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The last marines sail and the NAACP claims a share of the credit

1934 · year only · Diaspora

The 1900sAnba Chèf1 source
1934 · Diasporayear only

The last marines sail and the NAACP claims a share of the credit

Fourteen years of meetings, appeals to four presidents and pamphlets against a policy that outlasted them all.

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When the final contingent left Haitian soil, the association's twenty-fifth annual report recalled its own part in moving American opinion against the occupation and described itself as the leading organisation in the United States campaigning both for evacuation and for an end to American banking control of Haitian finances. Pamphile is careful about the balance sheet. The concentrated NAACP effort of the early 1920s did not end the occupation; the Harding administration instead rationalised and strengthened it, even while Harding withdrew marines from Camaguey in Cuba in 1922. What the association sustained afterwards was pressure: mass meetings, distribution of information across the United States, and appeals by staff to Coolidge, Hoover and Roosevelt and to individual senators. Pamphile closes by calling this work for human dignity in the first Black republic a little known part of the organisation's history.

James Weldon JohnsonNAACPWarren Harding HaitiUnited States
Where this comes from Pamphile, L. D. (1986). The NAACP and the American occupation of Haiti. p. 100.in the library
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Meanwhile, and next door

3 March 1934 · Haitian

Haiti's first feminist organisation is banned within days of its founding

The committee rewrote the programme down to one harmless sounding line and got its licence.

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The American withdrawal in 1934 opened room for a wave of new associations, and on 3 March that year the Ligue feminine d'action sociale was founded in Port-au-Prince, the first feminist organisation in Haiti. Within days a nervous government forbade it to operate, judging its programme subversive and overambitious. Ten women sat on the steering committee. Madeleine Sylvain and Alice Garoute were the best known. Beside them were Fernande Bellegarde and Olga Gordon, Therese Hudicourt and Marie Corvington, Alice Teligny-Mathon and Esther Dartigue, Georgette Justin and Maud Turian. They redrafted the programme until it reduced to a single mild point, the physical, economic and social improvement of the Haitian woman, and got their permission. Branches followed at Port-de-Paix in February 1935, Saint-Marc in September 1935, Les Cayes in October 1936, Jacmel in 1937, then Petionville, Leogane, Gonaives and Cap-Haitien. The League ran evening classes for women workers in poor districts, a cooperative savings fund, libraries and a workers' centre, and petitioned for equal pay for equal work.

Madeleine Sylvain-BouchereauAlice GarouteAlice Teligny-Mathon Port-au-PrinceJacmelLes CayesPort-de-Paix
Where this comes from Source not recorded for this entry.
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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.

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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.
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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.

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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
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