President Tubman left Atlanta after two days. The president spent a few days in New Orleans, then returned to New York briefly before setting sail for Haiti - the world's only other black republic at the time - and Jamaica.
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The Africa he returned to was changing. Old colonial powers - England, France, Spain, Belgium and Portugal - were losing their grip on the continent, and Tubman would find himself taking a greater role than ever before in international politics.
Starting in the late 1950s, former colonies all around Liberia became new nations, and a changing world meant changing policies. Tubman's commitment to the freedom of his African brethren was highlighted in July 1959, when he played host to the presidents of Ghana and Guinea in the Liberian mountain town of Saniquellie. There the three presidents formed a precursor body to the Organization of African Unity.
And in 1962, when Nelson Mandela was a young freedom fighter battling white South African rule, he met Tubman while touring the African continent and soliciting support for his anti-apartheid cause.
Tubman gave Mandela $5,000 for weapons and training. Then the old Liberian leaned in and asked him quietly, "Have you any pocket money?"
At the time, Mandela was being hunted by the South Africans and was so far underground that his own children did not know his real name.
"I confessed that I was a bit low," Mandela wrote in his autobiography, "and instantly an aide came back with an envelope containing four hundred dollars in cash."
Of course, Tubman could afford to spend more time on foreign policy issues because of the level of control he continued to enjoy in Monrovia.
In 1955, he survived an assassination attempt unscathed. In the aftermath of the bungled shooting, Tubman found what he believed to be a seditious conspiracy in the highest levels of his government.
Although some believe that the conspiracy charges were made up and that the assassination plot itself might even have been a sham, Tubman pounced on the opportunity to purge the government of some of his political enemies. And sham or not, Tubman would run for third, fourth, fifth and sixth terms virtually unopposed.
During that time, Tubman would build an impressive statistical legacy. The country's annual budget when he was first elected was about $750,000, but by the time of his last election it had topped $50 million.
A 1966 government report said Liberia's annual education budget had jumped, during that time, from $84,500 to $6.3 million. That money was spent on the country's 859 educational institutions, up from just 251 in 1944. In that 1966 report, Tubman's cabinet ministers laid out a resume of progress: more roads, more schools, more hospitals, more industry, more jobs - more of everything than there had been before Tubman.
It was an undeniable growth explosion, made possible by incredibly large sums of money from the United States and Europe.
"When we began to get this money and we began to open the roads to go to the mines and so forth, then schools began to go to the interior," says President Tubman's son Shad Jr.
"And the fact that he was president - he began to do this - he gets the credit. It was not that those who went before did not care - they cared very much.
"These men saw the need for integration, which, unfortunately was not forcefully pursued. He just resurrected it and pushed it."
It is that push towards unification that Shad Tubman believes is his father's one great legacy.
But some critics show a great disdain for Tubman's methods and quarrel with his results. Some question just how much he cared for the Liberian people and their welfare.
Tarty Teh, a Tubman critic, says tribal Liberians such as his grandparents were happy and content with their simple ways of life and didn't need the progress forced on them by Tubman and his developments.
"You go into the interior and they say Tubman is a good president because they were beaten least during his time. And that is a sad yardstick by which to measure assistance," Teh says.
Teh, a member of the Grebo tribe, once held the post of press and cultural counselor for the Liberian Embassy in Washington, among other government posts. He still lives in the Washington area and publishes essays on the Internet, sometimes vitriolic and largely critical of past and current Liberian presidents.
Teh tells the story of a Liberian woman he met in New York City. Teh was there as an extension of his duties at the embassy in Washington, assisting a Liberian official who was visiting the United Nations, and the woman, who was from the same tribe as he, suggested they go to lunch.
On their lunch date, the woman proudly revealed to him that she had once had a tryst with Tubman, telling the story in more detail than Teh wanted to hear.
"Now, I'm getting repulsed by all of this," he says of the woman's story. "Why is she telling me?"
It dawned on Teh that the woman was using her brush with Tubman to excite and entice him so that he might also feel honored to spend the night with her.
"I think that was her selling point," he says. "I didn't buy it."
For Teh, the encounter is a metaphor for the way Tubman treated the Liberian people, taking their tribal innocence in the name of better living through development and modernization.
"The thing is, I feel sorry enough for this lady, but the idea that she thought she had acquired some value by this experience is what is troubling," says Teh.
Another of his complaints is a common Tubman target: the road to Totota.
"Tubman built a road during the iron-ore boom," Teh says. "He built a road from Monrovia, and it headed straight to his farm, Totota.
"They paved it maybe two miles past that to the actual town after which his farm was named. It was not even paved through the town, it just ended. ...
"That's how much we did not matter to this man.
