rasanblaj · the timeline · the library

The American colours come down and Haiti fires forty two guns

5 July to 15 August 1934 · span · Haitian

The 1900sAnba Chèf1 source
5 July to 15 August 1934 · Haitianspan

The American colours come down and Haiti fires forty two guns

Roosevelt came ashore at the Cap in July and the last marines marched to the transports in August.

Read the full entryClose

Sténio Vincent visited Washington in the spring of 1934 and was received at the White House. Franklin Roosevelt returned the call on 5 July, coming ashore from the USS Houston at Cap Haïtien in heat near a hundred degrees and walking the wharf on legs that polio had taken most of the use of. The two presidents drove through crowds to the Union Club and agreed a memorandum whose main effect was that the marines would be gone by the middle of August. On 1 August, in front of Vincent, the cabinet and ten thousand people on the Champ de Mars, Colonel Démosthènes Calixte took command of the Garde d'Haïti from Colonel Vogel. On 14 August the American flag came down at brigade headquarters, twenty one guns sounded from Fort National, then twenty one more while the Dessalinienne played and the Haitian flag went up. The Americans left their weapons and equipment behind. Next morning the marines marched to the transports.

Sténio VincentFranklin D. RooseveltDémosthènes CalixteCharles MoraviaGeorges Léger Cap-HaïtienPort-au-PrinceChamp de Mars
Where this comes from Heinl, R. D., & Heinl, N. G. (2005). Written in blood: The story of the Haitian people. University Press of America.HT-WIB-000471HT-WIB-000472

A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.

Permanent link to this entry

Meanwhile, and next door

1930 · Diasporayear only

More than half of Black Caribbean America lives in one city

72,000 Afro-Caribbeans in the country and New York holding the majority of them.

Read the full entryClose

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.

New York CityHaitiJamaica
Where this comes from Source not recorded for this entry.
Permanent link to this entry
1934 · Haitianyear only

In 1934 a young Duvalier writes what Duvalierism would later enact

Signing himself Abderrahman, he described the contempt of the elite and the rage it produced.

Read the full entryClose

In 1934 a young Haitian doctor writing under the name Abderrahman published a page of complaint and defiance. He described what it was to come from the class of youth the elite dismissed as misbegotten, rejected with mistrust and contempt for having emerged out of the lower depths of the real Haiti, pushed back among the homeless and the hungry, worn down daily by poverty and by the arrogance of people newly arrived at money. The writer was François Duvalier. Heinl treats the passage as the key to everything that came after, and it is hard to argue with him. Twenty three years separate it from Duvalier's presidency. The doctrine that grew out of it holds that the light skinned elite had forfeited the right to govern by existing, its offence being its presence ahead of any particular act of misrule. Private humiliation had been converted into political theology. A reader in 1934 would have called it the cry of an angry young man.

François DuvalierLorimer Denis Haiti
Where this comes from Source not recorded for this entry.
Permanent link to this entry
1929 · Diasporayear only

The world crisis of 1929 takes Turkey's farm exports with it

A failed experiment in opposition politics and a collapse in export prices arrived together.

Read the full entryClose

Mustafa Kemal allowed a second party, the Liberal party of Fethi Okyar, to be founded in 1930. It drew unexpected popular support and was dissolved in November of the same year, largely because the Republican party hierarchy convinced Kemal that religious reaction was coming. Travelling for three months afterwards, Kemal found that the discontent in the countryside came from economic stagnation and from party members taking the profitable positions for themselves. The failure of that experiment coincided with the world economic crisis of 1929, which struck Turkey through its agricultural exports, and with the rise of authoritarian regimes in Europe. A reform movement that had been aimed since 1839 against autocracy, and that had treated the western parliamentary order as its goal, turned instead to strong measures and quick results. The opposition went back to the countryside to wait, and waited until 1946.

Mustafa KemalFethi Okyar Turkey
Where this comes from Source not recorded for this entry.
Permanent link to this entry

Back to the whole chronology