1928 · Haitianyear only

Price-Mars tells Haitians their culture is African and legitimate

A doctor born at Grand-Riviere du Nord in 1876 wrote the book that reordered Haitian self-description.

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1928 · Haitianyear only

Silvio Cator jumps for silver in Paris while marines hold Haiti

Born at Les Cayes in 1900, he is still the only Haitian to have won an Olympic medal.

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1928 · Datasetyear only

Three quarters of mandate spending goes to soldiers and officials

Education took 3.8 percent of the budget, health took 1.5, and the army of the Levant took the rest.

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1924 to 1929 · Diasporaspan

A million more black southerners go north when the quotas close

Northern factories had lost their European labour supply and looked south for it instead.

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1928 · Diasporayear only

Only three million Americans owned any stock at all

The legend of ruined chauffeurs and window cleaners describes about two per cent of the country.

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1928 · Haitianyear only

Ainsi parla l'Oncle is printed at Compiegne in 243 pages

A book of ethnology that made African ancestry sayable in a country under American occupation.

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1928 · Haitianyear only

Rehabilitating the people puts a distance between them and the writers

A culture can be called beautiful once its disappearance is assumed.

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17 October 1928 · Caribbean

Dominica gets a Peasant Information Bureau and a planter to run it

The growers' association excluded the growers from its own meetings.

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19 March 1928 · Diaspora

Zora Neale Hurston lies three days on a snakeskin couch

Six initiations in six months, and the first written account of an American Vodou initiation.

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4 April 1928 · Haitian

Le Petit Impartial opens fire on the Borno administration

Georges Petit and Jacques Roumain built a paper for one purpose and used it every week.

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2 June 1928 · Haitian

Roumain answers the censors in print while the jails fill

The state was arresting nationalist writers, so he wrote a column about being arrested.

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20 June 1928 · Haitian

Roumain tells the priests they may take up arms

When the country is in danger, he wrote, a clergyman carries the same duty as anyone else.

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1928 · Diasporayear only

Two black American artists go to Haiti to collect an opera

White and Matheus finish Ouanga in 1932 and wait until 1949 to see it staged.

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1928 · Haitianyear only

Price-Mars tells the elite to stop scorning its ancestral inheritance

Ainsi parla l'oncle treats peasant religion as a subject for science rather than shame.

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1928 · Haitianyear only

Haiti joins a hemispheric women's commission built on research

The Inter-American Commission of Women gave Haitian feminists a platform and a method.

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13 October 1928 · Haitian

Brouard reviews Price-Mars and calls the book a revolution

Le Petit Impartial handed the year's most important book to a poet who already agreed with it.

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December 1928 · Haitianmonth known

Roumain goes to prison and comes out a symbol

A generation of students read the arrest as proof that what they wrote had weight.

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13 December 1928 · Haitian

The two editors of Le Petit Impartial are arrested together

Sedition was the charge. Prison made both men into exactly what the movement needed.

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