Theodora Holly

Theodora Holly ca. 1902

Daughter of James Theodore Holly, a prominent African-American and bishop of the Episcopal Church in Haiti, Theodora Holly and her siblings played an important role in Haitian intellectual history. As a product of a family rooted in black nationalist emigrationist thought and action of the 19th century, Holly unsurprisingly inherited this tradition of solidarity between Black America and Haiti. Furthermore, as a Protestant fluent in English, French, and Creole, she was uniquely poised to connect Black America and the Anglophone West Indies with Haiti through her journalism for venues such as the UNIA's Negro World. Perhaps her greatest importance lies in her being one of the few female voices in Haitian noiriste circles, suggesting the need to explore gendered dimensions of noirisme.

Unfortunately, little appears to have been done on researching Theodora Holly's important role in Haitian education, women's history, and intellectual thought. According to David M. Dean, Grace Theodora Holly was the best scholar of James T. Holly's many children, but the family lacked the funds for her to study abroad. Her father believed African-American emigration to Haiti was necessary to ensure Haiti reached her destiny as a shining star of black civilization. However, Haitians could not do it alone since African-Americans supposedly were more civilized due to contact with Anglo-American religion and civilization. Opposed to this view, her brother, Arthur, was a pioneer in the ethnological movement, authoring texts on the question of Vodou and esoterica in Haiti. Holly also shared her brother's fascination with the occult and esoteric matters, although not, to my knowledge, openly embracing Vodou like Arthur. Most of her contributions to Les Griots were about numerology, however, and her writings about Haiti in The Negro World and other African-American journals usually stressed solidarity between Haiti and Black America or touched upon the history and conditions of women in the island.

According to Grace Sanders, Holly played an important role in the International Council of Women of the Darker Races of the World, whose members later established a vocational and domestic training schools for girls. As an educator, Holly's appreciation of the Vai writing system and its implications for creating a Haitian Creole writing system, also suggest the importance of looking back to Africa for solutions to problems facing our race today. It is hard to imagine her father would have thought of doing such a thing. She was also praised in issues of Le Nouvelliste and Le Matin for her conferences on education and moral cultivation as early as 1913, predating her involvement with the International Council of the Women of the Darker Races.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about Holly for this blog is her somewhat singular status as a Haitian woman directly engaged in the UNIA and noiriste circles. To what extent did her connections with African-American women and the UNIA shape a nascent Haitian women's movement? Did her father's enthusiasm for Fourier and Christian Socialism shape her belief in education and black women organizations for collective uplift? She seems to be one of the interesting figures in the early development of Haitian feminism and respectability, but also a proponent for educational reforms at a time when more women would have been migrating to the cities or working in new fields, as later seen by the presence of women in the tobacco industry or factories in the subsequent decades. Moreover, as someone shaped by the ethnological movement, she appears to mark a transition from the older classic black nationalism of her father to one shaped by the interwar years, a period where Haitians were urging themselves to not slavishly emulate French or Western ways but look inward.

Suggested Reading

 

Dean, David M., and James Theodore Holly. Defender of the Race: James Theodore Holly Black Nationalist Bishop. Boston: Lambeth Press, 1979. 

Moses, Wilson Jeremiah. The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1820-1925. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. 

Sanders, Grace Louise, La Voix des Femmes: Haitian Women's Rights, National Politics, and Black Activism in Port-au-Prince and Montreal, 1934-1986.