1955 to 17 May 1956 · Haitianspan
Schoolboys fight the police in the corridors of the Lycee Petion
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The 1955 coffee crop was the worst in years after Hazel. Complaints of graft rose as the government weakened, and the American magazine The Nation began printing the case against Magloire for his enemies on the left. Then came the old Haitian question of when exactly a president's term expires. Estime's supporters said Magloire had to go in May or at the latest December 1956. Magloire, reading the constitution written for him in 1950, said May 1957. From May 1956 there was no quiet. On 17 May schoolboys at Les Cayes and Jacmel came out into the streets, and so did the pupils of the Lycees Petion and Toussaint Louverture in Port-au-Prince, who barricaded the doors, threw furniture from the windows and fought the police from corridor to corridor. Tracts from a Comite Revolutionnaire appeared across the city. Magloire declared a state of siege. Later that month the drivers' union, which Francois Duvalier had helped build, went on strike.
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