Istwa Nou

What the marines were doing to Haitian girls became a concern for Black women across the region, who recognised the methods from their own countries. By 1920 Margaret Washington and Mary Church Terrell, who presided over the National Association of Colored Women, had swung their organisation toward anti-Black violence in the Caribbean and at home. In August 1922 a small group of them set up the International Council of Women of the Darker Races. It took in Terrell, Washington, Addie Hunton, Mary McLeod Bethune, Mme. Charles Dube, a Haitian teacher and philanthropist, and Theodora Holly, an African American activist living in Haiti who edited the French pages of the Negro World for Garvey's association. The council spent its first year on Haitian women and children. Holly ran most of the investigation. She was the daughter of Bishop James Theodore Holly, whose family had emigrated from the United States to Haiti to get away from American racism, and she worked in English and French. Black women were assembling the machinery for holding an empire to account.

In February 1921 a delegation from the Union Patriotique sailed from Haiti for Washington carrying testimony that Haitian women had gathered door to door. Sixty one committees had done the collecting. The accounts described women burned alive, hanged and shot during the American occupation. The delegation included Stenio Vincent, later president of Haiti, and Perceval Thoby, the organisation's representative in the American capital. Their timing was ruinous. Through the 1920 presidential campaign, Senator Warren Harding had used Haiti as a stick to beat Woodrow Wilson's foreign policy, repeating rumours of naval misconduct and charging the administration with the rape of Haiti. That served him until election day. By the time the Union Patriotique had raised the fare and put its men aboard a ship, Harding was president elect and Haitian suffering had stopped being useful to him. The testimony arrived intact and found no audience. A grievance loud enough to move a national election became, within four months, an embarrassment to the man it had helped elect.

Refused formal meetings by Harding and the rest of the American government, the Union Patriotique delegation was received in 1921 by the leadership of the NAACP: its president W. E. B. Du Bois, its secretary James Weldon Johnson and its treasurer Addie Hunton. The two organisations had been working toward each other for two years. In 1920, while Washington hesitated over sending any commission to look at the occupation, the NAACP sent Johnson to Haiti for two months of its own inquiry. He published the results in the Nation. American marines, he wrote, were steeped in colour prejudice, and they raped and assaulted Haitian women so often that the acts went unrecorded as crimes at all. Johnson then made the comparison that gave his reporting its force. What was being done to Haitians resembled what was being done to Black Americans at home in the same decade. The occupation ran on the racial logic that sanctioned lynching in Mississippi, exported under a flag and a treaty.