A movement built on the demand for black self-determination might seem to have had little to offer a country independent since 1804. Plummer shows why the American occupation changed the equation. Marines landed in 1915 and stayed two decades, importing segregation and fighting a guerrilla war in the countryside, while at Versailles the United States helped block a clause against racial discrimination.

Opposition converged from unexpected directions. James Weldon Johnson of the NAACP wrote to Marcus Garvey in 1920 urging him to condemn the intervention — a collaboration scholars have assumed the rivalry between them ruled out — and the UNIA had in fact already taken up the cause. What Garveyism offered in Haiti, Plummer argues, was a language for valuing Vodou, Creole and rural custom and for widening political participation. Few in number, Haitian Garveyites nonetheless fed the indigenist current and the middle-class politics that outlasted the occupation.