Istwa Nou

The authors of La Revue Indigene praised the African ancestry of Haitians and rejected French culture as the foundation of Haitian thinking. Jean Price-Mars gave the position its full statement in 1928 with Ainsi parla l'oncle, which put the peasant majority at the centre of the nation and treated farming practice and Vodou as proper objects of study rather than as shame. The argument did not stay in print. In 1929 students struck at the American-run agricultural school at Damien. Opposition politicians and the occupying officers alike lost patience with Louis Borno, whose presidency depended on American support. In 1930 women filled the streets while the Forbes Commission was in the country. The literary movement and the political one were made of the same people. The families that supplied the writers had supplied the women who raised money to send the Union Patriotique delegation abroad, and the streets that had held two hundred marchers behind Malbranche-Sylvain were about to hold ten thousand.

Herbert Hoover took office in March 1929 with the Haitian occupation running out of American excuses, and by 1930 he had approved a commission of inquiry led by W. Cameron Forbes. Five white men sailed to Haiti to find out what Haitians thought. High Commissioner John Russell had already refused Perçeval Thoby and the leaders of the Union Patriotique a permit for a demonstration timed to the commission's arrival. Forbes overturned the refusal after Régina Carrié Thoby proposed a parade of women with no men in it. Ten years earlier she had gone door to door with Malbranche Sylvain and other Union Patriotique women, raising money to send her husband and Sténio Vincent abroad to argue Haiti's case. On 1 March 1930 she went into the street again alongside Justinien Ricot and Thérèse Vieux Clesca. The condition attached to the permit was itself the argument. Women were allowed to protest because the occupation could not picture women as a political danger.