When US marines came ashore in Haiti in 1915, they began an occupation whose damage outlasted its end in 1934. Scholarship on how African Americans resisted Haiti's loss of sovereignty is well developed, Byrd notes, but it has centered on Black men and the institutions they ran, leaving Black women's responses thinly drawn.

Byrd recovers those responses and finds them mixed. Some prominent Black women went on describing Haiti as a place in need of civilizing. Others founded organizations that grew out of imperial language and at times leaned on imperial machinery to function.

Middle-class and elite Black women, in this account, were working through a shifting moment in Black intellectual life, holding to older ideas of uplift and respectability while also demanding Haitian freedom in radical terms. The article treats that combination as an opening into Black political culture, women's organizing, and American empire.