In 1852, the Black American writer and abolitionist Martin Delany lamented that “the claims of no people . . . are respected by any nation, until they are presented in a national capacity.” He was urging the emigration of Black people from the United States to Africa in the hope that their individual rights as people—and collective rights as a people—would be better respected across the ocean. By the middle of the nineteenth century, the nation had become the primary political form through