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.

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races ran study clubs in which members and outsiders read texts by people of African descent from anywhere in the world. The stated purpose was strengthening the darker races through familiarity with themselves and with one another. In practice this was an alternative curriculum, complete with research projects that placed Black women at the centre, at a time when no school in either country taught such a thing. Theodora Holly was the most requested speaker, lecturing girls and women in Haiti and in the United States on the history of Haitian women. Members also collected newspapers and photographs and mailed them across the water. Holly wrote to Margaret Washington describing a talk she gave to a girls' club in Port-au-Prince, where she held up Washington's photograph as an example of what a Black woman could be. A decade later in Paris, Jane and Paulette Nardal gathered a cercle d'amis on the same principle. An image travelling from Alabama to a schoolroom in Port-au-Prince was traffic the occupation had no method for reading.