Blyden is a modernist. He is an ardent believer in that typical ideology of nineteenth-century liberalism, one he calls “the law of progress.” As he puts it, “There is no such thing as standing still in life. The law is either forward or backward; if there is no conscious movement forward, there is an unconscious movement backward.” Based on such a belief, he sees Africa as a backward continent. He tirelessly advocates the need for Africans to rise above and beyond their material and spiritual degradation. He writes in A Voice from Bleeding Africa on Behalf of Her Exiled Children:

He called on black people to jump on the “railroad track of Improvement,” to be counted among the great nations of the world. For this to materialize, he advocated the idea of the diasporic African American civilizing mission of Africa.

Blyden was neither the first nor the last person to hold firm the idea of the African American civilizing mission of Africa. Alexander Crummell, Martin Delany, and even Marcus Garvey, among others, thought that they had the moral responsibility and the racial calling to help uplift Africa out of what they perceived as its entanglement in savagery and barbarism. That way, the black race would find the much needed respectability it so lacked, yet so much desired.