Two black American artists go to Haiti to collect an opera

The composer Clarence Cameron White and the librettist John Frederick Matheus travelled to Haiti for six weeks in search of musical materials for an opera. White completed the score in 1932 after a fellowship took him to Paris to study, and although it was performed in concert form in Chicago that year it was not staged until 1949. Jackson gathers the same year's other Haitian works to show how concentrated the moment was. Vandercook's life of Christophe appeared with drawings of the revolt that later fed Jacob Lawrence's paintings, and it moved Countee Cullen so deeply that he wrote the poem Black Majesty, published that May in the magazine of the National Urban League. The Haitian past had become working material for the Harlem Renaissance. Jackson treats the trip as the start of a sustained American musical engagement with Haiti.

Two groups of Haitian intellectuals reorganised the country's politics between 1926 and 1937, along the fault lines of class and colour. Jolibois fils wrote to Moscow in 1926 and the Comintern ignored him. In 1930, under French party sponsorship, Jacques Roumain founded the Haitian Communist Party with Max Hudicourt. President Vincent jailed Roumain in 1934, released him two years later, and outlawed the party by decree in November 1936. Its members, with the notable exception of Jacques Alexis, were mulatto men of the literary elite: Jean Brierre, Jules Blanchet, Roumain himself. French Marxism did not reach the second group. Black professionals and bureaucrats produced by the occupation, and by Russell's effort to build a Black middle class, were looking for Haiti's roots in Africa, and in 1937 they took the name Les Griots. Jean Price-Mars, Lorimer Denis and Doctor J. C. Dorsainvil led them, and a young ultranationalist physician named Francois Duvalier was among them. The Griots had the constituency the communists could never reach, and they used it.

African mine workers began striking in numbers once they stopped being migrants and started being residents. The 1927 walkout at the Shamva mine in Southern Rhodesia was run by Nyasa men who had lived on the property for years and had worked out how it functioned. On the Northern Rhodesian copper belt the pits sat close together, so news and plans moved between them, and the big stoppages came in 1935 and 1940. The second of those landed while the Royal Air Force was fighting over southern England. The miners knew nothing about that battle and everything about the fact that Britain could not do without copper, and the terms they extracted proved the point. No trade unions existed to call any of it. The organising ran instead through the Watchtower church and through Mbeni dance societies, formed for amusement, which split members into rival teams with uniforms and mock official titles borrowed from the men in the offices. Women danced and organised alongside men. Mbeni members served as go-betweens during the copper belt strikes.

The New York Stock Exchange estimated in 1929 that twenty million Americans owned stock, and Frederick Lewis Allen used that figure in the popular history he published in 1931. It was wildly wrong. The chief actuary of the Treasury calculated that about three million Americans, under two and a half per cent of the population, held securities in 1928, and brokerage firms reported 1,548,707 customers in 1929. Pension funds did not yet exist to give workers an indirect stake. So the crash by itself did almost nothing to the finances of the ordinary American, who owned nothing to lose. Stock prices recovered about a fifth of their losses by April 1930 and no major bank or company had failed. Kennedy's point is that the crash and the depression are two different events, and that the most careful students of 1929 have never demonstrated a causal link running from one to the other.