Italian refugees from Libya Italy and soon most of them emigrated in the early 1950s to the Americas (mainly to Canada, Venezuela, Argentina and the United States) and to western Europe (France, Benelux, etc..). After several years under British mandate, on December 24, 1951 Libya declared its independence as the United Kingdom of Libya (a constitutional, hereditary monarchy under King Idris). In 1952 started the exodus of most of the remaining Italian colonial settlers, mainly those in areas away from the main cities. Although in the late 1950s most of the 110000 Italians living in 1940 Italian Libya had already left the former colony,
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