Duvalier and Denis found Les Griots to make race a science

Three young men calling themselves Les Trois D had met since 1929 in a rented house in downtown Port-au-Prince to discuss what Price-Mars and the ethnological movement meant for the emerging black middle class. They were Lorimer Denis, a lawyer from Cap Haitien, Louis Diaquoi, a journalist from Gonaives who suggested the group's name before his death in 1932, and Francois Duvalier, then a medical student. After a failed attempt at a daily paper, the quarterly appeared with Duvalier, Denis and the poets Clement Magloire fils and Carl Brouard as directors, aiming to continue the work of La Revue Indigene. Duvalier and Denis wrote most of the articles, adopting the racial theories of Gobineau and Arthur Holly to argue that psychological and cultural characteristics differ sharply between European and African peoples and that Haitians are unconsciously governed by African heredity.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk died on 10 November 1938. The generation that had won the war of liberation and carried through the first reforms had by then reached the end of its creative period, working from goals set in the Young Turk era: a national Turkish state in a modern political form. Karpat's judgement is that they started with a society whose institutions were rooted in Islam, under bad conditions inside and out, and permanently undermined the belief that social arrangements, customs and authority were fixed. Ataturk is described as a soldier ruler rather than a dictator, a man who refused the title and kept insisting on national sovereignty, who ordered, punished and rewarded in the manner of someone used to being obeyed. He was an orphan raised in a village and then in Salonica. His coffin was placed in 1953 in a monumental tomb above Ankara.

For Africans and people of African descent across the Americas, the Second World War started in 1935. Ethiopia was the only genuinely independent state on the continent, and Mussolini wanted it, partly to build a new Roman empire out of Eritrea and partly to avenge the Italian defeat at Adwa in 1896. Through the early 1930s he argued in Europe that Ethiopia was an anachronism, a savage and unstable place that practised slavery and deserved no recognition. Britain and France quietly agreed. Italy invaded in October 1935 claiming an Ethiopian attack near the Somali border. The technological gap that had not existed in 1896 decided everything: armoured columns, aircraft and the occasional illegal use of poison gas. Addis Ababa fell in early 1936 and Haile Selassie went into exile, telling the League of Nations that Europe would be next. The Patriots kept up a guerrilla war throughout. Ethiopia became the focus of pan-African protest and an inspiration for the Rastafarian movement. Allied troops, including West and Central African units, restored Selassie in 1941.

Jose Francisco Pena Gomez was born in May 1937 near the border between the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Five months later Trujillo ordered the slaughter of dark skinned residents of that zone, an operation called Operacion Perejil and known more commonly as El Corte, the harvest. The dead were estimated in the tens of thousands, and Pena Gomez's parents were among them. He was raised by an adoptive Dominican family. The circumstances of his birth gave his political opponents their whole line of attack, and for decades he was accused of being Haitian; in the mid 1970s a journalist pressed him to answer the charge in an interview, and the recording and notes were lost. He ran for the presidency and never won it. After his final defeat he said racism was well entrenched in Dominican society, that a bloodbath would have followed had he been elected, and that Dominican society was not yet ready for a black president. He died on 10 May 1998.