24/08/2026
The Lone Star: Liberia’s Flag and the Making of Africa’s First Republic.
When Liberians raise their national flag on 24 August each year, they are marking more than the adoption of a piece of cloth. They are remembering the moment a small community of Black settlers, many of them formerly enslaved or free people of color from the United States, formally announced that they intended to govern themselves on the West African coast. The flag that first flew that day in 1847 still flies today, eleven red-and-white stripes and a single white star on a blue field, largely unchanged. Understanding why it looks the way it does requires stepping back into the complicated history that produced it.The story begins not in Africa but in the United States. In 1816 a group of prominent white Americans founded the American Colonization Society. Their motives were mixed and often contradictory. Some genuinely believed that free Black people would have better opportunities in Africa; others simply wanted to remove free Blacks from American society. The result was a colony established on land purchased and sometimes seized from local African communities along what is now the Liberian coast.
The first permanent settlers arrived in 1822. Mortality was catastrophic disease, conflict, and hardship killed large numbers, but the settlement persisted and slowly expanded. Over the following decades thousands of free Black Americans, some Caribbean migrants, and later Africans rescued from illegal slave ships by the U.S. Navy joined them. These settlers came to call themselves Americo-Liberians, deliberately distinguishing themselves from the indigenous peoples whose lands they occupied. By the mid-1840s the colony had grown restless under ACS control. Joseph Jenkins Roberts, himself an Americo-Liberian, had become the first non-white governor. In 1847 the settlers decided the time had come for full independence. On 26 July they issued a Declaration of Independence, modeled closely on the American one, and adopted a constitution. Eleven men signed the Declaration—Samuel Benedict, Hilary Teage (its principal author), Elijah Johnson, John N. Lewis, and others representing the three existing counties. That number eleven would soon be written into the national flag.
A new flag was needed. The colony had earlier flown a version of the American flag with a white cross in the blue canton, adopted in 1827 to show both affinity with and distinction from the United States. For the independent republic something different was required. Governor Roberts turned to the women of Monrovia. On 10 July 1847 he wrote to Susannah Elizabeth Lewis, asking her to convene a committee. Lewis was well connected: daughter of a former vice colonial agent, sister of the woman who would become Liberia’s first First Lady, and wife of one of the Declaration’s signers. She gathered Matilda Newport, Rachel Johnson, Mary Hunter, Sarah McGill Russwurm (wife of the journalist and later governor of Maryland-in-Africa, John Brown Russwurm), Colonette Teage Ellis, and Sara Draper. All seven women had been born in the United States. Working by hand, they reduced the stripes from thirteen to eleven and replaced the cross with a single five-pointed white star. On 24 August 1847 the new flag was unfurled in Monrovia amid speeches, music, and celebration. Lewis herself delivered a patriotic address. The symbolism was deliberate. The eleven stripes honored the signers of the Declaration. Red and white stood for courage and moral excellence. The blue field represented the African continent, and the lone white star proclaimed Liberia the first independent republic in Africa, a bold claim at a time when European powers were tightening their grip on the rest of the continent. The overall design remained close enough to the American flag to signal the settlers’ origins and political ideals, yet distinct enough to assert sovereignty.
The flag quickly became a practical emblem of that sovereignty. In the 1850s and 1860s the brig Eusibia N. Roye, owned by the prosperous merchant Edward James Roye (who would later become president), carried the Lone Star into the ports of New York and Liverpool—the first Liberian-owned vessel known to do so. In 1860 the design appeared on Liberia’s first postage stamps. International recognition came slowly; Britain acknowledged the new republic in 1848, France in 1852, but the United States, constrained by Southern political power, waited until 1862. Throughout these early decades the flag flew over a society that was itself deeply stratified. Americo-Liberians dominated politics, commerce, and culture, while the majority indigenous population remained largely excluded from power—a tension that would shape Liberian history for generations.
In 1915, nearly seventy years after the flag’s first raising, President Daniel Edward Howard signed legislation making 24 August Flag Day, a national holiday. The date has been observed ever since with parades, school ceremonies, and the public display of the national colors.
The Liberian flag is therefore more than a borrowed American design with minor alterations. It is a document in cloth: a record of the hopes, contradictions, and determination of the people who created Africa’s first Black republic. It speaks of Atlantic crossings, of the unfinished business of emancipation, of the ambition to build a modern state on African soil, and of the complicated relationship between settlers and the indigenous societies they encountered. Nearly two centuries later, the Lone Star still flies—weathered by civil wars, economic hardship, and political upheaval, yet recognizably the same banner first stitched by seven women in Monrovia in the summer of 1847.
~PHILOS~
