Palestine rises and a royal commission proposes partition

The sharp increase in Jewish immigration into Palestine between 1933 and 1936 hardened Arab opposition to the Balfour Declaration and produced strikes, bloodshed and then open rebellion that lasted from 1936 to 1939. Serious disturbances broke out on 19 April 1936, and on 7 August a royal commission was appointed to establish the underlying causes and to determine whether either Arabs or Jews had legitimate grievances under the terms of the mandate. The commissioners reported on 22 June 1937 that partition was the only method they could propose for dealing with the root of the trouble, on the principle that half a loaf beats none. The Woodhead Commission sent out in 1938 found no workable partition scheme, and the White Paper of 1939 was a further British attempt at a settlement. The mandate ended on 15 May 1948 and the war followed at once.

In 1937, two years after the border treaty was signed, Haitians living on the Dominican side of the frontier were killed in large numbers. Jean Price Mars called it an abominable drama, a sinister episode and a terrible butchery, and read it as a challenge and a provocation to war. The official Dominican account described painful incidents among Haitian marauders who had been looting settlers. What puzzled Price Mars most was how readily the Haitian government accepted a settlement with the Trujillo administration, and he reported a conversation with a Dominican public figure suggesting that eminent Haitians had connived in it. The killing became a fixed point in Haitian popular memory and, for many Dominicans as well, a symbol of barbarism. It also fitted a policy. Trujillo was planting agricultural colonies along the border to make the zone Dominican, while Dominican migration law went on permitting Haitian labour in the sugar industry.

The Stage Society mounted two performances at the seven hundred and thirty seat Westminster Theatre, a Sunday evening show followed by a matinee. Hogsbjerg identifies what made them a first. Black professional actors from across the diaspora, led by Paul Robeson and including Robert Adams as Dessalines and Orlando Martins as Boukman, appeared on the British stage in a play written by a black playwright. Admission required at least a guinea, the annual subscription to a society founded in 1899 to evade the Lord Chamberlain's censorship through private performances. To fit two shows James had cut three scenes from the eleven-scene script, which removed Toussaint's wife and sons entirely. At the second performance James stepped in himself for the absent actor playing Macoya and took the applause as author from the stage.

James recalled fifty years later that one night in Manchester Robeson proposed that the play tour with James himself in the part of Dessalines. It opened at the Westminster Theatre in London. Jackson places it inside a decade of work that turned the revolution into material for black artists across several forms, including Arna Bontemps's novel of Gabriel's Virginia revolt in 1936, Guy Endore's book of 1934 based on the insurrections of 1791, Jacob Lawrence's series of prints on Toussaint begun in 1938, and Ralph Ellison's story in New Masses in 1941, in which the Haitian leader enters African American folklore alongside Stagolee and John Henry. Robeson himself returned to the figure in 1954, writing that Ho Chi Minh was the Toussaint Louverture of Indochina. Jackson uses the production to show how far the revolution had travelled as artistic material.