Inheritance Baltimore engaged in building community in Liberia

people gathered in a room with window and wood floors

This is the morning after our performance of our original play 200 Years of Returns on Providence Island about the Liberian bicentennial. This photo features dancers associated with Orita’s Cross Freedom School, Pleasant Hope Baptist Church in Baltimore and choreographer Elliott Jones, two Baltimore-based graduate students, actors and the director of the Department of Museum Theater at Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia, actors from B4 Youth Theatre’s Gbarnga and Ganta, Liberia program sites, and former President of Liberia Ellen Johnson Sirleaf- Nobel Laureate (first democratically elected woman president in Africa). In 1822, free and manumitted Black people left what would become the US to establish a country where the concept of “liberty” applied to Black people. That place became Liberia, the land with the shortest period of colonization in Africa- 25 years- under American colonial governance. Liberia is one of two African countries never to endure European colonialism.