned to speak Arabic well enough so as to transact any business with the natives.”⁶⁴

On February 3 Hunt wrote an enthusiastic letter to Washington, praising the work that the Americans had done to that point. “Your boys arrived in good health and good cheer and have taken hold in a manner which augurs well for their future,” he noted. Hunt continued that if their start reflected their true character, “I congratulate you upon the kind of men Tuskegee sends out into the world… . I am delighted with these boys and therefore very hopeful that my experiment in blazing the way to this land of promise is going to prove beneficial to at least some of your race.” Hunt also shared that the Tuskegee men had recommended L. N. Spurlock and Ocie R. Burns for the project. “I should like to have [them] come to us if they will accept the same terms as you gave me for Triplett, Smith & Powell providing you are willing to let them come. If they decide to come send them along without delay.”⁶⁵ Lewis Nathaniel Spurlock and Ocie Romeo Burns were each Tuskegee-educated. Washington informed Hunt that Burns and a candidate of his own could soon join the Sudan Syndicate. In the spring of 1905, Burns and drilling expert J. Brown Twitty sailed for Africa. Twitty, who hailed from Lenexa, Kansas, was a member of Tuskegee’s 1904–1905 senior class.⁶⁶

That May, Washington sent the Tuskegee representatives—Burns, Twitty, Triplett, Smith, and Powell—a copy of the Tuskegee Student that included a report on their Sudan experience.⁶⁷ “I am writing this letter … to let you know that during Commencement season we are thinking of you, and to let you know how very much we are looking forward to your efforts in that far away land.” Washington continued that Hunt thought well of their abilities and had written him, as the enclosed issue of the Student showed. “I wish to impress … that it is incumbent upon you for the sake of the institution as well as for yourselves, that you put forth every effort to make the experiment a success, if it fails it not only carries you down, but us as well, and I wish you to justify the high faith which Mr. Hunt has.”⁶⁸

On May 20, 1905, the Freeman published an article titled “Field for Educated Negroes: The Success of Four Tuskegee Graduates.” It included Hunt’s recent interview with a reporter from the New York World. He expressed his reluctance to talk about his bringing Black Americans to the Sudan and acknowledged the difficulty in addressing the merits of emigration as “a solution to our Negro problem.” He did, however, opine, “Given favorable conditions the educated Negro can establish a home for himself in a foreign land and prosper there. Two important desiderata in such a move are congenial climate and the absence of competition with white men, especially where racial prejudice is operative.” When it came time to find men to work as his plantation overseers, Hunt shared that he had asked Washington to send four Blacks who were Tuskegee-educated. “I can say that thus far there has been no cause for disappointment in the experiment… . They have got along well with the Soudanese laborers and the influence of the Americans on the natives has been the best.” Noting that the Tuskegee men had sent for some of their colleagues (who had joined them) and that others were arranging to make the trip, Hunt stated, “All these are educated Negroes, there are no places for the others… . It is easy for an educated Negro who understands agriculture to make a home for himself there [Sudan], and if he is industrious to prosper.”⁶⁹

One point from the interview demands particular attention: why did Hunt share with the reporter that he did not want to be seen as suggesting emigration? The answer can be found in the exchange he had had with President Roosevelt at the White House. After Roosevelt expressed his hope that US Blacks could travel to another country if they wanted to escape their status in America, Hunt responded that the scheme was both humanitarian and business-centered. The president was apparently pleased, noting that earlier philanthropic plans had failed and that each Black man in Hunt’s project would be “paying for what he received and therefore be stimulated to business habits and the thrift of saving and management.”⁷⁰ Thus, in seeking to distance himself from the idea that he was engaged in an emigration project, Hunt probably knew that it was politically expedient for him to broadcast a position he knew Roosevelt would support. It is also possible that Hunt, beyond wanting to stay in the president’s good graces, actually agreed with Roosevelt—that African Americans should work out their salvation by the sweat of their own brows without philanthropic graces. Only a generation removed from chattel slavery, African Americans who had been so long and so violently disenfranchised should apparently be “stimulated to business habits” on their own, without the hint of assistance. It is no wonder that Booker T. Washington, the great evangelist of the gospel that Blacks should lift themselves with their own bootstraps, found a suitable partner in capitalist extraordinaire Hunt.

