Bryn Mawr subscribed to La Voix des Femmes before Sylvain arrived

Alice Garoute, Madeleine Sylvain, Jeanne Perez and Cleante Desgraves Valcin edited La Voix des Femmes and described it as a microphone for the oppressed. It would name injustice and abuse, they wrote, and bring Haitians together in a shared love of the country. Sylvain put the second aim plainly. The paper would link Haitians who knew too little about their own women, and would reach women anywhere in the world, free or not, on behalf of women's emancipation. It circulated in the main city of every region and in every town with a league chapter, among them Les Cayes, Cap-Haitien, Saint-Marc, Port-de-Paix and Jacmel. It went to North America by subscription, and Bryn Mawr College was taking it before Sylvain ever enrolled there. At the Paris Exposition of 1937 the writers won a prize for their reporting. Every number set aside a column in which invited respondents answered one question, for or against feminism, and reprinted essays and speeches by thinkers from Colombia, Cuba and Peru.

Constitutions in 1942 and 1946 allowed direct elections to a legislative council in the Gold Coast, which made organised parties worth forming. The United Gold Coast Convention was founded in 1947 under J. B. Danquah, a lawyer from a small professional elite. It was moderate, it stayed inside the law, and it worked by persuading colonial officials that reform was reasonable. The British were content with it. Younger activists with no property and no patience found nothing there for them. Kwame Nkrumah came back from the United States in 1947 to work for the Convention, having spent years in pan-Africanist politics abroad, and the rioting and shortages of those months made Danquah's method look useless to him. He left in 1949 and founded the Convention People's Party. Its method, taken in part from Gandhi in India, was called positive action: strikes and boycotts, non-violent, and willing to break colonial law. The British ran out of patience and arrested Nkrumah in 1950 along with several other leaders, on the theory that jailing a man puts away his argument with him.

Vincent's chief business in 1935 was staying in office past May 1936. He told Trujillo the plan: dissolve the legislature, rewrite the constitution, put it to a plebiscite, then elect a legislature of reliable men. The trial run was the Banque. City Bank was willing to sell its Haitian operation for a million dollars and the Senate refused to pass the purchase. Vincent held a plebiscite in February 1935, carried it 454,357 to 1,172, and moved exclusive control of economic policy into the palace. He closed the sale, then removed eleven senators including Price-Mars, Pradel and Pierre Hudicourt, explaining that opposing him placed them in rebellion against the popular will. On 2 June 1935 a new constitution passed the same way. It let the president dissolve the legislature and rule by decree, ended the separation of powers, made the executive the sole authority of the state, and by a single article gave Sténio Vincent a second term from 15 May 1936. The British minister called the referendum more of a farce than most.

On 30 December 1935 Le Nouvelliste, the country's main daily, began running a series of articles setting out the racial and biological theories of the Griots. The Griots were young intellectuals who had taken the cultural nationalism of Jean Price-Mars, which asked Haitians to recognise the African content of their own culture, and pushed it into biology. In their hands African descent stopped being a heritage to be studied and became a set of inherited traits determining temperament, aptitude and the proper distribution of political power. Printing the argument in Le Nouvelliste moved it out of small literary reviews and into the reading of every educated household in Port-au-Prince. This was the intellectual equipment of noirisme, the doctrine that the Black majority had a right to the state and that the mulatto elite had held it by fraud since 1804. François Duvalier was one of the Griots. Twenty-two years later he was president.