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When George S. Boley lived and worked in Stark County almost a half century ago he wanted to become president of his native country, Liberia.
As he explained it, the goal of the college graduate – he held bachelor’s and master’s degrees from State University of New York at Brockport and a doctorate in education from University of Akron – was not just a pipe dream.
Boley came from a small 43,000-square-mile country in northwest Africa, a “third world” nation of 1.6 million people where 90% of the population was illiterate.
“Anyone with a sixth-grade education in Liberia is like a Harvard graduate,” Boley told The Canton Repository for an article published on March 26, 1978. “The number of persons like myself, with doctorates, is insignificant.”
So, when he came to Canton and was named administrative assistant at Canton’s Goodwill Rehabilitation Center – his duties included developing funding sources, coordinating new programs, implementing program evaluation and developing the staff through long-range planning – Boley’s eyes remained focused on returning to help lead his homeland on the coast of west Africa.
What he would see in the years that followed was success as an adviser to the Liberian president, the turmoil of coup attempts, leadership responsibility of rebel forces, a decade of violent civil war, peaceful refuge in exile in the United States, accusations of being a warlord that cause deportation back to Africa, and eventual election to Liberia’s House of Representatives.
Early life emphasized education
Boley seemed to have been raised to have an impact on his country.
“I was lucky,” he continued in the 1978 interview. “My mother was illiterate. You could write her name as big as the city of Canton and she wouldn’t recognize it. But my father did everything in his power to afford me the best education, so I could read and write it as he did.”
Boley’s father, whose position in Liberia was roughly equivalent to a county commissioner in the United States, placed his son in a private Southern Baptist missionary school, an education that linked Boley to the US and to William R. Tolbert, the man who would become president of Liberia.
“He was vice president at the time I met him,” Boley recalled in 1978, noting Tolbert was connected to the Liberian Baptist Ministry and chairman of the the board at the Rick’s Institute, where he went to school. “He was like a godfather to me.”
Tolbert found Boley summer jobs in his hometown of Zwedru, assisted him in getting enrolled at an American university, and, Boley believed, would help him when he returned to Liberia.
“He told me, ‘You go to America and study. Come back. We’ll find something for you to do,'” Boley explained in 1978. “That guarantees me nothing, but it is a start.”
Boley said with a laugh that “I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to come back and overthrow him,” but that was not Boley’s intention at the time.
“Dr. Tolbert is a God-fearing man who has done much for the development of our country,” he said. “But, I’m 28. You have to be 35 to even be eligible for president. By the time my turn comes, it will be a new time, with different problems.”
Arrest, freedom and deportation
Indeed, Boley’s time would begin in little more than two years. And when his moment arrived in April 1980, it would find Boley embroiled in a struggle between the minority ruling class and a vocal faction of “native Liberians” who wanted to seize control.
Boley sat in a Liberian jail charged with sedition and treason, with the likelihood that Tolbert might sentence him to hang.
The former Canton-area resident had found favor with Tolbert when he first returned to Liberia. He was named a junior minister in the president’s administration. But, when he allegedly associated with opposition groups – primarily the dissenting “People’s Progressive Party” – he was jailed by Liberia’s chief executive.
But, before any sentence could be assigned to Boley, much less carried out, Tolbert and his government were gone. Tolbert and other members of his administration – rulers of a nation founded by freed American slaves – were executed, and in a matter of only a week, Boley went from the gallows to a high seat in the new government.
“He was released on the morning of the 1980 military coup that brought (Sgt.) Samuel Doe to power,” one online history reports. “Boley later became Minister of Presidential Affairs and Minister of Education under President Doe.”
He had risen to second in command in Doe’s cabinet of advisers, called Doe’s “right-hand man” by some accounts and reportedly running the country when Doe was traveling outside of it. In a sense, Boley had reached his pinnacle of power, at least intermittently.