Despite his initial enthusiasm, all was not well when Hunt returned to Zeidab in November 1905. While the Tuskegee men were working well with the Sudanese, the project was a mess; locusts and white ants were damaging crops, and no cotton plant was planted by the end of the year. Frank Conkey, the only other white American at the site, was stricken with malaria and died. Hunt was also hit with malaria, and in 1906 each of the Tuskegee men found themselves afflicted. With mostly Egyptian labor, the Syndicate had begun to grow cotton and wheat by 1906. That year it installed its first pump at Zeidab for the purpose of cultivating cotton. Large expenses were contrasted with small yields, and Hunt was regularly absent, attending his interests elsewhere. Due to the company’s financial position, Hunt’s annual salary of £3,000 as managing director had to be halted in December 1906. By 1907, eight hundred feddans of wheat and cotton (each) were being irrigated.⁷¹

In March 1907, John Powell wrote to Washington and spoke about his work to extend the “canalization” of the plantation, his supervision of seven hundred men, and the Tuskegee alums’ contributions (including the school they had provided).⁷² Writing that he had taken up his own farm, Powell continued, “I think I have made a very fair crop & will make some money. It was judged that my crop was the best grown at the Syndicate.” Due to the fact that their water supply was late arriving, Powell continued, they had not grown much cotton. “But with what little we have grown here I would say that this is a very good country for cotton growing & most general agricultural products. Our principal crops have been wheat, barley, clover & native corn.” Triplett had apparently done well in his work and was also “teaching the native boys to speak English,” Powell wrote. “He has taught many of them to read & write a little. The school[,] he operated it in his own time and expence with the cooperation of the other boys mentioned above.” Powell continued that Twitty had done great work in constructing a short railroad line. “I am very sorry,” he wrote, “that I have no illu[s]tration to send you of the work that Mr. Smith has done in puting up an eighty feet smoke-stack for a boiler on the banks of the Nile river. He does all the blacksmithing and machine shop work for a Thirty H Power engine & a sixty H Power engine.”⁷³

Of all the information Powell shared, one item presented immediate and lasting irony: “All the other boys have been in very good health with an exception of a little fever. Nothing serious or unusual.”⁷⁴ On April 17—less than a month after Powell’s correspondence—Twitty wrote to Washington and explained why he, Burns, and Triplett had returned to the United States. “The African fever,” he shared, “had nearly undermined our constitutions, making it imperative that we should leave immediately.” A doctor, he continued, had told them that they ran “very grave risks” if they stayed longer. In addition to this medical reason, Twitty shared that Hunt was retiring from leading the company: “[He] feared to leave us out there, in the hands of strangers.”⁷⁵ The following month, Freeman provided readers with an update on the status of the Tuskegee men. Of the five graduates who had been working in Sudan for two years, “introducing scientific farming and working at their other special trades,” Twitty, Triplett, and Burns had returned to the United States. “The Company for which they worked has disposed of its interests in the Soudan, and although they were offered employment with satisfactory compensation with the new Company, yet because of the ravages of the African fever, it was thought best for them to return home.” The Freeman continued that Poindexter Smith remained in Sudan and was in charge of the company’s blacksmith and machine work. John Powell also stayed behind and was in charge of agricultural work.⁷⁶ In August 1907, Washington shared some tragic news with Twitty: Smith had succumbed to malaria.⁷⁷

In all the correspondence between Washington and his students who went to Sudan, there is a notable absence of any language from Washington concerning the Sudanese themselves—concern about their condition, curiosity about their culture, or anything of the sort. This contrasted with his engagement with South Africa. Washington had direct though limited contact with Black South Africans, corresponded with nationalists, wrote that there was “no very great difference between the native problem there and the Negro problem in America,” and proposed solutions.⁷⁸ If the “native problem” that he referenced conjured within him a sense of racial solidarity with South Africans that never materialized with the Sudanese, the racist legislation passed in contemporary South Africa would have easily explained such feeling. In the late nineteenth century, as African Americans were being exploited on sharecropped fields and excluded from voting booths, segregationist legislation was designed in South Africa to deny Africans citizenship rights while exploiting their labor in mining towns. Two years before the US Supreme Court enshrined the “separate but equal” doctrine in Plessy v. Ferguson, South Africa’s 1894 Glen Grey Act assigned areas to segregate Africans from whites. Black South Africans were targeted with what historian Robert Vinson has termed a “segregationist onslaught” that denied them the franchise, marginalized them to low-paying employment, and offered them little judicial capacity to confront this systemic oppression.⁷⁹ While all these may explain Washington’s comparatively strong connection with South Africa compared to Sudan, his silence concerning the Sudanese in his correspondence with the Sudan-related Tuskegee students is nevertheless profound.

