Flag: Liberia Emoji

The flag of Liberia. Eleven alternating red and white horizontal stripes, with a blue square canton in the upper hoist bearing a single five-pointed white star. Ratio 10:19. Adopted on August 24, 1847, a month after Liberia declared independence and became the first independent republic in sub-Saharan Africa.

The design is Liberia's clearest link to its unusual origin story: the country was founded in the 1820s by the American Colonization Society as a colony for free people of colour and freed slaves from the United States. The flag was hand-stitched by a committee of seven women, led by Susannah Elizabeth Lewis, and deliberately modelled on the US Stars and Stripes. The 11 stripes stand for the 11 signatories of Liberia's 1847 Declaration of Independence. Red and white stand for courage and moral excellence. The single white star represents Liberia as Africa's first independent republic; the blue canton represents the African continent.

Liberia sits on the Atlantic coast of West Africa between 🇸🇱 Sierra Leone, 🇬🇳 Guinea, and 🇨🇮 Côte d'Ivoire. Capital Monrovia, named after US President James Monroe, the only capital outside the US (and the Vatican, by some counts) named for a foreign leader. Population about 5.5 million. Official language English; Liberian Kreyol (often called Liberian English) is the working lingua franca. Currency Liberian dollar (LRD), with US dollars circulating alongside.

Emoji 0.6 (2015), regional indicator pair U+1F1F1U+1F1F1 + U+1F1F7U+1F1F7 (L + R). Platforms without flag support fall back to LRLR.

Stars and Stripes cousin. 🇱🇷 is the most confused flag on earth at small sizes, because it looks, at a glance, like the US flag. That resemblance is the whole story: Liberia was founded by freed African-Americans in the 1820s, declared independence in 1847 (14 years before the US Civil War), and adopted a flag that explicitly nods to the Stars and Stripes. 🇱🇷 is often posted alongside 🇺🇸 in heritage-travel contexts, and for a particular kind of US-Africa connection story.

Shipping registry. Liberia runs one of the world's two dominant flag-of-convenience ship registries (the other is Panama). Roughly 13% of global merchant shipping tonnage flies the Liberian flag, meaning 🇱🇷 is stenciled on more ships than any country except Panama. Sailors, port workers, and maritime reporters post 🇱🇷 constantly.

George Weah. Liberia's most famous figure globally is ex-footballer and former president George Weah, the only African winner of the Ballon d'Or (1995) and the only former footballer to be elected head of state. 🇱🇷 peaked during his 2018-2024 term and still spikes around AFCON and Ballon d'Or conversations.

Minnesota, Rhode Island, and the diaspora. The biggest Liberian-American communities are in Minnesota (the largest Liberian population outside Africa, centred on Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center in the Twin Cities), Rhode Island (Providence), Staten Island, and Philadelphia. Liberian Independence Day parades in the Twin Cities in late July draw tens of thousands. 🇱🇷 is the identity flag for second-generation Liberian-Americans who call themselves 'LIB' on social.

Civil war recovery. Liberia's two civil wars (1989-1997 and 1999-2003) killed an estimated 250,000 people and displaced half the population. The wars produced Charles Taylor) (later convicted of war crimes by the Special Court for Sierra Leone), and the rise of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first elected female head of state in African history and the 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate.

• 🏛️
  Capital: Monrovia (population ~1.6M, named after US President James Monroe)
• 👥
  Population: ~5.5M (2025 estimate)
• 📐
  Area: 111,369 km² (roughly the size of Tennessee or Guatemala)
• 💵
  Currency: Liberian dollar (LRD); US dollar also circulates widely
• 🗣️
  Languages: English (official); Liberian Kreyol as the working lingua franca; Kpelle, Bassa, Kru, Mandingo as major indigenous languages
• 📞
  Calling code: +231
• 🕐
  Time zone: GMT+0, no daylight saving
• 🌐
  Internet TLD: .lr

The American Colonization Society and the founding of 1822. The American Colonization Society was a private group founded in 1816 with support across the US political spectrum, from abolitionists who saw repatriation as emancipation, to enslavers who wanted free Black Americans removed from the US. The ACS bought land from local West African chiefs around Cape Mesurado in 1821 and, on January 7, 1822, landed its first settlers at a site they named Monrovia after US President James Monroe. Over the next quarter-century, roughly 13,000 African-Americans and around 5,000 Recaptives (Africans freed from illegal slave ships by the US Navy) settled there. Indigenous peoples (Kpelle, Bassa, Kru, Mandingo, Gola, and others) made up the overwhelming majority of the population.

