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Quaker Paul Cuffee was Americas first African American millionaire in 1816 he sailed to Sierra Leone and helps a group of immigrants from the United States of America establish themselves. Paul Cuffee, a successful Quaker ship owner of African- American and ancestry, advocated settling freed American slaves in Africa. He gained support from the British government, free black leaders in the United States, and members of Congress for a plan to take emigrants to the British colony of Sierra Leone. Cuffee intended to make one voyage per year, taking settlers and bringing back valuable cargoes. In 1816, at his own expense, Captain Cuffee took thirty-eight American blacks to Freetown, Sierra Leone. As a result of this trip, supporters of colonization form an organization to seek volunteers to settle in Africa. The roots of the colonization movement date back to various plans first proposed in the eighteenth century. From the start, colonization of free blacks in Africa was an issue on which both whites and blacks were divided. Some blacks supported emigration because they thought that black Americans would never receive justice in the United States. Others believed African-Americans should remain in the United States to fight against slavery and for full legal rights as American citizens. Some whites saw colonization as a way of ridding the nation of blacks, while others believed black Americans would be happier in Africa, where they could live free of racial discrimination. Still others believed black American colonists could play a central role in Christianizing and civilizing Africa.
The American Colonization Society (ACS) was formed in 1817 to send free African-Americans to Africa as an alternative to emancipation in the United States. In 1820 the American Colonization Society sends its first group of immigrants to Sherbro Island in Sierra Leone on one Paul Cuffee’s ship but he had died in 1817 most likely of Malaria he contracted in Sierra Leone.