In 1907 the company was reorganized and renamed the Sudan Plantations Syndicate, Ltd. (SPS). Hunt wound up leaving the project and sold his holdings to the renamed syndicate. According to Harlan, Tuskegeans were apparently no longer involved in the work. The Condominium government hoped to prove that long-staple cotton and grain were suitable commercial operations and opened a pump irrigation system at Taiyiba. It asked SPS to run the venture and subsequently financed a pump irrigation scheme at Barakat, with the syndicate building canals and overseeing the agricultural work. SPS was brought into a larger partnership with the government to manage the development of Gezira. A major agricultural project, it was planned before World War I and became fully operational in the 1920s. Originally a joint venture of the Condominium, SPS, and local farmers, its cotton production was a pillar of colonial Sudan’s economy. The government assumed the company’s role in the Gezira Scheme following Sudan’s 1956 independence.⁸⁰ While it may be a stretch to state that Tuskegee agricultural aid made a significant difference to Condominium agricultural or economic development, this much is sure: the Tuskegee students, through their participation in Hunt’s project, can be placed in the early genealogy of the Gezira Scheme, an effort Alden Young has labeled as “the product of an imperial imaginary.”⁸¹

Hunt returned to the United States in 1910 and settled in Las Vegas in 1924. There he participated in real estate and, in anticipation of the Boulder Dam’s completion (which he led), bought large tracts of desert property. Located southeast of Las Vegas, the dam—renamed Hoover Dam—was completed in 1936. Two years before his death in 1933, Hunt wrote about his Sudan experiment.⁸² “I decided to employ some of our educated negroes who were familiar with cotton culture in America, believing they would aid me in a better contact with the natives.” In an about-face from his former enthusiasm, Hunt added that the Tuskegeans proved useful, “[but] malaria killed a majority of them, when the balance lost heart and fled, hence this experiment ended in failure, and these were only some of the mistakes which a wiser man would have avoided.” Hunt, by contrast, cast whites in a fairer light. “The white men in our employ, who survived malaria and lived to tell the tale, together with those who gave their lives to the project, were the real heroes of the undertaking.”⁸³ Hunt’s decision to broadcast the racial identities of his employees in this respect can be read as his prejudiced effort to argue that whites were more virile and capable than Blacks.

To be sure, the engagements Washington and his students had with Hunt were nuanced and problematic. The US historian Sven Beckert has noted that Washington and his disciples worked to obtain freedom for both Black Americans and Africans by accommodating to powerful statesmen and capitalists.⁸⁴ Hunt was quite obviously one such capitalist, and their choice to participate in Hunt’s Sudan scheme can be read as complicity with an imperial, capitalistic project that benefited white interests. Where, in this particular Sudanese milieu, was the path to Black freedom? On one hand, Tuskegee men contributed to one of British Africa’s best cotton-growing successes, “prov[ing] the viability of irrigated cotton cultivation in the region,” and the SPS “provided the management and capital to expand operations into the Gezira plain.”⁸⁵ On the other hand, the project was short-lived, a man died in the process, and others returned home ill only to be publicly denigrated by Hunt years later. While the choices that the Tuskegee men made were indeed complex, no doubt involving a mix of personal and professional interests with perceived positive and negative consequences, the negative outcomes appear straightforward. While the Tuskegee experts wanted to use science and technology to “revolutionize” Sudanese agriculture, the historian Jonathan E. Robins writes that “the Gezira project reproduced the structures of racial hierarchy, agrarian poverty, and dependency that plagued the South.”⁸⁶

“In Africa,” wrote Louis Harlan, “[Washington] supported the principle if not all the practices of colonialism… . Washington’s role and outlook were complex, but they supported the concept of the white man’s burden.”⁸⁷ In some respects, the Sudan project can be used as evidence to support this claim. Washington, through the participation of Tuskegee men, participated in a venture that would “uplift” an African colonial populace through agricultural training funded by a white business tycoon. These men were sent to a country that contained—at least in the minds of Hunt and Lord Cromer—“lazy” people who needed to be taught sound work ethic. Interpreted solely in this light, it is easy to read Washington as an educationalist who sent his students to a Sudanese project that would fill Hunt’s coffers and support imperial interests.

