Americo-Liberians, or Congo people or Congau people in Liberian English  are a Liberian ethnic group of African-American, Afro-Caribbean and Liberated African descent.

The sister ethnic group of Americo-Liberians are the Sierra Leone Creole people, who share similar ancestry and related cultures.

Americo-Liberians trace their ancestry to free-born and formerly enslaved African Americans who emigrated in the nineteenth century to become the founders of the state of Liberia.

They identify there as Americo-Liberians. (Some African Americans – in the more common sense of the term – following resettlement in Canada also participated as founding settlers in Sierra Leone and present-day Côte d'Ivoire.

Although the terms "Americo-Liberian" and "Congo" had distinct definitions in the nineteenth century, they are currently interchangeable and refer to an ethnic group composed of the descendants of the various free and ex-slave African American, Caribbean, Recaptive, and Sierra Leone Creoles who settled in Liberia from 1822.

Later in Liberia, these African Americans integrate five thousand liberated Africans called Congos (former slaves from the Congo Basin, who had been freed by British and Americans from slave ships after the prohibition of the African slave trade) and five hundred Barbadian immigrants into the hegemony.

Americo-Liberians rarely intermarried with indigenous West Africans.

Although Western literature and discourse in the United States and United Kingdom use the term "Americo-Liberians", this term is outdated and in common parlance the majority of Liberians (including the Americo-Liberian people themselves) and neighburing West Africans such as Sierra Leoneans refer to the Americo-Liberian people as "Congo" or "Congau" people.

The colonists and their descendants led the political, social, cultural and economic sectors of the country; they ruled the new nation from 19th century until 1980 as a dominant minority. From 1878 to 1980, the Republic of Liberia was a de facto one-party state ruled by both the indigenous and Americo-Liberian-dominated True Whig Party and Masonic Order of Liberia.[6]