In the nineteenth century, there were growing calls for the African diaspora located in Western Europe and the Americas to be resettled in Africa. In that century, many members of the African diaspora were moved to Sierra Leone and Liberia. Based in Liberia, the black Christian preacher Edward Wilmot Blyden began promoting African pride and the preservation of African tradition, customs, and institutions. Blyden sought to promote a form of Christianity that was suited to the African context, and believed that black people had to acquire their own historical knowledge about themselves. The idea of the African diaspora's return to Africa was given impetus by the creation of the State of Israel in 1948 as a nation-state for the Jewish diaspora to return to. Also spreading through Africa was Ethiopianism, a movement that accorded special status to the east African nation of Ethiopia because it was mentioned in various Biblical passages. For adherents of Ethiopianism, "Ethiopia" was regarded as a synonym of Africa as a whole. Across the continent, although particularly in South Africa, Christian churches were established that referred to themselves as "Ethiopian"; these groups were at the forefront of the burgeoning African nationalist movement that sought liberation from European colonial rule. Of significant influence on Rastafari was the Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey, who spent much of his adult life in the United States and United Kingdom. Garvey supported the idea of global racial separatism and rejected the idea that black people of African descent living in the Americas should campaign for their civil rights; instead he believed that they should migrate "en masse" back to Africa. His ideas were opposed by many blacks in the Americas and he experienced hostility from African-American civil rights activists like W. E. B. Du Bois. He also faced opposition from the government of Liberia, which did not want millions of unskilled migrants arriving on its shores. As a mass movement, Garveyism declined in the Great Depression of the 1930s. A rumour later spread that in 1916, Garvey had called on his supporters to "look to Africa" for the crowning of a black king; this quote was never verified. Soumahoro noted that this statement was "legendary". Rather, Garvey was critical of Haile Selassie for leaving Ethiopia at the time of the Italian Fascist occupation, describing the king as "a great coward" who rules a "country where black men are chained and flogged." Rastafari does not promote all of the views that Garvey espoused, but nevertheless shares many of the same perspectives.