However, other elements complicate this narrative. The participation of President Roosevelt, Egypt’s Lord Cromer, and Sudan’s Reginald Wingate injected a level of statecraft into what could have otherwise been construed as a strictly financial or philanthropic enterprise. The attention that newspapers afforded to the scheme illustrated both the sensationalized path that the story took and its status as one that garnered widespread attention. Interestingly, Hunt’s insertion of emigration into the conversation regarding Sudan was not echoed by Washington or his students, reflecting perhaps that, despite Black America’s plight, not all African American were buying the idea of Africa as a refuge. If anything, Washington’s warning that the men not go to ruin from a moral standpoint reflected the complicated relationship that Black Americans had with the continent at the time.

While Washington articulated his willingness to assist Hunt and informed his men of the consequences of their conduct, his letters are completely silent regarding his personal views of the Sudanese. How could such silence on the very people that inhabited the country that his students were going to work in be explained from a man described by Edward Erhagbe “as one of the most important black diasporan contributors to Africa during his age”?⁸⁸ Was one’s status as a Pan-African defined simply by one’s willingness to support ventures on the continent? To directly correspond with Africans or comment on Africa-related issues? Whatever the reason for his silence, it is quite compelling that Washington devoted all of his language on Sudan to the white businessman Hunt and his African American pupils without a meaningful word on Sudan, its people, or its conditions. Such negligence warrants reconsideration of episodes about which Washington was more apt to comment on specific happenings on the continent, those in which he wasn’t, and what those discrepancies might reveal about his approach to Africa.

In many respects, the Hunt-Washington Sudan scheme was bizarre. The plan joined an eccentric white American businessman (Hunt), the most famous African American (Washington), one of British Africa’s most powerful figures (Cromer), and the president of the United States. A plan that would purportedly involve seven hundred thousand Black families ended up with a handful of Tuskegee men staying for less than five years. The project has, perhaps understandably, been relatively marginalized in coverage of Washington’s (and Tuskegee’s) engagements with Africa in the early twentieth century. Yet, despite these realities, the project highlights important themes that can both confirm existing knowledge of Washington and the contemporary Black public and perhaps provide some new insights. Poindexter Smith’s death, the return of the students, and Hunt’s subsequent denigration of the Black participation provide a fitting example of the way in which joining such capitalistic endeavors did not provide the freedom for Blacks that Washington longed for. Emigration’s injection into this narrative revealed its continued salience a quarter of a century after the conclusion of Reconstruction. Washington’s preeminent concern with the participating students and total documentary silence on the Sudanese calls into question his consideration a Pan-Africanist. In these ways, the Sudan scheme is a bizarre but useful topic of analysis.

Finally, the cotton scheme was the first documented instance of African Americans within Sudan’s geographic boundaries. The educated backgrounds of the men involved foreshadowed the fact that many of the successive generations of Black Americans to visit the country would be similarly college-educated, whether at HBCUs or predominately white institutions. Given the paucity of African American college graduates at the time—as of 1899, only six southern HBCUs had more than twenty college students—the Tuskegee men wielded privilege that most of their Black contemporaries did not possess, thereby clothing the project with a particular exclusivity. The project’s loose association with the US government became more pronounced in the 1950s and 1960s, when several African Americans worked in US foreign service capacities in Khartoum during the early period of Sudanese independence. The spirit of aid that undergirded the cotton scheme persisted into the early twenty-first century. One example of the posture of aid that endured came in the person of Andrew Brimmer, who—in addition to becoming the longest-serving member of Tuskegee’s board of trustees—would serve as a member of the Federal Reserve’s Central Banking mission to Khartoum and help to establish a central bank in the country.⁸⁹ In these ways, the cotton scheme examined in this chapter foreshadowed significant elements that marked Black engagements with Sudan for the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

Roughly thirty years after Twitty, Triplett and Burns returned from Sudan, Italy invaded neighboring Ethiopia. Ethiopia’s fight to maintain its sovereignty fueled African American internationalism and engagement with modern Africa, and in the ensuing years the community became fervently anticolonial. Some early twentieth-century African American intellectuals, including W. E. B. DuBois, sought to redeem African history.⁹⁰ In the period bookended by Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia and Sudan’s 1956 independence, Black writers shined a spotlight on Sudan’s ancient glory and contemporary colonial status under Anglo-Egyptian rule. Sudan, in this paradigm, was not just a far-off place where Tuskegee men could cultivate cotton. It was also a place where readers of Black newspapers could develop a sense of racial pride and solidarity. While Booker T. Washington may have been silent concerning the Sudanese people, Horace R. Cayton and others would not.