A hundred women organise in three weeks and write a platform

In the first months of 1934 Alice Garoute and Madeleine Sylvain drew up plans for an organisation they called La Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale. In February Sylvain invited a chosen group of women to talk it through. Over several meetings they settled on a philosophy, a structure and a platform. The philosophy was to improve the economic, intellectual, social and political condition of Haitian women. By March the organisation had elected an executive committee of eight, and the rest of the membership, close to a hundred within three weeks, was sorted into six subcommittees. Those committees wrote a platform covering the physical, intellectual and moral condition of Haitian women, a sharper sense among them of what society was owed, and protection for children, for women and for the old. The speed says something about how much groundwork already existed. The fundraising campaigns, the reading groups, the salon arguments and the ten thousand women who had marched in front of the Forbes Commission were rehearsals for this.

James arrived in London and moved in May to the Lancashire cotton town of Nelson to stay with the family of the Trinidadian professional cricketer Learie Constantine. He was there officially to help Constantine write his autobiography, but it was Constantine who arranged for a local Nelson printing firm to publish James's own book on the Trinidad labour leader Cipriani. Hogsbjerg stresses that this was the manuscript James had carried from Trinidad and that once it was sent back to the West Indies he considered himself free for his real work, which he expected to be a second novel. The play displaced the novel instead. James later put it that fiction writing drained out of him and was replaced by politics, a shift driven by his campaigning for West Indian self-government.

The United States formally ended its military occupation of Haiti and withdrew its forces on 14 August 1934, nineteen years after the marines landed. The soldiers left. The financial administration did not. Washington kept control of Haitian customs collection and debt service for years afterwards through a fiscal representative, which meant the instrument that had brought the marines in the first place remained in American hands once they were gone. Sténio Vincent, who had spent his career campaigning against the occupation and had been chosen president by the first working legislature since 1918, proclaimed himself the second liberator of Haiti. The title invited a comparison with Jean Jacques Dessalines and did not survive one. Vincent governed for another seven years, arranged the extension of his own term, and grew steadily more attached to rule by decree. Haiti got its army, its flag and its ceremonies back in 1934, and the ledger stayed in a foreign office.

Just after 1900, West Indian immigrants made up about one percent of the Black population of the United States, and most of them lived in New York City. By 1930 there were 72,000 Afro-Caribbeans in the country and more than half were in New York. The flow then stopped almost completely. A federal immigration law passed in 1924 and the McCarran-Walter Act of 1952 cut Caribbean arrivals through the 1940s and 1950s. The Hart-Celler Act of 1965 removed the quotas that had done the blocking, and the numbers recovered fast enough that by 1980 more than 50,000 West Indians of various origins were entering the United States each year. They came mainly from Jamaica, Guyana, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, Haiti and Martinique. The concentration of that migration in one city is why Black politics in New York has never been a single constituency, and why coalitions there have to be built rather than assumed.