Haiti as Emblematic of the Black Struggle for Freedom

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Some of the best minds in Africana studies gathered in the George Washington University's Jack Morton Auditorium for a daylong Black history symposium, "Avenging America: Conversations about Black Fugitivity and Freedom in the United States," according to Quito Swan, director of GW's Africana Studies Program and associate professor of history and Africana studies in the Columbian College of Arts and Sciences.

In opening remarks to an audience of GW students and faculty, including GW President Ellen M. Granberg, Swan invoked the names of Ona Judge, Hercules Posey and Harry Washington, fugitives who fled George and Martha Washington's plantation, as "legacies of Black fugitivity to inform the discourse on Africana studies and the Black radical tradition."

"Avenging America," Swan noted, was taken from the words of General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the self-proclaimed first emperor of Haiti, who after the success of the Haitian Revolution in 1804, declared, "Yes, I have saved my country. I have avenged America."

Dessalines' army, Swan said, included formerly enslaved Africans, Indigenous and mixed-race people and free Blacks, some of whom had fought in the 1776 American Revolution. Swan said Dessalines and his revolutionaries "abolished slavery, denounced white supremacy and castigated the colonial crimes of genocide and racism throughout the Americas"; in contrast,"the aftermath of the American Revolution witnessed the rapid expanse of slavery."

Leslie Alexander, a professor of history at Rutgers University and author of "Fear of a Black Republic: Haiti and Black Internationalism in the United States," was a featured speaker in conversation with Lakeisha Harrison, professorial lecturer and GW assistant dean for student services, diversity, equity, and inclusion at the Elliott School of International Affairs.

Alexander explained that the Haitian Revolution of the 19th century represented an early version of the fear of the domino effect. In an era when whites considered Blacks intellectually inferior and not fully human, Haitians defeated the largest and most powerful army in the world, Napoleon's.

President George Washington was quoted to have said in reaction, "Lamentable, to see such a spirit of revolt among the Blacks. Where it will stop is difficult to say." His fears of what the event might give rise to in the United States were shared by Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton and other founding fathers.

Harrison said it was a conundrum that the people celebrating their own freedom in the American Revolution could not acknowledge the right to liberty of the Black people who fought with them, including the companies of soldiers brought over from Haiti.

At the heart of the conflict, Harrison said, was economic exploitation. Though Haiti is now considered the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, in the 19th century, as Saint Domingue, it was the most profitable European colony in the Americas. It comprised twice as many enslaved people as other Caribbean countries and provided France a third of its annual wealth. In exchange for Haiti's independence and under the threat of continued assault, France insisted on payment of an annual "indemnity" for decades-the equivalent of $15 billion a year today-which kept Haiti impoverished.

This exploitation, Harrison contended, was a pattern and testing ground for strategies that France and the United States have used to profit from Haiti and other newly independent countries. Six decades after the U.S. attained its own independence, Harrison explained, it recognized Haiti-but only with the expectation that the country would be under U.S. control. Fear of a Black republic, of African people free to govern themselves, has been behind that policy of every administration since then, Harrison said.

The symposium offered a series of conversations with Africana and Black studies scholars including GW faculty and students, such as a conversation on Africana Studies and the Black radical tradition with GW Africana studies lecturer Da'Vonte Lyons in an exploration of the mission of Africana studies with Howard University Associate Professor Joshua Myers.

Lyons noted that the discipline has been perceived as a corrective and critique of the study of Black people; an aggregation of disciplines investigating the Black experience that includes history, sociology, linguistics and psychology; and a kind of interdisciplinary study without its own approach to teaching.

"Africana studies distinguishes itself by its relation to the liberation struggle," Myers said, and is essentially "grounded in how it's going to free us." He said that means the discipline may often find itself at odds with the institutions where it finds itself, which he said, are "complicit in" and "help rationalize the colonial order, the imperial order."

"In that sense we are fugitives inside our spaces…that are trying to contain us," he said. "It is not a question of what to study…but how to study," or operate differently, "alongside" the structures of higher education.