Blacks and Latinos have numerous historical connections. The moors of North Africa occupied Spain from about 700-1400 A.D., about the time of the Spanish King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella. Additionally, the slave trade which began with [Henry Louis Gates] the Navigator flourished from the 1440s, taking Africans into Portugal and Spain as servants. Many conquistadors of the New World brought with them free men of African ancestry. Finally, the Transatlantic Slave Trade sealed Afro-Hispanic connections as slaves intermingled voluntarily and involuntarily with their captors, creating variations in our color palate. Thus, our connections are longstanding. My point is that the African Diaspora experience, as was evidenced on Oscar night, is diverse and includes influences of blacks in Europe, Africa and all the Americas and the Caribbean. There are strands of the Diaspora in the Middle East, including Arab nations, and in places as unlikely as Mexico and China. So, blacks in America must begin to embrace our global heritage and we must also learn that our experiences are not superior but mere pieces of a wider tapestry of "colors." All are worth celebrating, researching and understanding. We are one great people cast to the winds by emigration and immigration, historical slavery, war, racial mixing and chance.
The French called the Island St. Domingue, and began importing thousands of African slaves to clear much of the land and build plantations. By the late 1700s, there were over half a million African slaves in St. Domingue, and dose to 40,000 whites, as well as almost as many "mulattos." (The word "mulatto" derives from the Spanish term meaning a young mule.) They were the "free people of color," the result of white men taking many slave women. [Adam Hochchild] goes on to tell us how very rich France became through its plantocracy on St. Domingue alone: "The colony's eight thousand plantations accounted for more than one third of France's foreign trade, and its own foreign trade equaled that of the newly born United States." White planters and merchants on the island lived a life of luxury unrivaled in "the New World." Hochchild tells us that on that fateful August night "a large group of slaves representing many plantations met under the night sky in a remote spot called Alligator Woods..." and these are the words reportedly shouted to the throng by a revolt leader: '"Throw away the image of the god of the whites who thirsts for our tears, and listen to the voice of liberty which speaks in the hearts of all of us."
First, the two armies all but destroyed the French plantocracy on the island then they defeated a Spanish force and huge English and French armies. In Adam Hochchild's book Bury the Chains, we learn that then-U. S. President George Washington and then-Secretary of State Thomas Jefferson, both slave owners, sent "a thousand muskets, other military supplies, and eventually some $400,000" of U. S. aid to quell the revolt now known as "the Haitian Revolution." Randall Robinson reveals more in his book, An Unbroken Agony: "Some . . . had been brought to Haiti [St. Domingue] from other Caribbean slave colonies men like the storied Boukman from Jamaica and the legendary Makandal from Trinidad, and the great general, Henri Christophe, who was born in Grenada." Blacks who escaped plantations in the United States also joined L'Ouverture's armies. Robinson reports that L'Ouverture had been the intellectual, "the African humanist, the military strategist, the administrator and, not insignificantly, the conciliator." Robinson also writes that [Jean-Jacques Dessalines] "had been, first and last, the hard-nosed soldier who believed that an enemy as manifestly unsalvageable as the French had to be, wherever possible, obliterated."
After [Jean-Jacques Dessalines]' death, [Henri Christophe] assumed leadership of Haiti, but the mulatto minority South set up its own republic under Pétion. Christophe committed suicide in 1820 amid an uprising over his forced labor policies. Pétion's successor, JeanPierre Boyer, reformed the two republics into one Haiti. Boyer ruled until his government collapsed in 1843 due to political rivalry. Until 1915, only two of the 21 governments since 1843 were not dismantled by coups d'états or political in-fighting. Except for agreement on the abolition of slavery, the state and nation were headed in opposite or different directions before the L'Ouverture adherents took over in 1804. The literature on Haiti, from Trinidadian C. L. R. James' classic book The Black Jacobins, to TransAfrica founder Randall Robinson's An Unbroken Agony, all tell the awful consequences of the "color curtain" in claustrophobic Haiti.
