Mary McLeod Bethune, Haiti, and Black Feminists

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Mary McLeod Bethune, influential figure in the Black Freedom Struggle and one of the leaders of the National Council of Negro Women. Often obscured in our memories of this important and powerful Black woman is her links to Haiti, a country she only visited once. Bethune was friends with the President of Haiti's wife, Lucienne Estimé, and awarded Haiti's Medal of Honor and Merit.

While she only visited in Haiti during 1949 (the same year of President Estimé's Exposition for the Bicentennial of Port-au-Prince), the National Council of Negro Women had been in communication and solidarity with the Haitian women's movement throughout the 1940s. The Ligue d'Action Feminine Sociale, established in the 1930s, maintained links with Black women organizations and feminists in the US and some of its members traveled and met with African-American women, too.

African American Women and Haitian women had also found solidarity and worked together earlier (as early as the 1920s, when African-American women showed an interest in anti-US Occupation collaboration and research on the conditions of Haitian women) in the International Council of Women of the Darker Races, an organization consisting mostly of African-American women and a small contingent of important Haitian feminists (including Theodora Holly, Haitian daughter of an African-American immigrant, Theodore Holly). Clearly, the Haitian women's movement of the 1930s and 1940s was tied to broader Black women's movements in the US and international collaborative projects.

For more information, read Grace Louis Sanders's "La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women's Rights, National Politics, and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montreal, 1934-1986." Her excellent work is the source for this post, and eloquently elucidates the origins and forms of Haitian women's activism in Haiti and the Diaspora.