Istwa Nou

Back from Haiti, Addie Hunton reported that important people were paying attention and that her quiet propaganda on Haiti's behalf might come to something. Quiet is the wrong word for what she then did. Inside the same year she spoke about Haiti to the California state convention of the National Association of Colored Women, to the National Federation of Colored Women's Clubs, to the NAACP convention in Chicago, and to the National Association of Colored Women again at Oakland. The following year she carried the subject to the Pan-African Conference in New York. Malbranche-Sylvain and Hudicourt were working the same circuit from the other end, through the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, so that what happened to a woman in Port-au-Prince could be described in a hall in California within months. The speed of the reporting did nothing to slow the occupation. While Hunton toured, Haitian girls went on being harmed by the men garrisoned in their towns, and the list of their names went on getting longer.

A few months after Hunton went home, Perceval Thoby posted a letter to W. E. B. Du Bois with cuttings from two Haitian papers, l'Essor and Le Courrier Haitien, folded inside it. The story they carried was the rape of a girl of eleven whose name was never printed. Thoby asked Du Bois to run it in The Crisis and to say plainly that the American occupation was working to keep the facts down. He knew what that request cost. Luc Dorsainvil, who edited l'Essor, had already been thrown out of his job as head of the passport service at the Interior Ministry for letting the details appear. So the machinery moved against the journalist and left the rapist alone. Thoby also wanted it understood why such cases so rarely reached print at all: where marines committed rape, families kept quiet, out of shame or out of fear of what would follow a complaint. Women had come forward all the same. Thoby's assumption was that for every one who did, there were others nobody counted.

L'Oeuvre des Femmes Haitiennes held its first meeting on 2 March 1926 and had the Jean Joseph Industrial School open before September. Money and names came from both sides of the water. The Haitian backers included Madame Dantes Bellegarde, Madame Francois Dalencour, Madame Pascal Elie and Eugenie Jean Joseph. The American backers included Mary McLeod Bethune, Eva T. Bowles and the socialist teacher Layle Lane. The stated purpose was to build up local industry and give ordinary people a training they could use. Harriet Gibbs Marshall, an African American educator and pianist, wrote to Theodore Roosevelt to thank him for his money and to explain the arrangement of the committee: there were plenty of male members, and the officers were women, because somebody had to rouse the men to their civic duties. The economic argument was that a country importing everything should make and sell things of its own. The social argument was narrower. The school set out to turn girls into good wives and housekeepers, and it left the question of what women were for exactly where it found it.