"Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, The path is open to the sea": Remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music, and Culture of the African American People
Two centuries of African American oratory, writing, painting and music kept the Haitian Revolution in view, and Jackson assembles that record. He starts in 1797 with Prince Hall telling a Boston Masonic lodge to take heart from events in the French West Indies, then moves through James Theodore Holly's emigrationist preaching, black state conventions pressing Congress to recognise Haiti, and Frederick Douglass, later minister in Port-au-Prince, telling a Chicago audience in 1893 that Haitian fighters had struck a blow for every black person alive. Du Bois returned to Toussaint from his doctoral work onward. Jacob Lawrence, inspired by a play he wrongly credited to Du Bois, answered with forty-one gouache panels. Countee Cullen wrote from Vandercook's life of Christophe, and Duke Ellington folded Christophe and the 1791 revolt into Black, Brown and Beige. Across these forms Haiti serves as proof of capacity and as a usable claim on freedom.
Jackson, M. (2008). "Friends of the Negro! Fly with me, The path is open to the sea": Remembering the Haitian Revolution in the History, Music, and Culture of the African American People. Early American Studies, 6(1), 59-103.