[2] Mr. Powell, a teacher of Tuskegee, wrote this letter a few years ago while making a study of the Negroes in Ohio.

A TYPICAL COLONIZATION CONVENTION

   CONVENTION OF FREE COLORED PEOPLE

In another column we present a Circular Address to the free colored people of Maryland, calling a Convention to assemble in Baltimore the 25th of July, to take into consideration their present condition and future prosperity, and compare them with the inducements held out to them to emigrate to Liberia.  This movement may be considered indicative of the change that is going on in the minds of the colored people respecting emigration.  It is well known that heretofore they have been almost entirely insensible to the advantages which they must necessarily enjoy in a land peculiarly their own.  They have not been entirely free from the control of bad counsellors.—­Now they seem resolved to take the matter into their own hands, and to look at their present condition and future prospects in this country as a matter in which they are personally interested.  When they do this in earnest, the result can be easily foreseen.  They will desire to escape from their present anomalous condition, will yearn to be free and disenthralled, to have a land of their own, to have rights unquestioned by any superiors, where character, enterprise, education, and all that is lovely and noble in life shall combine to elevate and improve them and their children after them to the latest generation.

—­African Repository, XXVIII, 195-196.

   EMIGRATION OF THE COLORED RACE

In presenting the circular, which will be found in another column, of which a committee of colored persons have undertaken the distribution, (and which was written by one of themselves,) it gives us pleasure to commend it as the evidence of a new and generally unexpected change of sentiment on the part of the colored population, or, at least, some portion of it.  It is well known that for twenty-five years the Colonization Societies in this country have labored to present before that portion of our population, the advantages which must accrue to them, from emigration to a land where they might enjoy, undisturbed, those social and material privileges which it was impossible ever to expect they could obtain by a residence of centuries in this country, and that these appeals have met with comparatively little attention, and, in deed have been received with very bad grace by the great mass of those whom it was intended to benefit.  The cause of this opposition was to be found in the steady and violent animosity of those white fanatics, who, setting themselves up as the peculiar friends of the blacks, represented that the prejudice against their color was merely an arbitrary sentiment, which time would weaken or entirely dissipate; and that they might still look forward to enjoying,