While Haiti continues to go through turmoil and political instability, the debate over outside intervention places CARICOM, the United Nations, and France—as well as Haitian citizens—on different sides. Meanwhile, the United States continues to play a major role in its fate by maintaining support for Haiti’s unpopular acting Prime Minister Ariel Henry.
The American relationship with Haiti has deep—and very ugly—historic roots. In July 1915, the United States invaded and occupied Haiti for what would be 19 years. One of the little-remembered facts about that occupation, and its investigation, was the role played by James Weldon Johnson, who is mostly remembered today for his poetry, the leading role he played in the Harlem Renaissance, and as the author of “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” known today as the Black national anthem.
However, in his role as the first Black executive secretary of the NAACP, Johnson went on a mission to Haiti to investigate the U.S. occupation. He went on to publish a scathing and substantive four-part series on U.S failures there in The Nation magazine.
This is some of the Black history that the state of Florida, under its current educational leaders, probably won’t be teaching, even though Johnson was a native of Jacksonville where in 1897, he was the first Black American admitted to the Florida Bar since Reconstruction.
RELATED STORY: ‘Lift ev’ry voice and sing:’ Honoring an anthem and its author
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Bill Delaney wrote this biography of Johnson for The Jaxson in 2018; I’m sure Florida Gov. Ron “DeKlantis” would love to erase it from the internet.
James Weldon Johnson (1871 – 1938) is, without exaggeration, the single most accomplished person ever to come from Jacksonville or Florida. Among other things, the LaVilla native was Florida’s first African American lawyer after Reconstruction; the principal of Stanton, which he converted into Florida’s first black public high school; a U.S. Consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua; the first African American head of the NAACP; and a respected university professor. But even without these accomplishments, Johnson would have secured a place in history for his literary output.
Johnson was born in Jacksonville in 1871 during the Reconstruction period when the federal government worked to protect the rights of newly freed African-Americans across the South. His mother was Bahamian immigrant Helen Louise Dillet and his father was James Johnson, the head waiter at the St. James Hotel. His brother was noted musician John Rosamond Johnson. Johnson grew up in the town of LaVilla, later annexed by Jacksonville. His childhood experience of the city was of a comparatively tolerant place where African Americans could advance and prosper.
Johnson attended Atlanta University at the age of 16 and then returned to Jacksonville where he served in various high-status positions. In 1895 he founded the Daily American, Florida’s first African American-oriented newspaper. In 1897 he was admitted to the Florida Bar, becoming the first black Floridian to pass the Bar since Reconstruction ended. He also served as principal of Stanton School, where he spearheaded the effort to add a high school, the first in the state to serve African Americans.
Johnson’s mother, Helen Louise Dillet Johnson, born in the Bahamas in 1842, “was a musician and the first black female teacher in a Florida grammar school at Edwin M. Stanton School.” She was the daughter of a Haitian immigrant to the Bahamas, Stephen Dillet, and a Bahamian mother, Mary Symonett.
RELATED STORY: Caribbean Matters: Hey DeSantis, by attacking Black history you’re attacking Caribbean Floridians
Johnson wore many hats during his lifetime, and not just those of a noted poet and literary figure. Emory University’s James Weldon Johnson Institute for the Study of Race and Difference fills out the picture of his achievements.
Admired for his able, judicious, and creative approach to leadership in an era stained by virulent forms of racism, Johnson, fluent in Spanish and French, was the first African American to serve as the United States consul to Venezuela and Nicaragua.
After his period of service in the consular corps, in 1915 Johnson joined the staff of the NAACP. Rising quickly through the leadership ranks, a year later he became the first African American to serve as field secretary and later as executive secretary of the NAACP. As executive secretary of the NAACP, Johnson organized in Manhattan the historic Silent March of 1917 (above) to protest the national crime of lynching.
During his tenure as executive secretary of the NAACP, Johnson also led a national campaign against lynching that garnered significant congressional support in the form of the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill of 1921, a bill that would have made lynching a national crime, but it failed to become law because of insufficient votes in the Senate.
Other significant achievements during Johnson’s tenure as head of the NAACP include the exposure of the brutality of the Marines during the United State’s occupation of Haiti, and the national campaign to support the Houston Martyrs: the soldiers of the 24th U.S. Infantry sentenced to death or life imprisonment for the 1917 uprising in Houston, Texas.
