Kru

The Kru are a cluster of related peoples on the coast of what is now southeastern Liberia and western Ivory Coast, among them the Grebo, Bassa and Krahn. European sailors called their shore the Pepper Coast for its melegueta pepper.

Each village was its own small community; the Kru fished and traded along the coast. Their traditions say they were never enslaved, and Kru men marked their foreheads with an indigo line to show they were free. In the era of the Atlantic slave trade, Europeans hired them as sailors, pilots and interpreters on ships along the coast and called them Krumen, a name tied to the English word crew.