Eugene Roy is proclaimed the nation's choice by the delegates

On 20 and 21 March 1930 Le Nouvelliste printed the proclamation of Eugene Roy as the elected choice of the nation, made by the assembly of district delegates of the republic and signed by Jean Price Mars as first secretary. Two days earlier the same paper had carried an interview with him on the compromise reached between the opposition and the government. On 26 March La Presse printed his thanks to the populations he had defended before the American commission of inquiry, and on 8 November it printed his thanks to his fellow citizens of the northern department. In the same year he published articles in Haiti-Journal on the double aspect of the Haitian problem and on the solidarity of races and of workers as seen from the United States, and on 5 March he read a paper to the Society of Medicine on psychiatric aspects of the vodou crisis. The occupation was fifteen years old and was being negotiated away.

Hoover's social scientists reported that infant mortality among black Americans in 1930 was nearly double the white rate, ten per cent against six, and that black life expectancy was fifteen years shorter, forty five years against sixty. Fewer than five per cent of eligible African Americans in the eleven states of the former Confederacy were registered to vote as late as 1940. Separate waiting rooms, separate drinking fountains, separate churches and deliberately inferior schools were the ordinary furniture of life, and the few industrial jobs in the South were closed to black workers. C. Vann Woodward called the arrangement an anthropological museum of southern folkways and dated its perfection to the 1930s. The historian Ulrich Phillips wrote in 1928 that white southerners shared one settled resolve, that the region should remain a white man's country. This is the United States that occupied Haiti until 1934.

Herskovits found a Dahomean who made charms for a living and who came back to him repeatedly through 1931 with new ones. For each he explained how it had been made, what had gone into it and why, the taboos attached to it, who could use it, under what conditions and to what end. Charms meant to harm were included alongside charms meant to protect. The collection reached just under forty gbo with the details recorded for every one. A gbo could be worn at the waist, neck, wrist or ankle, kept inside a house, set at the edge of a field, buried in ground a man owned, worked into cuts in his skin, or swallowed. Once a specialist had sold a client the method, the right to make that charm belonged to the buyer as much as to the seller. A Dahomean proverb says the charm holds nothing for long, while the powers of the Vodu are eternal.

On 1 March 1930, after prayers and mass at the church of Sacré Coeur in Port au Prince, about ten thousand Haitian women walked into the streets carrying banners against the American occupation. The permit had been granted on condition that no men take part, and the organisers held to it. Foreign newspapers reported that Madame Thoby came out onto the steps and told the crowd the demonstration belonged to women alone. The procession moved down the Champ de Mars and closed around the statue of Henry Christophe. Two children knelt and laid a wreath of flowers at the foot of the statue of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the founder of the state. Men watching from a distance saw the bronze figure vanish inside the crowd while the national anthem came up out of it. Régina Carrié Thoby had spent days assembling that crowd while she negotiated with the occupation for permission to assemble it. The founders of the republic were being claimed by their daughters.