But it is Johnson’s work on behalf of Haiti that we’ll be examining today.
The Jaxson explored Johnson’s 1920 investigation in a 2021 story by John “Jack” F. Gaillard.
In the midst of James Weldon Johnson’s multi-front efforts for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a new assignment was handed to him. His board of directors asked him to visit American-occupied Haiti and report back.
Haiti’s history had been troubled for many years. Although its revolt against French colonization in 1804 had made it the second independent country after the U.S., in all of the Americas, foreign powers, including Napoleon Bonaparte, continued their meddling in its affairs.
The resulting instability and vulnerability prompted President Woodrow Wilson in 1915 to send the Marines in what turned out to be a [19-year] occupation of Haiti.
Although Johnson and many other opinion leaders initially supported occupation, the severity of it began to raise considerable apprehension. In spite of press censorship, “reports of the harsh conditions due to the American occupation kept leaking through to us,” he wrote.
When the Marines jammed a new constitution through the Haiti legislature in 1918, alarm swept through many an American mind, including the board of NAACP. It would be 1920 before there were sufficient resources to send Johnson and one of his board members for a first hand report.
Gaillard’s story is illustrated with a series of photos from the Beinecke Library at Yale University.
The full text of Johnson’s four reports in The Nation, known collectively as “Self-Determining Haiti,” is available online, via Project Gutenberg. I’ve included some key points from each report below.
I. “THE AMERICAN OCCUPATION”
(From The Nation, August 25, 1920)
There are several distinct forces—financial, military, bureaucratic—at work in Haiti which, tending to aggravate the conditions they themselves have created, are largely self-perpetuating. The most sinister of these, the financial engulfment of Haiti by the National City Bank of New York, already alluded to, will be discussed in detail in a subsequent article. The military Occupation has made and continues to make military Occupation necessary. The justification given is that it is necessary for the pacification of the country. Pacification would never have been necessary had not American policies been filled with so many stupid and brutal blunders; and it will never be effective so long as “pacification” means merely the hunting of ragged Haitians in the hills with machine guns.
Then there is the force which the several hundred American civilian place-holders constitute. They have found in Haiti the veritable promised land of “jobs for deserving democrats” and naturally do not wish to see the present status discontinued. Most of these deserving democrats are Southerners. The head of the customs service of Haiti[11] was a clerk of one of the parishes of Louisiana. Second in charge of the customs service of Haiti is a man who was Deputy Collector of Customs at Pascagoula, Mississippi [population, 3,379, 1910 Census]. The Superintendent of Public Instruction was a school teacher in Louisiana—a State which has not good schools even for white children; the financial advisor, Mr. McIlhenny, is also from Louisiana.
Many of the Occupation officers are in the same category with the civilian place-holders. These men have taken their wives and families to Haiti. Those at Port-au-Prince live in beautiful villas. Families that could not keep a hired girl in the United States have a half-dozen servants. They ride in automobiles—not their own. Every American head of a department in Haiti has an automobile furnished at the expense of the Haitian Government, whereas members of the Haitian cabinet, who are theoretically above them, have no such convenience or luxury. While I was there, the President himself was obliged to borrow an automobile from the Occupation for a trip through the interior. The Louisiana school-teacher Superintendent of Instruction has an automobile furnished at government expense, whereas the Haitian Minister of Public Instruction, his supposed superior officer, has none. These automobiles seem to be chiefly employed in giving the women and children an airing each afternoon. It must be amusing, when it is not maddening to the Haitians, to see with what disdainful air these people look upon them as they ride by.
