A Haitian president is asked in Washington about American segregation

Destin records that Magloire reached celebrity status in the United States when Eisenhower invited him for a state visit, having made the cover of a national magazine the year before. The tour was received with publicity, especially over his views on race in America. As a guest in the wake of the Supreme Court's school desegregation decision, the leader of the first black republic was interviewed about the case and predicted that discrimination in the United States would soon be a bad dream. He received an honorary doctorate of law from a black sociologist serving as a university president, and further honours in New York. Destin sets the visit inside the period called the golden age, when coffee prices were high and the country was the only one in the Caribbean where the tourist industry was controlled by nationals.

In 1935 Madeleine Sylvain-Bouchereau formed the Ligue Féminine d'Action Sociale with nine other women: Georgette Justin, Maud Turian, Esther Dartigue, Alice Téligny Mathon, Marie Corvington, Olga Gordon, Fernande Bellegarde, Thérèse Hudicourt and Alice Garoute. They attacked gender inequality in Haitian politics directly and made suffrage the test of whether the country meant its own founding claims. Two decades of petitions, marches, essays and letters to legislators followed. In 1950 the Constitutional Congress amended Article 8 and granted women of twenty-one and over the right to vote in local and national elections. Haitian women cast ballots in a national election for the first time in 1957. The achievement belonged to a small professional class of women who kept insisting that the democratic promise of the first Black republic in the hemisphere was still outstanding. Their charge against the founders was specific. The men who won independence at the end of the eighteenth century wrote women out of full citizenship, and nobody corrected it for a hundred and forty-six years.

In 1950 King's College London awarded a doctorate to Kenneth Onwuka Dike of Nigeria for a history researched through oral tradition, the first of its kind. Until then the African past had been treated as unrecoverable because it was unwritten. Dike showed that it could be worked on with evidence, and African history became a scholarly field. Literature moved at the same time. Camara Laye published L'Enfant noir and Chinua Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart, both of them handling a pre colonial past that colonial schooling had trained its pupils to forget. The confidence was real and so was the wreckage around it. Ethnic, regional and religious blocs were already fighting over the space the colonial state would vacate, and many of those quarrels dated to the nineteenth century. The years of Dike's doctorate and Achebe's first novel were also the years of the South African race laws, of insurgency in the Portuguese colonies and the Belgian Congo, and of the wars in Algeria and Kenya.

A writer signing as H.P.J. published two columns in the Daily Gleaner in Kingston in June 1955. The first, on the eighth, said that proposals to change the marketing system came from harassed Marketing Department officials who were listening to small farmers whose system was collapsing, while consumers paid high prices that never improved the producer's lot. The second, on the twenty third, said that few higglers in any category made much money, and that their willingness to work for tiny margins had blocked the growth of greengrocers with telephones and delivery vans. The two charges pull against each other. In one the trader takes too much out of the chain. In the other she takes so little that no better paid trade can establish itself. Jamaica had no formal plan to abolish higglering at the time. The criticism came from middle class townspeople in conversation and in the press, some of whom also complained to visiting researchers about the rudeness of market women.