1980 — Doe's Coup

In the early hours of April 12, 1980, seventeen low-ranking soldiers led by Master Sergeant Samuel Doe stormed Liberia's Executive Mansion, killing President William Tolbert. The coup ended 133 years of rule by the Americo-Liberian elite. Ten days later, thirteen former ministers were executed on a Monrovia beach, images of a new order asserting itself with brutal speed in the capital.

Doe, the first indigenous Liberian to rule the nation, seized power and would hold it through the nineteen-eighties. For Liberia, the night marked the end of one long era of rule and the beginning of another, led for the first time from outside that elite.