"I think Tubman missed a wonderful opportunity to build the Liberian infrastructure. He of all the Liberian presidents had the means to do something, but did nothing. That's what I judge him by."
Teh plays down the respect that Tubman's refinements earned Liberia on the world stage.
"He was a Christian. He was a concise thinker. He spoke simple, good English, not all this flamboyant stuff," concedes Teh. "But that? That's style. I would have traded that for a superhighway."
Dr. Carl Burrowes, an associate professor at Howard University in Washington and a native Liberian, says that for people to understand Tubman's legacy they must view him in context.
"In the Liberian consciousness, when you look at him in comparison to other presidents, clearly he broke the mold - presidents who come and go and last no longer than eight years," Burrowes says.
"He stayed for 27 ... and there was a lot of economic growth during his tenure. So Liberians who are locked into seeing him through those lenses see him either as this great godsend or as this benevolent figure.
"My point is that, if one ... looks at what was happening in the Third World at that time you see much the same thing in many other places.
"The roads might have gone further in one country or another, or this president might have lasted a few years longer than Tubman, but the pattern was similar."
In the end, Burrowes says, Tubman's outsized presidency skews his importance in Liberian history. What success he did have, Burrowes argues, was largely the result of the economic partnership he had with the West, for which he was merely a point man.
"I don't think he was the worst Liberia ever had, and I don't think he was the best. I don't really think he was even in the league with the best," he says.
"But, given the fact that he rode that wave of prosperity that came after the war, he looms large on the horizon. Plus, he stayed in office as long as he did. ...
"There have been many books written about him, where there are no books on previous presidents who did much more with much less."
His critics, including Teh and Burrowes, fault Tubman for his love of power, his Machiavellian tactics and his human failings, but Shad Tubman Jr. maintains that his father never strayed far from his humble roots, when he used a rowboat to get to the congressional sessions from faraway Cape Palmas.
Shad says he doesn't bother answering criticisms about his father because he defended himself well enough in his life.
"I know that he tried his best for the people and he did his best for the country," Shad Jr. says. "My father had one basic vision: unification and integration. It was a question of the commonality of humanity; this is really what he was after.
"You can't fake loving your fellow man for 27 years."
A nation mourns
In late June 1971, Tubman appeared for his weekly news conference on the fifth floor of the Executive Mansion.
He appeared tired and withdrawn, and he quoted a passage on death from Ecclesiastes.
Tubman was preparing to fly to London for prostate surgery. One reporter asked him if he had set a date for his departure.
"Which departure?" Tubman asked. "Do you mean the one, you go and never return?"
The surgery was performed July 23.
Jimmy Barrolle, the president's butler, recalls that day at the hospital. He remembers that the operation took hours longer than the surgeons said it would.
And he remembers how, when they finally brought Tubman down to his room, he was lying motionless on the gurney. The mighty president was naked, save for a single bedsheet and a piece of rubber tubing hanging from his mouth.
Barrolle remembers how he sat there, holding William V.S. Tubman's head gently in his hands.
He remembers people rushing into the room at some point.
"It seemed that everybody had an injection to give him. Everybody."
When it was over, Jimmy remembers standing in the quieted room with the president's personal physician, his security chief and the Liberian ambassador. The cause of death was a hemorrhage.
"That wonderful man," Barrolle says. "That God-given man.
"That's when he left this world."
It was about 2:25 in the afternoon in Liberia when he passed. He was 75.
William R. Tolbert, Tubman's longtime vice president, was sworn in and addressed his countrymen, an entire generation of whom had never known a leader other than William Vacanarat Shadrach Tubman.
When his body was brought back to Monrovia, people lined the streets to watch the massive bronze casket escorted down Tubman Boulevard.
"Some cried without restraint. Some shed their tears in silence," wrote Tubman biographer Robert Smith. "Others were grim and stoic, but all were genuine in their mourning.
"It was impossible now to tell who had been for him and who had not."
A power vacuum
That was nearly 30 years ago, and Jimmy Barrolle, now 80, says he still thinks about President Tubman "too much" every day.
"I remember President Tubman as a father to me because he did everything for me. He took me as his son.
"We have different tribal people. This person is Kru, or this person is Bassa. I'm Bassa. That person is Gio, Mano, Krahn - all those things," Barrolle says.
"He took everybody to be his people. He loved his people."
And according to Gertrude Brewer, who worshiped alongside Tubman as a young girl, the admiration went beyond the mortal world.
"God was quite pleased with him," she says. "That's why he took him before we had the revolution."
Tubman's death left a power vacuum in Liberia, and in each decade since, the chaos has deepened and the blood has flowed.
"No Liberian expected what happened in Liberia," says Shad Jr., who lives in New York and longs to raise up the ruins of the once-proud nation that his Augustan ancestors helped found.
"That was not human what happened there."
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