Istwa Nou

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.

On 1 March 1930, after prayers and mass at the church of Sacré Coeur in Port au Prince, about ten thousand Haitian women walked into the streets carrying banners against the American occupation. The permit had been granted on condition that no men take part, and the organisers held to it. Foreign newspapers reported that Madame Thoby came out onto the steps and told the crowd the demonstration belonged to women alone. The procession moved down the Champ de Mars and closed around the statue of Henry Christophe. Two children knelt and laid a wreath of flowers at the foot of the statue of Jean Jacques Dessalines, the founder of the state. Men watching from a distance saw the bronze figure vanish inside the crowd while the national anthem came up out of it. Régina Carrié Thoby had spent days assembling that crowd while she negotiated with the occupation for permission to assemble it. The founders of the republic were being claimed by their daughters.

The women's demonstration was set for 1 March 1930, which was also Carnival day in Port au Prince. High Commissioner John Russell told Régina Carrié Thoby the choice was unwise. She answered that a day of protest and a day of Carnival did not cancel each other out, and that with effort and will both could be held. Russell then said the date was fixed by the government and that he could do nothing about it. Thoby gave the exchange to the newspapers, including the reply she had kept to herself, which she reported making with some irony: say the word government and everyone accepts it immediately. Russell was the government. By printing his evasion she made the occupation's chain of command look ridiculous in every literate household in the capital. Le Nouvelliste drew the conclusion in bold type. Haitians had stayed away from Carnival entirely, ten thousand women and girls had marched instead, and no better evidence of a united country could be handed to the Forbes Commission.