African repatriation for ex-slaves and free blacks from North America and other Western societies began during the eighteenth century. For example, Job Ben Solomon of Senegal was captured, sold to a slave trader, and shipped to Maryland. Literate in Arabic, Job wrote a letter to his father that fell into the hands of a white official, who had it translated. He then helped to buy and liberate Job, who returned to his homeland in 1734. Approximately 1,200 slaves, among the thousands who were emancipated and evacuated by the British after the Revolutionary War, repatriated to Sierra Leone in 1791.

Black emigration to Africa grew in the wake of northern slave emancipation (1780–1846). Free black Boston shipowner Paul Cuffee transported 38 ex-slaves to Sierra Leone in 1815, which foreshadowed a meeting of Presbyterian ministers in Philadelphia the next year. They organized the American Colonization Society (ACS), whose wealthy members included southern masters who pushed to relocate freed blacks. Black opposition to and support for ACS increased. ACS received a $100,000 federal subsidy and founded the African colony of Liberia (1821). It resettled probably 13,000 blacks prior to the Civil War and a total of 20,000 by its closing in 1910. Blacks also emigrated by means of independent black programs despite slavery and post–Civil War segregation. Vital to emigrationism ca. 1900–1945 were Pan-African congresses and the Universal Negro Improvement Association, pursuing Back-to-Africa, freedom, independence, and justice for blacks in Africa and its Diaspora. Many civil rights and Black Power activists later pursued the same goals.