Haitians, Haiti, and the International New Negro Political Agenda, 1919–34

In March of 1920 James Weldon Johnson, Secretary General of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored people (NAACP), set sail for Port-au-Prince, Haiti carrying with him letters of introduction to many of the capital city’s intellectual, economic, and political elite. He was tasked with investigating the stories of excesses of the U.S. military Occupation of a Caribbean country, by then nearly five years in progress. He also bore the weight of more than a century of connections between the Black republic and African Americans. Along its course, the relationship had waned and ebbed, with Black people in the United States feeling pride and disappointment and alternately approached or distanced themselves from various Haitian administrations. By the advent of the occupation many prominent African Americans supported military intervention due to the negative press surrounding Haiti, some exaggerated, some based on nearly two decades of political instability to begin the century. Johnson’s mission to Haiti was part of a larger diaspora building project where Haitians and Haiti’s liberation were ultimately enlisted in a larger effort to unite people of African descent, globally. The result of Johnson’s travels was to inaugurate an anti-occupation movement based on racial solidarity between African descended people in the United States and Haitians. I maintain that the anti-occupation movement that emerged was just one component of a global impetus that connects to the Pan-African Congresses initiated by W.E.B. Dubois. I argue that African Americans in the NAACP promoted occupied Haiti as a cause to unite people of African descent, a vector through which the weight of such a united community could affect change, and that the Haitians themselves became exemplars of what I term the international new negro political agenda.