Brandon R. Byrd. The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti.

In The Black Republic, Brandon Byrd demonstrates how Africans Americans expressed their sometimes-conflicting perceptions of Haiti. He explains that Haiti mattered to African Americans living through Jim Crow and white imperialism as it “influenced their imaginings of the means and ends of achieving black freedom in a world that demanded black subservience” (11). This book fills a significant gap in the historiography of Black internationalism, which has greatly overlooked African American interest in Haiti during Reconstruction. Bookended by a prologue, introduction, and epilogue, the book’s five chapters move chronologically from Reconstruction to end of the United States’ occupation of Haiti in the 1930s.

Chapter 1 highlights how Black intellectual, diplomatic, and religious leaders imagined Black progress through Haiti during early Reconstruction. Byrd explains how, “For a great number of African Americans, the diplomatic recognition of Haiti by the United States was a portent of greater appreciation of their own changing status” (18). Drawing on Haiti as a source of racial equality, some Black authors and speakers rebutted white supremacist narratives that diminished Haiti to “condemn black political participation following the defeat of the Confederacy” (26) through biographies, public lectures, and conventions. However, Black intellectuals like Benjamin Tucker Tanner believed emphasizing degrees of Black assimilation in the Americas, prioritizing ethnicity and nationality over race, best combatted scientific racism. President Ulysses S. Grant appointed Ebenezer Don Carlos Bassett as the first African American diplomat to Haiti (or anywhere in US history) in 1869. Not long after, Frederick Douglass went to the Dominican Republic as part of a presidential commission to study its possible annexation. Douglass led some Black intellectuals in supporting annexation because it could “uplift black people abroad” (47). Black Protestant missionaries joined African American diplomats. James Theodore Holly led a group of Black refugees to Haiti in the 1860s and established Holy Trinity Church in Port-au-Prince. A decade later, Reverend Theophilus Gould Steward became an active African Methodist Episcopal Church missionary in Haiti. He kept a journal offering many condemnations of Haitians, cohering “with a civilizing impulse that animated many conservative evangelicals and liberal Protestants” (53).

The second chapter shows how Black leaders shifted their perspectives into the 1880s. While they still saw “Haiti as a singular site where African Americans could participate in U. S. politics” (60), they emphasized racial unity instead of ethnic difference. Bassett’s diplomatic successor, John Mercer Langston supported “Haitian self-determination” (66) based on American political, Protestant, and capitalist models. An emigrant to Haiti himself, Louden S. Langley attempted to rouse African American emigration to Haiti in 1880 arguing that Black people could only flourish in a racially separate society. Simultaneously, the AME Church provided scholarships for Haitian students to attend Wilberforce University in Ohio and raised over two thousand dollars to support missionary work in Haiti. Mary Ella Mossell led Black AME women in efforts to try “to make Haitian women better housewives as well as devoted Christians” (79). All the while, white scholars wrote about the so-called “Negro problem.” For example, British diplomat Spenser St. John’s Hayti; Or, the Black Republic—the inspiration for Byrd’s book title—suggested Black Haitians had proved themselves unfit for self-governance. Overall, white authors inferred that African Americans needed white leadership because independent Black Haitians had failed. In a public letter, Alonzo Holly criticized St. John and encouraged African Americans to remember Haiti as proof of Black people’s abilities.

Byrd discusses Douglass’s relations with Haiti in the third chapter. Douglass returned to Haiti as a diplomat in 1889 and took part in negotiations for US possession of Môle St. Nicholas. Rear admiral Bancroft Gherardi accompanied him. Haitian leaders found “Douglass unpersuasive and Gherardi combative,” so they closed negotiations. Black and white Americans were disappointed in Douglass, but he reminded them “Haitians were aware of U.S. racism and prone to reject any hypocrite who discriminated against Africans Americans while professing to deal equitably with Haitians” (119). At the 1893 World’s Fair, the Haitian Pavilion stood alongside those of European and North American countries. Byrd explains, “Haitian elites in Chicago erected a testament to what they saw as black modernity. In fact, there were no representations of Vodou or any other elements of Haitian popular culture” (130). Douglass gave a speech praising Haiti’s achievements and African Americans’ debts to it.

Byrd examines how African Americans grappled with who should uplift Haitians in the lead up to US occupation. Booker T. Washington pursued international racial uplift through industrial education. He exported the Tuskegee model and brought Haitian students to the Tuskegee Institute. Washington and others believed uplifting Haiti would help rehabilitate “their racial image” (153). Holly argued that it was African Americans’ duty to help Haitians, which Byrd calls the “black man’s burden” (159). Monroe Work suggested select Black Americans should have colonized Haiti. While William Pickens urged the US government to annex Haiti, former diplomat Bassett argued against annexation. President Woodrow Wilson seized upon unrest in Haiti to occupy it in 1915. The fifth chapter explores the response to this occupation and Black internationalism. W. E. B. Du Bois’ position evolved quickly from support to opposition. James Weldon Johnson’s four article series exposed an “exploitative military regime under the guise of humanitarian” (224). Moved by racism at home and abroad, African Americans joined organizations from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom. The US withdrew in 1934 “thanks to the militant resistance of Haitians and the invaluable assistance of the international anti-occupation movement” (235).

Focusing primarily on African Americans, Byrd does not fully interrogate the idea of Haiti as a republic. In fact, it experienced different forms of government under various leaders after its independence, from Emperor Jean-Jacques Dessalines and King Henri Christophe to President Jean-Pierre Boyer and Michel Domingue. Nonetheless, The Black Republic is an engaging Black intellectual history, accessible to upper division undergraduates and scholars alike.