II. “WHAT THE UNITED STATES HAS ACCOMPLISHED”
(From The Nation, Sept. 4, 1920)
The American Occupation of Haiti is not only guilty of sins of omission, it is guilty of sins of commission in addition to those committed in the building of the great road across the island. Brutalities and atrocities on the part of American marines have occurred with sufficient frequency to be the cause of deep resentment and terror. Marines talk freely of what they “did” to some Haitians in the outlying districts. Familiar methods of torture to make captives reveal what they often do not know are nonchalantly discussed. Just before I left Port-au-Prince an American Marine had caught a Haitian boy stealing sugar off the wharf and instead of arresting him he battered his brains out with the butt of his rifle. I learned from the lips of American Marines themselves of a number of cases of rape [18] of Haitian women by marines. I often sat at tables in the hotels and cafes in company with marine officers and they talked before me without restraint. I remember the description of a “caco” hunt by one of them; he told how they finally came upon a crowd of natives engaged in the popular pastime of cock-fighting and how they “let them have it” with machine guns and rifle fire. I heard another, a captain of marines, relate how he at a fire in Port-au-Prince ordered a “rather dressed up Haitian,” standing on the sidewalk, to “get in there” and take a hand at the pumps. It appeared that the Haitian merely shrugged his shoulders. The captain of marines then laughingly said: “I had on a pretty heavy pair of boots and I let him have a kick that landed him in the middle of the street. Someone ran up and told me that the man was an ex-member of the Haitian Assembly.” The fact that the man had been a member of the Haitian Assembly made the whole incident more laughable to the captain of marines.
Perhaps the most serious aspect of American brutality in Haiti is not to be found in individual cases of cruelty, numerous and inexcusable though they are, but rather in the American attitude, well illustrated by the diagnosis of an American officer discussing the situation and its difficulty: “The trouble with this whole business is that some of these people with a little money and education think they are as good as we are,” and this is the keynote of the attitude of every American to every Haitian. Americans have carried American hatred to Haiti. They have planted the feeling of caste and color prejudice where it never before existed.
III. GOVERNMENT OF, BY, AND FOR THE NATIONAL CITY BANK
(From The Nation, Sept. 11, 1920)
FORMER articles of this series described the Military Occupation of Haiti and the crowd of civilian place holders as among the forces at work in Haiti to maintain the present status in that country. But more powerful though less obvious, and more sinister, because of its deep and varied radications, is the force exercised by the National City Bank of New York. It seeks more than the mere maintenance of the present status in Haiti; it is constantly working to bring about a condition more suitable and profitable to itself. Behind the Occupation, working conjointly with the Department of State, stands this great banking institution of New York and elsewhere. The financial potentates allied with it are the ones who will profit by the control of Haiti. The[20] United States Marine Corps and the various office-holding “deserving Democrats,” who help maintain the status quo there, are in reality working for great financial interests in this country, although Uncle Sam and Haiti pay their salaries.
IV. THE HAITIAN PEOPLE
(From The Nation, Sept. 25, 1920)
Much stress has been laid on the bloody history of Haiti and its numerous revolutions. Haitian history has been all too bloody, but so has that of every other country, and the bloodiness of the Haitian revolutions has of late been unduly magnified. A writer might visit our own country and clip from our daily press accounts of murders, robberies on the principal streets of our larger cities, strike violence, race riots, lynchings, and burnings at the stake of human beings, and write a book to prove that life is absolutely unsafe in the United States. The seriousness of the frequent Latin-American revolutions has been greatly over-emphasized. The writer has been in the midst of three of[31] these revolutions and must confess that the treatment given them on our comic opera stage is very little farther removed from the truth than the treatment which is given in the daily newspapers. Not nearly so bloody as reported, their interference with people not in politics is almost negligible. Nor should it be forgotten that in almost every instance the revolution is due to the plotting of foreigners backed up by their Governments. No less an authority than Mr. John H. Allen, vice-president of the National City Bank of New York, writing on Haiti in the May number of The Americas, the National City Bank organ, who says, “It is no secret that the revolutions were financed by foreigners and were profitable speculations.”
In this matter of change of government by revolution, Haiti must not be compared with the United States or with England; it must be compared with other Latin American republics. When it is compared with our next door neighbor, Mexico, it will be found that the Government of Haiti has been more stable and that the country has experienced less bloodshed and anarchy. And it must never be forgotten that throughout not an American or other foreigner has been killed, injured or, as far as can be ascertained, even molested. In Haiti’s 116 years of independence, there have been twenty-five presidents and twenty-five different administrations. In Mexico, during its 99 years of independence, there have been forty-seven rulers and eighty-seven administrations. “Graft” has been plentiful, shocking at times, but who in America, where the Tammany machines and the municipal rings are notorious, will dare to point the finger of scorn at Haiti in this connection.
