Black Americans paid little attention when the Marines landed in Haiti in 1915. Booker T. Washington thought Haitians backward and short of industrial schooling, and most eyes were on the war in Europe. Plummer traces how that indifference hardened into sustained opposition.

Race leaders moved first, but ordinary people followed, writing to the State Department, the black press and the White House, pressing their weight as Republican voters, and demanding a hand in policy toward Haiti. Administrations answered differently: Harding campaigned on the issue and then investigated, Coolidge ignored the critics, Hoover conceded a second black commission and then managed it as Harding had. Robert Moton's delegation was refused passage on navy ships.

The episode matters, Plummer argues, because it registers a shift in how black Americans understood themselves and their kinship with people of African descent elsewhere. Accommodation was given up in Haiti as it was being given up at home.