Independence and the flag, 1847. On July 26, 1847, Liberia's settler government declared independence from the ACS, writing a US-style constitution with a Monrovia-based government and an Americo-Liberian ruling class. A month later, on August 24, a seven-woman committee led by Susannah Lewis hand-stitched the flag: eleven stripes for the eleven independence signatories, one star for Africa's first republic, a US-inspired canton for the US link. Joseph Jenkins Roberts, born free in Virginia, became the first president.

The True Whig Party century. From independence to 1980, Liberia was governed almost continuously by the True Whig Party, the Americo-Liberian political machine that ruled over a country where indigenous Liberians were disenfranchised until the 1960s. The 1980 coup by Samuel Doe, a 28-year-old Krahn sergeant, ended the True Whig era by publicly executing 13 cabinet ministers on Monrovia's beach. Doe ruled until 1990, when he was captured and killed by rebels.

Two civil wars (1989-2003). Charles Taylor's NPFL invasion from Côte d'Ivoire in December 1989 started a decade of conflict. Taylor won the 1997 election with the unspoken slogan 'He killed my ma, he killed my pa, but I'll vote for him.' A second war (1999-2003) forced Taylor into Nigerian exile, and later to trial in The Hague for war crimes committed in Sierra Leone. Combined, the wars killed around 250,000 people.

The Sirleaf and Weah years. Ellen Johnson Sirleaf's 2005 win made her Africa's first elected female head of state. She rebuilt roads, led the Ebola response in 2014-2015, and shared the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize for her women's-rights work. In January 2018 she handed power to George Weah, the only African Ballon d'Or winner and Liberia's biggest global celebrity. Weah lost his 2023 re-election bid to Joseph Boakai, a peaceful handover that marked one of Liberia's most stable transitions in generations.

• ⭐
  July 26: Independence Day: 1847 independence; Liberia's biggest civic day. Monrovia parade, Minnesota parade, global diaspora parties.
• 🛥️
  January 7: Pioneers' Day: Anniversary of the first ACS settlers landing at Providence Island in 1822; a quieter civic commemoration.
• 🪖
  April 12: Redemption Day: Anniversary of the 1980 coup that ended Americo-Liberian rule. Contested: for some it's a liberation day, for others a turning point into instability.
• 🗳️
  November (2nd Tuesday): Elections Day: Liberia's American-style voting schedule; both legislative and presidential races run on this model.
• 🦃
  Thanksgiving (1st Thursday in November): Liberia is one of the only countries outside the US to formally observe a Thanksgiving holiday, an Americo-Liberian inheritance.
• 🇱🇷
  August 24: Flag Day: Anniversary of the 1847 flag adoption; the specific 🇱🇷 day of the year.

• •Liberia's capital Monrovia is named after US President James Monroe, making it one of the only capital cities on earth named after a foreign head of state.
• •The Liberian flag was hand-stitched by a committee of seven women led by Susannah Elizabeth Lewis in 1847.
• •Liberia is one of only two countries in the world that hasn't officially adopted the metric system (the other is the United States; Myanmar is halfway).
• •Liberia was never colonised by a European power in the traditional sense, a distinction it shares with 🇪🇹 Ethiopia. It did, however, spend a century ruled by a small Americo-Liberian settler elite over an indigenous majority.
• •George Weah is the only former professional footballer to be elected head of state of a country (president of Liberia, 2018-2024).
• •Ellen Johnson Sirleaf was the first elected female head of state in African history and the 2011 Nobel Peace Laureate.
• •The Liberian Registry is headquartered in Dulles, Virginia, not Monrovia. Yes, this is weird. Yes, it's been this way since 1948.

• •🇱🇷 is a regional indicator sequence: U+1F1F1U+1F1F1 (L) + U+1F1F7U+1F1F7 (R). ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code: LRLR.
• •Unsupported platforms render it as the letters LRLR.
• •Shortcode: :flag_lr::flag_lr: or :liberia::liberia: on most messaging platforms.
• •Flag ratio is 10:19 (unusually elongated). Most national flags are 2:3 or 1:2.

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