But, Doe was murdered in September 1990, and Boley went into exile in the United States. He settled with his family in western New York, near the college at which he had gained much of his education.
Still, Boley’s influence on the civil war continuing in Liberia during the 1990s persisted, U.S. officials believed, causing his eventual deportation from the United States in 2012. At the time the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement began deportation efforts, Boley was living in Hilton, New York, just north of Rochester.
Boley denies deportation accusations
“George Boley’s removal is a major step in addressing the serious human rights abuses Mr. Boley perpetrated in Liberia in the 1990s,” said a statement by ICE Director John Morton in March 2012. “The United States has always welcomed refugees and those fleeing oppression, but we will not be a safe haven for human rights violators and war criminals.”
Morton noted that Boley’s removal was “the first ever U.S. deportation based on the use of child soldiers in war.”
The British Broadcasting Corporation, at BBC.com, had reported in February 2012 that a federal judge had ruled that evidence the ex-Liberian Peace Council leader had been involved in killings and recruited children was grounds for his removal.
“Boley, who has been in custody for two years, denies the accusations,” the BBC reported. “Around a quarter of a million people died during Liberia’s 1989-2003 conflict.”
In defense of his father, Boley’s son, George Boley Jr., told Associated Press the judge ignored evidence indicating specific allegations brought against him were not corroborated by credible evidence. He also maintained there could have been two groups calling themselves the LPC.
According to the BBC’s Jonathan Paye-Layleh, reporting in Liberia’s capital, Monrovia, Boley’s LPC was one of seven armed groups fighting during the prolonged civil war.
“In 1995, Mr. Boley joined other warlords, including Charles Taylor, to lead an interim council for about a year,” reported the BBC, noting that Taylor and Boley signed a deal to end the civil war in 1995, but the end of the conflict was short-lived. “After presidential elections in 1997, the conflict resumed.”
Taylor, who also earned a college degree in the United States and served in the government of Doe after returning to Liberia, was elected president of Liberia in 1997, and he served until he was forced to resign in 2003. He later was convicted of war crimes, and sentenced to 50 years of confinement, to be served in the United Kingdom.
In the same 1997 Liberian election, Boley also ran for president on the ticket for the National Democratic Party of Liberia. He garnered little more than one percent of the vote.
Contrinues career in politics
Following his deportation, Boley returned to Liberia. He continued effort to seek the power to effect the lives of his countrymen.
In 2017, Boley – still termed “a Liberian politician and former warlord” at the wikipedia page for Dr. George Eutychianus Saigbe Boley – was elected to Liberia’s House of Representatives, representing Grand Gedeh County, his home region.
A Facebook page called “Office Of Dr. George S Boley Sr. FORUM” listed some of his efforts and achievements in a posting late in 2023.
Boley “lobbied for the construction of the then impassable road during rainy season, a project completed in 2021.”
Fueled by his “deep passion for education,” the representative proposed and guided through the House of Representatives passage of a bill “elevating/upgrading the Grand Gedeh County Community College to a University status.”
He helped “complete the radio station project started by his predecessor and got it operational out of his own iniative without (Legislation Funds).”
Criticism and condemnation follow Boley, however. An entry in 2010 on the blogsite “Operation We Care for Liberia” was entitled “BLOOD ON HIS HANDS: Boley Trial Spells Doom for Supporters of Liberia’s War.”
Liberia “could no longer lay down the welcome mat for those blamed for the destruction of human lives and economic demise.”
The posting noted that Boley “has maintained that his sole intent was peace, and that he did not oversee or engage in violence against civilians.”
Nevertheless, Prudence Bushnell, a former U.S. Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs under President Bill Clinton, was quoted in the posting as saying “there were few Liberian faction leaders who were innocent during the civil war.”
“As far as I knew there was not a warlord in Liberia at the time of these struggles … who did not have blood on his hands.”
Reach Gary at [email protected]. On Twitter: @gbrownREP.
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