Politics & Power Quote by Carter G. Woodson

Woodson is doing something more surgical than defending Liberia: he is rewiring the causal story Americans told themselves about Black political capacity. The sentence is built like a legal objection. If Liberia has failed - a concession to prevailing talk of the era - the conclusion does not follow. Woodson refuses the lazy syllogism that turned any turbulence in a Black-led republic into proof that Black people were unfit for self-rule. He redirects blame upstream, toward the machinery that produced the conditions of "failure" in the first place.

The line works because it weaponizes a conditional. "If" opens the door to the critic, then slams it shut with a reframing that exposes the critic's hidden premise: that the burden of proof sits on the formerly enslaved. Woodson flips the burden back onto slavery as a system of deliberate underdevelopment: stripping education, capital, institutional memory, and stable civic life, then judging the outcomes as innate deficiency. His choice of "merely" is pointed; it shrinks what racist commentary inflated into civilizational verdict.

Context matters. Liberia was often cited in U.S. debates about colonization, "uplift", and segregation - invoked by white commentators as a cautionary tale and by some Black leaders as a complex experiment in sovereignty. Woodson, a historian of Black life and a founder of what became Black History Month, insists on historical causation over racial folklore. He implies that governance is not a racial trait but a learned, resourced practice - and that slavery's most enduring project was not just forced labor, but the attempted sabotage of the future.