William Tubman

William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman was born in Harper, Maryland County, Liberia, on the twenty-ninth of November 1895, the son of an Americo-Liberian Methodist minister whose family had emigrated from Georgia in the 1830s. He took his legal training at the Liberia College and was admitted to the Liberian bar in 1917.

He served as a member of the Liberian Senate (1924-31, with a break for compelled retirement under the 1930s League of Nations forced-labor controversy) and as Associate Justice of the Liberian Supreme Court (1937-1944). The True Whig Party — the party of the Americo-Liberian settler descendant elite that had governed Liberia continuously since the republic's founding in 1847 — selected him as its presidential candidate in 1943.

He served as President of Liberia for twenty-seven years and four months — from the third of January 1944 until his death in office on the twenty-third of July 1971. His tenure remains the longest of any Liberian president.

His National Unification Policy (1944) was the first formal attempt to integrate the country's indigenous African populations — sixteen ethnic groups inhabiting the interior — into the political life of the Americo-Liberian coastal republic. He extended the franchise to indigenous Liberians in 1946, to women in 1947, and to property-less men in 1955. His Open Door Policy (also 1944) opened Liberia to foreign investment; Firestone, Republic Steel, and Bethlehem Steel established major operations under the policy.

He survived three assassination attempts. He hosted the founding conference of the OAU at Addis Ababa in 1963 as a senior continental statesman.

He died in London on the twenty-third of July 1971, age seventy-five.

He is honored here as the president of Africa's oldest republic whose twenty-seven years extended its franchise to its indigenous majority.