Word: tubman
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1950-1959
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
There was scarcely a campaign poster to be seen or an election speech to be heard, and the one opponent to Liberia's President William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman, 63, had his own typically Liberian reason for bothering to run at all. "Not being particularly opposed to the continuation in office, of President Tubman," a church organist had said in his formal platform, "this venture of mine is divinely inspired. It is purely sportsmanlike, and is in response to the ardent desire of Dr. Tubman for fair and friendly competition...
...turn, that just before last week's election he announced over the radio that he would vote for his organist opponent himself. He could well afford the gesture; of all Africa's political figures, none except the Emperor of Ethiopia has shown greater staying power than "Shad" Tubman...
...Tubman's father is a Georgia-born Methodist minister who became Speaker of Liberia's House of Representatives. Tubman himself is a cigar-chomping ban vivant who likes to have the towers of Monrovia's Saturday Afternoon Club specially illuminated whenever he drops in at night. He runs his Ohio-sized country with the benign shrewdness of an oldtime U.S. city boss and a good many of the trappings of an African autocrat. If Liberia is still one of the most backward countries in Africa, its pace of advance is now among the fastest...
Know Thy Place. When Tubman took over in 1943, just a little less than a century and a quarter had passed since 88 former U.S. Negro slaves, backed by President James Monroe, the Congress of the U.S., and an idealistic organization called the American Colonization Society, landed on the Pepper Coast of Africa to set up a new nation. Except for Haiti, Liberia was the only Negro republic in the world, but that was about its only distinction. The descendants of the first U.S. settlers formed a haughty aristocracy of "Americo-Liberians" who lived along a 40-mile stretch...
...Scriptural Saying. To break the stranglehold of his fellow Americo-Liberians, Tubman began what he called a "national unification policy." In 1944, for the first time, tribal Liberians got the vote and even won a few seats in the legislature, where they proved to be reliable members of Tubman's True Whig Party. Later, Tubman extended the suffrage to women, took tribal Liberians into his Cabinet. In the back country, often carried in a hammock, the traditional mode of travel for Liberian VIPs, he palavered endlessly with jungle chiefs. Eventually he set up a network of bush clinics, experimental...