Six women found a council and put Haiti first on its agenda

What the marines were doing to Haitian girls became a concern for Black women across the region, who recognised the methods from their own countries. By 1920 Margaret Washington and Mary Church Terrell, who presided over the National Association of Colored Women, had swung their organisation toward anti-Black violence in the Caribbean and at home. In August 1922 a small group of them set up the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. It took in Terrell, Washington, Addie Hunton, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mme. Charles Dube, a Haitian teacher and philanthropist, and Theodora Holly, an African American activist living in Haiti who edited the French pages of the Negro World for Garvey's association. The council spent its first year on Haitian women and children. Holly ran most of the investigation. She was the daughter of Bishop James Theodore Holly, whose family had emigrated from the United States to Haiti to get away from American racism, and she worked in English and French. Black women were assembling the machinery for holding an empire to account.

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.

Eugene O'Neill's play opened at the Provincetown Playhouse and passed within a year to the young Paul Robeson, whose performance drew praise for its emotional strength, before going to Broadway in 1921. Jackson notes that Robeson had first encountered Toussaint and the revolution as a seventeen year old schoolboy in New Jersey in 1915, the year American troops landed in Haiti. The film version of 1933 opened simultaneously to segregated audiences and met immediate black criticism, with a New York paper reporting in September that Harlem objected to the constant use of a racial slur and a Philadelphia paper editorialising in November that it found not one redeeming feature in the picture. A later critic read the film as mapping its hero onto a Haitian primitivism drawn from nineteenth century colonial thinking.

The board of directors resolved to send James Weldon Johnson to investigate reports of atrocities. Pamphile explains why this was a departure. Until then the association had confined itself to equal rights for Black Americans and above all to the campaign against lynching. Johnson, newly in charge, added an international dimension on the conviction that racism was embedded in American policy toward Black nations and not merely in domestic practice. Haiti was his prime example of American racism exported. He was suited to the errand, having served as consul at Puerto Cabello in Venezuela and at Corinto in Nicaragua, and his maternal great-grandmother Hester Argo had left Haiti in 1802 during the war of independence. Before sailing he consulted Theodore Roosevelt, who was also unhappy with Wilson's handling of Haiti, and went with Roosevelt's blessing, taking Herbert Seligman with him.