Lescot falls and the era of uncontested mulatto rule ends

On 11 January 1946 Elie Lescot was forced out of the presidency by a military coup in which Paul Magloire took the leading part. His removal closed the period, running from the start of the United States occupation in 1915, in which the light skinned elite governed Haiti without serious challenge. Several grievances arrived at once. Peasants had lost land to wartime agricultural schemes. Black intellectuals had not forgiven the campaign against Vodou carried out with the Catholic church. The dealings of the Lescot family were widely known. And a war fought against fascism made a president who ruled by decree hard to defend. Dumarsais Estime, a black politician associated with noirisme, was elected to a six year term and took office in August, the first black head of state since Vilbrun Guillaume Sam in 1915. A new constitution was promulgated. The argument Jean Price-Mars had put in a book in 1928, that Haiti should recognise itself as an African country, now held the government.

The National Party's laws after 1948 sorted South Africans by colour and fixed where each group could live, work and travel. A small African elite came through the system anyway and organised against it. In the 1950s the African National Congress, until then moderate and slow, was taken over by a younger group around Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu. The defiance campaign of 1952 and 1953 brought mass breaking of the pass laws and mass arrests. By the middle of the decade African, Indian and coloured organisations had come together behind a demand for a democratic South Africa with no racial qualification at all. The alliance was fragile. Zulu crowds had attacked Indians in Durban in 1949, and inside the ANC some leaders resented the influence of white liberals and of communists. A breakaway group formed the Pan Africanist Congress at the end of the decade. A state that had spent ten years dividing people by colour had given them one thing to agree on.

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.