And this is the people whose “inferiority,” whose “retrogression,” whose “savagery,” is advanced as a justification for intervention—for the ruthless slaughter of three thousand of its practically defenseless sons, with the death of a score of our own boys, for the utterly selfish exploitation of the country by American big finance, for the destruction of America’s most precious heritage—her traditional fair play, her sense of justice, her aid to the oppressed. “Inferiority” always was the excuse of ruthless imperialism until the Germans invaded Belgium, when it became “military necessity.” In the case of Haiti there is not the slightest vestige of any of the traditional justifications, unwarranted as these generally are, and no amount of misrepresentation in an era when propaganda and censorship have had their heyday, no amount of slander, even in a country deeply prejudiced where color is involved, will longer serve to obscure to the conscience of America the eternal shame of its last five years in Haiti. Fiat justitia, ruat coelum!
In 2021, David Suggs took on the history of our 1915 occupation for The Washington Post.
In 1915, the U.S. military invaded Haiti. Over the next 19 years, it executed dissidents and instigated a system of forced labor.
U.S. soldiers were dispatched to Haiti’s shores in 1915, ostensibly to stabilize a country in disarray after a presidential assassination.
But over the next 19 years, U.S. forces executed political dissidents and implemented a system of forced labor that ravaged Haiti’s peasant population. Thousands of people died.
The United States’ two-decade occupation shaped Haiti in important, and often damaging, ways. Haitian leaders continued to use the systems developed by the United States to exploit rural farmers and silence dissidents. And significant parcels of Haitian land were sold to U.S. companies. As Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat wrote on the 100-year anniversary of the invasion: “Our désocupation has yet to come.”
Fast-forward over 100 years from Johnson’s report and recommendations, and take a hard look at where we are today. It seems to me that the United States hasn’t learned from its history with Haiti. Will we ever?
Writing for The New York Times on July 18, Jake Johnston, a senior research associate at the Center for Economic and Policy Research, points to current problems with U.S. foreign policy regarding Haiti.
Just last week, Secretary of State Antony Blinken met with Mr. Henry, highlighting $100 million in assistance provided to Haiti’s national police and reiterating Washington’s support for a foreign military intervention that the embattled prime minister had requested, though many in Haiti see the request primarily as a way to prolong his rule.
The justification from U.S. officials — and others in the international community — for their support of Mr. Henry is that he was appointed to the position by Mr. Moïse just before his death. Though Mr. Henry had yet to take office, “this gives him a certain legitimacy,” the head of the United Nations political mission in Haiti said last month. Now their struggle has been to bolster that legitimacy in Haiti.
Many Haitians don’t see Mr. Henry as legitimate at all. He is deeply unpopular, and the political opposition has been pushing for him to enter into a power-sharing agreement. In early June he met with members of the opposition and civil society groups in Kingston, Jamaica. But after three days of meetings, it was abundantly clear that he has no intention of sharing power. With the support of the United States and the United Nations, what incentive does he have to negotiate?
The North American Congress on Latin America’s latest report on Haiti, published July 4, examines the role American-manufactured guns are playing in current gang violence there.
Despite periodically expressing dismay at the state of gun violence and poverty in Haiti, lawmakers and mainstream media in the United States are unwilling to act to disrupt the flow of this deadly export. Even with constant increases to defense spending, peaking this year at $842 billion, the Pentagon refuses to make any effort to secure the safety of Haitian and Caribbean borders. The U.S. Coast Guard claims to be coordinating security in the northern Caribbean but have not made any significant firearm seizures in the region. They do continually seize drugs and refugees. Servants of the powerful gun lobby, U.S. politicians actively undermine efforts to curb the death toll on both sides of the Caribbean Sea; Florida Governor Ron DeSantis passed a law on May 12 making it tougher for companies and investigators to track weapons.
Politicians like DeSantis and Trump make a name for themselves scapegoating immigrant and oppressed communities but skirt over the push factors that motivate millions to risk their lives fleeing the Global South. Behind the scenes, the NRA has waged a campaign to elect judges in state races and influence supreme court judges, with anti-democratic repercussions far beyond Washington.
[…]The United States’ gun crisis is Haiti’s gun crisis. The past century of intervention has shown that this is not the first time U.S. action and inaction has been responsible for the proliferation of violence in Haiti. The Haitian people are saying “no” to a military occupation and “yes” to the recovery of the nation’s wealth and reparations after centuries of foreign exploitation.
I wonder what James Weldon Johnson would have say about all of this, were he alive today. I have a pretty good guess.
Join me in the comments to discuss further, and for the weekly Caribbean News Roundup.
