Istwa Nou

The International Council of Women of the Darker Races put much of its money into sending investigators abroad, and the most consequential of those journeys was Addie Hunton's visit to Haiti in 1926. Her guides in Port-au-Prince were Eugenie Malbranche-Sylvain and Therese Hudicourt. Six years earlier those two had walked two hundred women through the same streets in protest; now they walked an American through the places where the occupation had done its damage. What came out of the trip was a report of 180 pages called Occupied Haiti. Its subtitle described the authors as six disinterested Americans, from organisations that were American through and through, who had looked at conditions on the ground themselves and wanted the independence of the republic given back. The conclusion was that the United States military should go, and go at once. The title alone did work that argument could not. Americans who had been told the occupation was a favour to Haiti were reading Americans who had gone to see and come home asking for withdrawal.

The marines did not leave when the American investigators asked them to, and the refusal produced a wave of organising rather than a collapse of it. The Joseph School, run across national lines, took as its subject the schooling of small children living under military rule. Madame Charles Dube of the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, the business teacher Rosina Jean-Joseph and Madame Dantes Bellegarde led that effort, and out of it came a new body, L'Oeuvre des Femmes Haitiennes pour L'Organisation du Travail. Its membership list is a map of who had been running things among Haitian women for a generation. Madame Etienne Mathon had led La Zelatrice and would go on to help found the LFAS. Madame Clement Pethel had led Femina. Madame Tancrede Auguste, a former first lady, ran La Creche. Alongside them sat school principals, a night school director for adults and two independent social workers. Every classroom these women opened was addressed to girls, in a country whose streets American personnel had made dangerous for exactly those girls.