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  • 9 - Liberia, the League and the United States (1933)

  • W. E. B. Du Bois
  • Edited by Adom Getachew, University of Chicago, Jennifer Pitts, University of Chicago
  • Book:
    W. E. B. Du Bois: International Thought
    Published online:
    10 November 2022
    Print publication:
    17 November 2022, pp 100-116

  • Summary

    This 1933 essay revisits Liberia’s precarious political and economic situation in the wake of a League of Nations commission formed in 1929 to investigate charges that the Liberian government had tolerated slave trading. Du Bois wrote the essay on the basis of a cache of League documents provided to him by the writer and activist Anna Melissa Graves. Du Bois writes that the League’s International Commission of Inquiry or Christy Commission dwelt more on general economic conditions, having quickly concluded that Liberia had successfully suppressed the forced labor practices in question. Its elaborate and misguided economic proposals failed to recognize the true reasons for Liberia’s poverty and debt and threaten to exacerbate the problem. United States government efforts to guarantee the profits of the Firestone Corporation likewise demonstrate Liberia’s vulnerability to being “ruthlessly exploited as a foundation for American and European wealth.”