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The dead are counted three ways and the electoral field is cleared

16 June to 22 September 1957 · span · Haitian

The 1900sAnba Chèf1 source
16 June to 22 September 1957 · Haitianspan

The dead are counted three ways and the electoral field is cleared

Official fifty, Maurepas Auguste over five hundred, Diederich and Burt a thousand, then a state of siege.

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Fighting went on through the night across the lower city. When the army had the upper hand, trucks came to collect the bodies and the fire brigade hosed down the streets. The government counted fifty dead and two hundred and fifty injured. Maurepas Auguste put the figure above five hundred. Diederich and Burt later estimated a thousand. Kebreau imposed a state of siege that held without further trouble until election day, fixed at last for 22 September 1957. Six months of collapse had done the work of a campaign. Fignole was in Miami. Jumelle had been discredited whatever his qualifications. Dejoie was still moving and on the defensive. Duvalier had the commander of the army on his side, a growing cell of Duvalierist officers, and a quiet rumour in circulation that the Americans backed him. He went to the countryside with nationalism, mysticism, the racial argument he had inherited from Estime, and a plain division of the world into them and us, delivered in long sentences where Creole ran into French.

Antonio KebreauFrancois DuvalierLouis DejoieClement JumelleDaniel Fignole Port-au-PrinceHaiti
Where this comes from Heinl, R. D., & Heinl, N. G. (2005). Written in blood: The story of the Haitian people. University Press of America.HT-WIB-000540

A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.

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Meanwhile, and next door

1955 · Diasporayear only

A Haitian president is asked in Washington about American segregation

Magloire visits Eisenhower after the desegregation ruling and predicts the bad dream will end.

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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.

Charles S. JohnsonDwight EisenhowerPaul Magloire Fisk UniversityNew YorkWashington
Meanwhile, and next door Read these right here. You keep your place. Peek ›8 and 23 June 1955A Kingston columnist calls Jamaica's market women uneconomic
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The 1940s to the 1960s · Africanspan

Land taken from Kikuyu farmers becomes the Mau Mau war

Kenyatta founded the KAU in 1947; by 1952 the landless were fighting a war he had not called.

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White settlement in Kenya took the best farmland out of African hands and pushed the people who had worked it into crowded reserves. Colonial officials then blamed African methods for soil erosion and imposed farming rules that made the reserves harder still to live in. Those who left for Nairobi joined a growing urban poor the authorities treated as a criminal class. In 1947 the Kenya African Union was founded under Jomo Kenyatta and expanded quickly into a mass movement, run by moderates and filling up with people who owned nothing and were prepared to fight for land. Killings in the countryside began at the end of the 1940s and became sustained war through 1951 and 1952. The Kikuyu split along the same line. Kenyatta wanted peaceful change. The leaders of the landless wanted land and freedom. When the fighting spread across the White Highlands the British banned the KAU and imprisoned Kenyatta, who had had almost nothing to do with it.

Jomo KenyattaKenya African UnionMau MauKikuyu KenyaNairobiWhite Highlands
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8 and 23 June 1955 · Caribbean

A Kingston columnist calls Jamaica's market women uneconomic

Two columns in one month accused higglers of taking too much and of charging too little.

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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.

H.P.J. Kingston, Jamaica
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