These 5 Haitian Cities Founded By African Americans Who Chose Land Over Home — Find Your Family Name

In September 1824, one hundred and twenty free Black New Yorkers gathered inside the African Zion Church for a farewell blessing before boarding a ship. They weren't fleeing. They were choosing, deliberately, publicly, with their own church's blessing, to leave the United States behind for a country most of them had never seen, invited by a foreign president who promised them something the United States never had: free land, full citizenship, and a government that already looked like them. Most people have never heard this migration happened at all. This video covers Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer's 1824 recruitment campaign, his real correspondence describing Haiti as "a sure asylum" compared to the rival American Colonization Society's plan to send free Black Americans to Africa instead; the deeper diplomatic motive behind his offer, tied to winning international recognition of Haitian independence; and the five real Haitian cities, Port-au-Prince, Cap-Haïtien, Jacmel, Les Cayes, and Gonaïves, that together received over half of the roughly 6,000 African Americans who made the crossing, with real documented settler numbers for each. It also covers why so many eventually returned to the United States, and the honest limits of what surname records survive for these five specific communities today. One honest note: unlike the Samaná settlement in the modern Dominican Republic, which preserved documented surnames like Brown, Núñez, and Ray, the five Haitian communities largely integrated into the broader population, and we couldn't find individual surname lists for them — that doesn't make a family connection less real, just harder to prove from a single video. If your family has oral history connecting to this 1824 migration, our surname and record research service is built for exactly that — the link is pinned in the comments below. We go directly into the surviving passenger lists, Haitian government proclamations, and emigration society records for your specific surname, and tell you honestly what they show. Drop your surname and any family history you have in the comments. We've now traced Haiti's ancestry, its independence, its earliest immigrants to the United States, and this time, Americans who immigrated the other way. If you want us to trace what happened to these five communities in the decades that followed next, tell us in the comments. Subscribe if uncovering the real, documented history hidden inside the African and Caribbean diaspora matters to you. Sources: — Weeks, J. M., and Ramírez Zabala, V., "Some Forgotten Philadelphians," Expedition Magazine, Penn Museum. — Fanning, S., "Caribbean Crossing: African Americans and the Haitian Emigration Movement" (NYU Press). — "Undoing Slavery: African American Emigrationists and the Voluntary Haitian Emigration Movement," OpenEdition Books. — "Samaná Americans" (Wikipedia); Loring D. Dewey (Wikipedia); Haitian emigration (Wikipedia). #HaitianHistory #AfricanAmericanHistory #1824