Publication details
Flying Haiti : The Black Press, Haiti, and Early Black Aviation
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| Year of publication | 2018 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Description | This paper explores Haitian aviation in the 1930s and early 1940s as a forgotten area of black internationalist and anti-imperial cooperation between Haitians and African Americans. While most scholarship has addressed James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, and numerous African American women’s organizations’ political support for Haitian independence from U.S. occupation between 1915 and 1934, the history and development of early Haitian aviation during U.S. imperial domination in the region and the role that African American leaders played in it throughout the 1930s is a topic rarely discussed. However, when six Haitian pilots joined the Tuskegee Airmen in 1943, the event was merely a culmination of the efforts between African Americans and Haitians in the 1930s. This paper traces cooperation between African Americans and Haitians in the field of aviation as black internationalism and anti-imperialism through investigation and analysis of The New York Amsterdam News, The Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender’s as well as Haiti’s Le Nouvelliste and Le Temps’ coverage of watershed moments in Haitian aviation. By focusing on the 1930s , the paper argues that, even though historians claim that Haiti’s first aviator was Colonel G. Edouard Roy, the first commander of the Haitian Air Force in 1943 and previously a student at Roosevelt Field in New York, Haiti had, in fact, made forays into aviation a decade earlier, with Leon Desire Paris becoming not only the first Haitian, but also the first black pilot to successfully complete a long-distance international flight. Finally, by focusing on the 1930s, the paper uncovers healthy cultural and political exchange between black America and Haiti in all things aviatic at a time when the United States still maintained a powerful military and civilian presence in the Caribbean through, among others, its domination over plane routes between North and South America. Ultimately, then, the paper shifts focus within black aviation history from the Tuskegee Airmen and WW2 to the 1930s, with black attempts at succeeding in the highly-skilled, predominantly white, technological field of aviation as a metaphor for anti-imperial resistance against white America’s technological and economic domination over blacks in the United States and the Caribbean. |