The Haitian marriage tax is repealed under Lescot

Sanders Johnson notes the repeal of the marriage tax under president Élie Lescot in a note attached to her discussion of Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain's peasant portraits. The tax belongs to a cluster of legal disabilities she treats as the practical substance of Haitian women's second-class citizenship: control of women's wages, the requirement of a husband's authorisation for travel and later for voting, and the wage rules the League fought through the St. Aude Project. She reads the League's campaigns as aimed less at abstract rights than at these specific instruments, and connects them to the field research members conducted from 1936 through the late 1940s in rural towns and Port-au-Prince, documenting women's work routines, cultural practices and family structures. The repeal is one of the few clean legislative victories in a record otherwise made of partial amendments.

African soldiers fought a long way from home. Troops raised in the French and British territories were in Italy from 1943 to 1945, and British commanders used African regiments heavily in Burma, the campaign that got called the forgotten war. By 1945 more than three hundred and seventy thousand Africans were serving in British forces alone. Many came out of it with a sharper sense of how the colonial system worked and where it sat in the world. Some professional soldiers were demobilised and settled quietly back into their villages. Others became organisers, agitators and party men in the years that followed. What the veterans brought back was firsthand. They had lived alongside Europeans of every class, had killed Europeans, and had watched European officers panic and retreat and fail. The claim that Europeans were a superior order of men did not survive that. Men who had been sent to defend empires that refused them citizenship came home knowing the thing could be broken, and knowing from four years of drill how to organise the men who would break it.

In May 1945 the Association Democratique Haitienne organised a memorial service in Harlem for Jacques Roumain, the Haitian writer and communist organiser. Earl Browder, then head of the Communist Party in the United States, spoke. The actor Canada Lee read a poem for Jacques Roumain that Langston Hughes had written for the occasion. The gathering made visible a community that had grown quietly. After the American marines left Haiti in 1934, Haitians who had relatives in Harlem, and women recruited to work as maids in wealthy white New York households, had joined people who emigrated earlier. Migration from Haiti to the United States is often told as three waves, the revolutionary period, the occupation and the Duvalier years, with nothing in between. The Harlem service belongs to one of those supposedly empty stretches and shows an organised political community inside it.

In 1945 Manuel Arturo Pena Batlle told his readers that under the Trujillo regime Dominicans had won unimaginable victories, above all in preserving the Spanish character of their nationality. He was a serious historian who had built a whole account of Dominican history around the idea of a Spanish community defending itself against outsiders, and he took a leading part in the border negotiations with Haiti. Among the victories he counted was the massacre of Haitians in the border zone eight years earlier. He argued that fixing a line on a map was the simple part of the border question and that the real problem was Haitians settling on Dominican soil, which had been dealt with by what people called la poda, the pruning. The regime he was defending ran on anti Haitian feeling and on an admiration for Spain, and he wrote at the moment when European fascism had just been defeated.