Istwa Nou

Maurice Dartigue had just finished at Columbia's Teachers College and had a reputation in rural and industrial schooling. His wife Esther Dartigue, a founding member of the League, is the likely reason he was on the programme. She admired his support for teaching the early grades in Kreyòl and for replacing French textbooks with English ones, and she was impatient with how slowly the elite responded to rural education. Dartigue and Price-Mars both offered education as the leveller: women would earn political rights by proving they could think and produce. Men faced no such test. Dantès Bellegarde closed the series from a long way to their right. He had been ambassador in Paris and Washington, had spoken at the second Pan-African Congress, and counted Du Bois and Rayford Logan as friends. He believed in Western liberal thought and wanted Haitians admitted to Western society as equals. His public quarrels with Price-Mars were famous, which is probably why both were invited by the secretary general, his daughter Fernande. Bellegarde-Smith reads those debates as one question: what is a Haitian in the modern world.