Pamphile reconstructs how one American civil rights organisation forced the occupation of Haiti into public argument. Working from Senate committee hearings, NAACP annual reports, Georges Sylvain's collected papers and the New York press, he follows James Weldon Johnson through three months of interviews in Haiti in 1920 and the charges he published on returning: that the marines landed to secure a financial convention Haiti had refused, that National City Bank shaped State Department policy, that roughly three thousand Haitians died in the campaign against Charlemagne Péralte, and that Washington built none of what it promised. Harding carried the issue into his campaign, Navy officials contradicted each other, and a naval court cleared the corps. Johnson's advice also revived L'Union Patriotique under Sylvain, which grew fourteen branches and sent a delegation to Washington. No inquiry changed policy, yet the association kept the occupation on the American agenda until the last marines left in 1934.