Africa the European powers that laid claim to African territories. The Berlin Conference sought to end the European powers' Scramble for Africa, by agreeing on political division and spheres of influence. They set up the political divisions of the continent, by spheres of interest, that exist in Africa today. Imperial rule by Europeans would continue until after the conclusion of World War II, when almost all remaining colonial territories gradually obtained formal independence. Independence movements in Africa gained momentum following World War II, which left the major European powers weakened. In 1951, Libya, a former Italian colony, gained independence. In 1956,
Mississippi-in-Africa (since renamed the Supreme Court). In the late 1840s, approximately 300 African-American freedmen from Ross's Prospect Hill Plantation emigrated to Mississippi-in-Africa. They were the largest single group of American colonists to migrate to Liberia. Ross's grandson and heir Isaac Ross Wade contested the will through years of litigation, during which time he occupied the plantation. Wade was supposed to pay the freedmen for their labor. In 1847 the court ruled that the slaves, then technically free, could leave the United States. In 1848 the last group of Ross's freed slaves emigrated to the colony in West Africa. The passage to