Yvonne Sylvain's savings sit in an American bank for nine months

Haiti spent nine months of 1946 without a settled government, between the fall of Lescot in January and the working through of the new constitution. Yvonne Sylvain, a Haitian doctor, had several hundred dollars of savings held for her in the United States bank account of Sadie Alexander, the American lawyer who was her friend. That arrangement was the whole of her protection through the crisis, and it held. Almost no Haitian woman had a friend abroad who could do such a thing. Trade unions had no legal standing in Haiti until after 1946, so women with no foreign connection and no union had one route left, which was to ask a sympathetic legislator to act for them, as members of the Ligue Feminine d'Action Sociale did with St. Aude. The class question the assembly argued about all summer appears here as a number. A few hundred dollars in a Philadelphia account was the difference between waiting out a political collapse and being ruined by it.

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.

On 1 January 1946 the student paper La Ruche, edited by Rene Depestre and Theodore Baker, greeted the new year as the year democracy would beat fascism, and printed four lines of verse: down with the Francos, long live democracy on the march, long live justice, long live the workers of the world. Within two days the editors were in the police station on the Champ de Mars and the paper was banned. Medical students walked out first, then the rest of the university, then the lycees, then children as young as ten, crossing the Champ de Mars shouting for liberty and democracy and against dictatorship. The Garde answered with clubs. On 7 January, Jacques Stephen Alexis, Depestre and Baker announced a new party demanding the release of political prisoners, immediate elections and a free press. On the 8th and 9th the government clerks struck, then the teachers, then the shopkeepers. Elie Lescot went on the radio promising drastic measures. On the afternoon of 11 January, Alexis and Georges Rigaud went to his residence and told him to go. He asked for time to arrange his affairs. Two hours later Fort National fired three times.