2021 Chancellor’s Award for Research from Vanderbilt University• Finalist, 2021 Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History •Honorable Mention, 2020 Isis Duarte Book Prize
Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000), copyright ARS, NY. “To Preserve Their Freedom” from the series from the series “The Life of Toussaint L’Overture” (1988). Digital image copyright The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, NY.
In The Black Republic, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019), Brandon R. Byrd explores the ambivalent attitudes that African American leaders in the post-Civil War era held toward Haiti, the first and only black republic in the Western Hemisphere. Following emancipation, African American leaders of all kinds—politicians, journalists, ministers, writers, educators, artists, and diplomats—identified new and urgent connections with Haiti, a nation long understood as an example of black self-determination. They celebrated not only its diplomatic recognition by the United States but also the renewed relevance of the Haitian Revolution.
While a number of African American leaders defended the sovereignty of a black republic whose fate they saw as intertwined with their own, others expressed concern over Haiti's fitness as a model black republic, scrutinizing whether the nation truly reflected the "civilized" progress of the black race. Influenced by the imperialist rhetoric of their day, many African Americans across the political spectrum espoused a politics of racial uplift, taking responsibility for the "improvement" of Haitian education, politics, culture, and society. They considered Haiti an uncertain experiment in black self-governance: it might succeed and vindicate the capabilities of African Americans demanding their own right to self-determination or it might fail and condemn the black diasporic population to second-class status for the foreseeable future.
When the United States military occupied Haiti in 1915, it created a crisis for W. E. B. Du Bois and other black activists and intellectuals who had long grappled with the meaning of Haitian independence. The resulting demand for and idea of a liberated Haiti became a cornerstone of the anticapitalist, anticolonial, and antiracist radical black internationalism that flourished between World War I and World War II. Spanning the Reconstruction, post-Reconstruction, and Jim Crow eras, The Black Republic recovers a crucial and overlooked chapter of African American internationalism and political thought.
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PRAISE
“Byrd writes clearly, and his prose is wonderfully free of the jargon that mars so much academic writing. His research, both archival and secondary, is impressive. And his epilogue, which briefly carries this story into the present day . . . reminds readers that the past is not some distant country, but rather a series of roads that inform our complicated present day.”
“In this incisive and innovative work, [Byrd] illustrates that the politics of Haiti both inspired and troubled Americans . . . This is an illuminating work that helps build a foundation of scholarship important for understanding ideological development and governance in African American politics both within and beyond US borders.”
“Brandon Byrd’s book is a nimbly argued, innovative history of black freedom in the United States as this came to be experienced, imagined in the breach, and theorized in juxtaposition to the Haitian state . . . Erudite and engagingly written, Byrd’s study reveals how much the experience of slavery and emancipation in the United States has shaped the way Americans view and describe Haiti. As a genealogy of anti-imperial politics, it is also sure to interest a broad range of scholars . . .”
“. . . The Black Republic models excellent scholarship. It is thoroughly researched, well-argued, and beautifully written. It is easily accessible to undergraduate students . . . and can be taught in multiple historiographical traditions . . . Moreover, it carries forth a Black intellectual tradition reflected in iconic works by W.E.B. Du Bois, Rayford Logan, and many others. These attributes undoubtedly make The Black Republic a book that will have lasting impact on academic scholarship.”
“In The Black Republic, Brandon Byrd fills an important gap in the literature on relations between the United States and Haiti by focusing on the views of prominent African American intellectuals and public figures in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries . . .”
“Brandon Byrd’s examination of African Americans’ concern with Haiti during the years from the US Civil War to the start of the occupation fills an important gap in scholarship. Using materials ranging from diplomatic archives to plays and public celebrations, Byrd shows the many ways in which black Americans imagined the Caribbean republic as their own status changed, from the hopes of the Reconstruction period to the increasingly difficult conditions of the Jim Crow era. He also convincingly demonstrates that any history of US foreign relations during this period needs to take the opinions and actions of African Americans into account.”
“The Black Republic is impeccably researched and crafted; the writing shows care and intentionality, while the bibliography and notes are generous and rich. It is an intellectual history of an idea of Haiti, that was constituted–and contested–by African American leaders in the post-Civil War period.”
“The Black Republic is brilliant and timely, as Haiti still has much to teach us about the global Black liberation struggle and those who seek to destroy it.”
“Brandon R. Byrd tracks the history of an idea, possibly even an aspiration, of how Haiti haunted African American political thought in myriad ways, while also demonstrating the vexed relationship various U.S. black thinkers had with the first black independent republic. The Black Republic will prove an invaluable work of scholarship that will transform how historians and scholars more generally approach black political thought and black intellectual life.”
“An innovative intellectual history of black possibility, The Black Republic wonderfully recovers a forgotten period in American history when the future of the world was unknown and Haiti loomed over the political visions of white supremacists and black revolutionaries alike. Brandon R. Byrd demonstrates how merely the idea of Haiti has long been central to the Western political imagination—as a litmus test for black self-determination, a warning about the dangers of Negro rule, or as a crossroads for America’s imperial ambitions.”
“[D]eep and elegant . . . Byrd fills a significant gap in scholarship by focusing on the relationship of Haiti and the U.S. during emancipation, Reconstruction, and the establishment of Jim Crow . . . Byrd’s argument is striking and sound. His book reminds readers that American identity has always been bound up, for better or worse with the fate of its neighbors.”
“In this extraordinary book, Brandon R. Byrd both rewrites the history of Black internationalism, locating Haiti firmly at its center, and offers a refreshingly nuanced reconsideration of the many ways that US African Americans engaged with the ‘Black Republic’ after the American Civil War.”