William Tolbert
William Tolbert was the last of the Americo-Liberian presidents, a Baptist minister who tried to open the True Whig state a little and was killed in his bed by the soldiers who ended it. He was born in 1913 at Bensonville, the grandson of freed slaves from South Carolina, into the settler class of perhaps three per cent of the population that had governed Liberia since 1847; he entered the legislature at thirty, was vice-president to William Tubman for nineteen years, and became president when Tubman died in 1971. He was also, from 1965, president of the Baptist World Alliance, the only head of state to hold the office. His programme was called Total Involvement for Higher Heights: he dropped Tubman's top hat for a safari suit, allowed an opposition party to register, recognised the Soviet Union and China, and chaired the Organisation of African Unity in 1979, whose summit in Monrovia he built a hotel and a hall to host. None of it touched the structure. His family held the cabinet, the rubber and iron concessions paid what they had always paid, and the indigenous majority stayed where it had been. In April 1979 his government proposed raising the price of rice, the staple, by half; the demonstration against it in Monrovia was fired on, some forty people died, and the Rice Riots broke what was left of the state's authority. A year later, on 12 April 1980, Master Sergeant Samuel Doe and sixteen enlisted men climbed the wall of the Executive Mansion at night and killed him in his bedroom; his body was put in a mass grave, and thirteen of his ministers were shot on the beach ten days later. His son A. B. Tolbert was dragged from the French embassy and killed. The republic the settlers had run for a hundred and thirty-three years ended with him, and what followed was worse.
- Lived: 1913 CE – 1980 CE
- Nationality: Liberian
- Roles: head_of_state, politician, clergyman
