ACS lecturers and essayists often used deeply racist rhetoric, emphasizing that free Black people would always constitute a criminal class because their African “race” rendered them poorly adapted to live in cool climes or unable to conduct themselves as independent citizens. In this respect, the colonization movement was an extension of the impulses that spurred the black laws of Ohio and other free states. Most colonizationists believed African Americans could never be assimilated into American civil and political life. Most thought the United States was destined to be a white nation, and
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