Vincent rejects the petition and the first League dissolves

Jacques Roumain and Hudicourt finished three months in prison in the same weeks that Sylvain, Garoute and Thérèse Hudicourt filed their petition for authorisation. Vincent knew the names and the families behind them. He had visited the Garoute house and seen the books and newspapers kept there, some of it Marxist. Whatever weighed with him, a labour department run by women or the proposed changes to family life, the petition read as the leading edge of something more radical, and his government refused it. The League dissolved in April 1934. Sylvain later gave two reasons for the collapse. The government objected to the agenda itself: secondary schools for girls, economic independence for married women, equal pay for equal work, the vote, a women's labour department, and the closing of brothels. The second reason was internal. Most members were cautious and had no wish to be on the wrong side of the palace, while a small group would have fought anything. Arrest was a live risk, for the women and for the men in their families.

Speaking in Nelson on the subject of the Negro, James condemned the British Empire for the racism it fostered not only in the colonies but in the metropolis itself, stressed the achievements of African civilisation, and was reported as saying that there would one day be a tremendous revolt in Africa. Hogsbjerg places the lecture at the point where two commitments converge. James had returned to Britain earlier that year having concluded that European civilisation was doomed, had made an independent study of Marxism and decided to become an organised revolutionary, and his new militant Pan-Africanism developed alongside that. The editor treats the combination as the political engine of the play, which he says is panoramic in its treatment of the revolution and spreads eleven scenes across three acts. Hogsbjerg adds that the same year saw the first play written and directed by a Jamaican woman staged in London, changing what a British theatre audience might expect.

The last United States marines sailed from Haiti on 14 August 1934, closing nineteen years of military occupation. The Americans had built roads, bridges, hospitals and schools, piped clean water into Port-au-Prince and strung telegraph line between the main towns. They had also killed more than two thousand Haitians putting down the Caco rebellion, revived forced labour through the corvée, shut the Black majority out of political life, and left the mulatto elite holding the economy more securely than they had found it. The institution that mattered most was the national guard, trained and armed by the United States. Every strongman of the next half century reached for it first. No part of the political system had been reformed, and the poverty produced by the French indemnity and a century of bad government was untouched. Two organisations founded that same year, the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale and the Haitian Communist Party, are the better measure of what came out of 1934.

In March 1932 the Paris journal La Revue du Monde Noir carried an article by Georges Hardy on what Black artists across the world had contributed. The journal was short lived and it mattered out of all proportion to its run. It appeared in French and English, which let Haitian writers, African American writers and Africans living in Paris read one another without a translator standing in between. That readership is what an article of this kind served. It presented a body of Black artistic achievement as a single subject rather than as a set of local curiosities, and it fed a sense of racial pride among an international group of intellectuals who had until then been working inside separate national conversations. For Haitians, whose country was under American military occupation, the journal supplied evidence that their own indigenist argument belonged to something larger. Ideas that later hardened into political movements were circulating first as literary criticism.