Dartiguenave deports Lifschitz and creates an occupation critic

The Haitian president Sudre Dartiguenave ordered Lifschitz's deportation, pursuing a more legalistic route to a problem a marine officer named Grant had earlier tried to handle by threatening his wife and telling her to sell the land. Casey follows what deportation made possible. Lifschitz spent four months in Havana, contacted the American consul who arranged his passage to the United States, and in January reached New York, where a soap manufacturer put him in touch with the congressman Isaac Siegel. He told Siegel that his property had been taken, that marine officers were responsible, that his wife and sister-in-law had been brutally treated, and that when he sought justice he was deported without notice to anyone. Siegel became his strongest advocate and pressed the State Department, securing him the best treatment available to an American citizen with a congressional ally.

Churchstone-Lord told the Chicago Defender that if the United States meant to keep its protectorate over Haiti, Haitians would rather have Black American troops. White troops, he said, were arrogant and known for their contempt toward Haitians, women and girls in particular. The request measured what people expected to survive. Under a foreign army that was going to stay, the only choice on offer was which soldiers were least likely to read Haitian skin as permission. His report put a structure of rape, assault and murder in front of an American public with no other way of learning about it. Few of the incidents were ever investigated by the marines or by the gendarmerie. Haitians moved the information themselves, by word of mouth, in newspapers and journals, in open letters, and where it was possible through courts martial. Churchstone-Lord learned about the dead girls through those channels and sent the story north. The Black press in the United States did the work of a court of inquiry because there was no court of inquiry.

A commercial and professional class in British West Africa founded the National Congress of British West Africa. It ran branches in the Gold Coast, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia. Through the 1920s it extracted the concession of elected African members in the territorial legislatures, most effectively in the coastal towns where this class had matured. The Congress produced offshoots, among them the West African Students' Union, which gave young West Africans in London a place to argue and introduced them to pan-African ideas. Its leaders thought regionally on a practical calculation, since no single colony could face Britain by itself. Many of them held that organising along colonial boundaries made no sense, those boundaries having been drawn by Europeans for European convenience. Nnamdi Azikiwe of Nigeria carried the argument. British officials meanwhile regarded their tropical African possessions as mere geographical units and saw no reason to worry about nationalism in them. Within one generation those units were sovereign states, governed by men who had been students in London.

In January 1919 word reached Port-au-Prince that things were wrong at Hinche, out on the Plateau Central at the end of the new road. The corvée had officially stopped the previous October and was still running. Peasants ran into the bush at the sight of a gendarme. Prisoners taken by the marines were shot or simply vanished. Colonel Williams reported the charges baseless on the word of the district commander, Major Clarke Wells. Lieutenant Colonel Hooker went up and came back with the opposite finding. General Catlin, carrying a lung half destroyed at Belleau Wood, then went himself to Saint Michel, Maïssade and Hinche and talked to priests, magistrats and frightened peasants. The corvée was in full operation, prisoners had been shot with escape given as the reason every time, and Wells had made clear to his subordinates that he did not want prisoners reported. Catlin relieved Wells, moved every Gendarmerie officer out of the district, and brought courts martial against nobody. General Barnett read of indiscriminate killing in a court record that September and demanded an inquiry.