Histories of Black opposition to the United States occupation of Haiti have centred on men such as James Weldon Johnson, and Byrd asks what shifts when middle class and elite Black women are placed at the centre instead. Letters to the NAACP and the State Department, club records, and the 1927 report Occupied Haiti show women pressing for the removal of the marines while describing Haitians as needing to be civilised. Nannie Helen Burroughs trained Haitian pupils as missionaries who would lift their compatriots out of Vodou and Catholicism; Charlotte Atwood praised the occupation's public health service; Harriett Gibbs Marshall founded an industrial school in Port-au-Prince teaching housekeeping and cooking, and later the Save Haiti League. Byrd treats that tension as the mark of an unfinished passage in Black thought, from nineteenth century racial uplift toward an internationalism able to take Haitian working people seriously on their own terms.