In The Black Republic, Brandon R. Byrd explores the ambivalent
attitudes that African American leaders in the post-Civil War era
held toward Haiti, the first and only black republic in the Western
Hemisphere. Following emancipation, African American leaders of all
kinds-politicians, journalists, ministers, writers, educators,
artists, and diplomats-identified new and urgent connections with
Haiti, a nation long understood as an example of black
self-determination. They celebrated not only its diplomatic
recognition by the United States but also the renewed relevance of
the Haitian Revolution. While a number of African American leaders
defended the sovereignty of a black republic whose fate they saw as
intertwined with their own, others expressed concern over Haiti's
fitness as a model black republic, scrutinizing whether the nation
truly reflected the "civilized" progress of the black race.
Influenced by the imperialist rhetoric of their day, many African
Americans across the political spectrum espoused a politics of
racial uplift, taking responsibility for the "improvement" of
Haitian education, politics, culture, and society. They considered
Haiti an uncertain experiment in black self-governance: it might
succeed and vindicate the capabilities of African Americans
demanding their own right to self-determination or it might fail
and condemn the black diasporic population to second-class status
for the foreseeable future. When the United States military
occupied Haiti in 1915, it created a crisis for W. E. B. Du Bois
and other black activists and intellectuals who had long grappled
with the meaning of Haitian independence. The resulting demand for
and idea of a liberated Haiti became a cornerstone of the
anticapitalist, anticolonial, and antiracist radical black
internationalism that flourished between World War I and World War
II. Spanning the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow
eras, The Black Republic recovers a crucial and overlooked chapter
of African American internationalism and political thought.
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