Flag of Liberia

How to read it

Known as the Lone Star, the flag was made by a committee of seven women chaired by Susannah Elizabeth Lewis, whom Governor Joseph Jenkins Roberts asked to lead it in a letter of 10 July 1847, the Liberian Observer records. It was first raised in Monrovia on 24 August 1847, a month after the Declaration of Independence. An Act of the Legislature approved on 25 October 1915 made 24 August National Flag Day, a public holiday; each year the President proclaims it and calls on citizens to fly the flag from every dwelling and public building, Liberia’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs says. In 2022 the seven women’s portraits were put on Liberia’s 500-dollar banknote.

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Liberia’s and the United States’ flags side by side

The likeness to the United States flag is deliberate. The US flag has thirteen red and white stripes and a union of white stars on blue, under Executive Order 10834. Liberia’s has eleven stripes and one star. The colony’s flag of 1827, FrontPage Africa notes, was nearly a copy of the American flag with a white cross where the stars would be; the women of 1847 kept the red and white stripes and the blue corner, honouring the settlers’ origins in the United States, and set a single white star where the many stars would be, the Liberian Observer says. All seven of them were born in the United States.

Why does Liberia’s flag have eleven stripes?

For the eleven men who signed Liberia’s Declaration of Independence in 1847, according to the government’s Flag Day proclamations. One of the committee, Colonette Teage Ellis, was the sister of Hilary Teage, who wrote the Declaration. FrontPage Africa’s Flag Day editorial in 2026, the 179th, read the colours differently from the government: red for courage and valour, white for moral excellence, purity and peace, and the blue for the African continent and for liberty bound to fidelity.