She came to the assembly on purpose, and other groups waited outside

The woman turned away at the door had not wandered in. Her intention was to join the women in their section. She may have belonged to the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale, or attended its night schools, or used the Foyer Ouvrier, the community centre the Ligue ran in Port-au-Prince. Outside, Daniel Fignole had brought out the urban working class following he called the rouleau compresseur, the steamroller, to roll over any resistance to workers' rights. His Mouvement Ouvrier Paysan supported women's rights, ran a women's section in its newspaper Chantiers, and in 1948 founded a Bureau d'Action Feminine led by Carmen Jean-Francois Fignole. Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau later recalled that in 1946 there were many women's groups in Haiti, from the left to the Christian right, and that the Ligue was the only one with no party attachment and an explicit feminist programme. Most people in the hall disapproved of the woman's removal, including the same crowd that jeered the Ligue when it walked out. Almost none of them did anything afterwards to bring her back in.

In August 1941 Churchill and Roosevelt issued the Atlantic Charter, proclaiming the right of all peoples to choose their own government and to be protected from aggression. Educated Africans read it and asked the obvious question. Churchill was obliged to reply that Britain already looked after its imperial subjects perfectly well. The reply did not hold.African newsletters multiplied through the 1940s and their contents travelled further by word of mouth than by print, and the comparison being drawn everywhere was between fascism in Europe and colonial rule in Africa. Organisers took the charter as evidence that the system was weak and the philosophy behind it bankrupt. Roosevelt, anti-imperial by instinct, pressed his ally for a postwar timetable. By the end of the war a generation of young Africans educated in Europe and the United States had gathered around pan-Africanism, and at the fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester in 1945 they stopped submitting petitions. The demand was the dismantling of the colonial empires and total independence.

Jeanne Perez travelled to New York in 1947, and an account of the trip records that she formed a great liking for Harlem, a place she had heard a great deal about. Harlem in 1947 held the largest concentration of black political and artistic life in the United States, with its own newspapers, theatres, churches and organisations. Perez had spent years teaching Haitian girls, her niece among them, that their country's revolution and its monuments belonged to them, and she had written the girl a tour of the fortress Henry Christophe built in the northern mountains. The Harlem visit extended that education outward. What she wanted to leave behind was a habit of recognition, so that a Haitian girl reading about black life in another country would take it as connected to her own and not as foreign business. The geography of the lesson grew from the mountains above Cap-Haitien to the avenues north of Central Park.

Dumarsais Estime became president of Haiti in 1946 under the slogan of a black man in power. He had been a deputy under Sthenio Vincent and under Elie Lescot, he was the son of large landowners in the Artibonite, and he was married into an old mulatto family. The economy helped him. Postwar markets lifted coffee and sisal, exports doubled, tourism brought in foreign currency, and the budget rose from twelve to twenty one million dollars between 1946 and 1949. In that setting the noiriste argument appeared to be demonstrating its own usefulness. A substantial black section of the bureaucracy took shape and allied itself with the traditional fractions of the bourgeoisie of every shade, strengthening them. The black petty bourgeoisie expanded in the liberal professions, in small commerce and in the civil service. Reforms were announced for the peasantry and the working class and nothing changed for them. Repression of the unions and the left followed later.