Istwa Nou

In October 1924 United States military intelligence in Haiti filed a report on a political group in the United States, consisting of James Weldon Johnson and others of the Garvey circle, which had sent word to the anti occupation men of Port-au-Prince, naming Sylvain, Hudicourt and Cauvin, telling them to spread news throughout Haiti that the occupation was about to end. The rumour did spread and produced demonstrations across the country. The report is useful for what it saw and for what it missed. It saw an alliance forming between the NAACP, Garvey's UNIA and the Union Patriotique. It assumed that alliance ran between men. The correspondence being tracked passed through women, among them Theodora Holly, who translated much of it, and the money and the testimony had been collected by women's committees. Perceval Thoby understood the press better than his watchers did and used it to embarrass the Coolidge administration over attacks on Haitian women. In 1927 Normil Sylvain, Max Hudicourt, Arthur Holly, Jacques Roumain, Emile Roumer and Jean Price-Mars founded La Revue Indigene.

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.