  On the other hand, there were Negro women and men of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries of enslavement for whom the prospect of assimilating with White people in any fashion or on any terms was to be firmly rejected. Such sentiments were especially prominent during the decades leading up to the Civil War as conditions became even more constraining for supposedly free-born and freedpersons with the passage in 1850 of the Fugitive Slave Law that stripped away any legal protection for escaped and former slaves who made it to free states by declaring it legal for any White person to apprehend any Negro who could not document their free status and return the person to enslavement. Garnet, responding to the circumstances the law created, is representative of those Black folks who became advocates of the emigration of Negro people to Africa. He was the founder of the African Civilization Society, an organization that promoted emigration of American Negroes to Africa in keeping with a more positive agenda than was the case with the American Colonization Society, which was organized by White people to foster the relocation of troublesome abolitionist free Negro people to Liberia, the colony founded with federal support by White Americans intent on preserving the institution of slavery and White Racial Supremacy.