Haitians set the record straight about Dessalines, their leader

International smear campaign almost succeeded in erasing his revolutionary legacy

Newly named Dessalines Boulevard is undoing in a concrete and tangible way centuries of the trivialisation of our history RODNEYSE BICHOTTE Haitian-American

CROWDS cheered as local lawmakers last month unveiled a street sign showing that Rogers Avenue in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn would now be called Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard, after a Haiti ans lave-turned-revolutionary general.

When Dessalines declared Haiti’s independence from France in 1804 after a 13-year slave uprising and civil war, he became the Americas’ first black head of state.

Supporting the French colonial perspective, leaders across the Americas and Europe immediately demonised Dessalines.

In the US, itself newly independent from Britain, newspapers recounted horrific stories of the final years of the Haitian Revolution, a war for independence that took the lives of some 50 000 French soldiers and more than 100 000 black and mixed-race Haitians.

For more than two centuries, Dessalines was memorialised as a ruthless brute. Now, say residents of Brooklyn’s “Little Haiti” – the blocks around Rogers Avenue, home to some 50 000 Haitian-Americans – it’s time to correct the record.

They hope the newly renamed Dessalines Boulevard will burnish the reputation of this Haitian hero. The New York City Council’s vetting committee labelled Dessalines a “possibly offensive historical figure”, tacitly referencing the massacre of French citizens that followed Haiti’s revolution. My research indicates that between 1 000 and 2 000 white landowners and their families, merchants and poor French were executed, always in a very public fashion.

Some estimates are as high as 5 000. Just after declaring independence, in early 1804, Dessalines discovered that local French colonists were plotting to overthrow his new government. He ordered all remaining French citizens in Haiti, except for a few French allies, to be killed.

To his critics, however, Dessalines’ massacre amounted to “white genocide”. In researching Dessalines for the biography I am writing, I found that he was in many ways cut from the same cloth as Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and other American revolutionaries.

But in his commitment to black equality he was far more radical than America’s founding fathers, who freed the US from England but let black Americans stay in chains for another nine decades. In June 1803, when Dessalines began planning for independence, he wrote to President Thomas Jefferson.

Like Americans, he reported, Haitians were “tired of paying with our blood the price of our blind allegiance to a mother country that cuts her children’s throats”. They would fight for their freedom. Jefferson never responded. Dessalines’ vision of an autonomous black state – a nation founded by enslaved people who killed their colonial masters – alarmed the patrician Virginia plantation owner, Jefferson’s letters show.

Rather than reckoning with the ills of racial oppression and colonialism, most prominent thinkers across the Americas and Europe interpreted Dessalines’ war as an example of African barbarity.

Haiti was run by a “hord of ferocious banditt” and led by “Barbarous Chieftains”, commented one British observer in 1804.

This racist view of Dessalines persisted for two centuries.

Today, modern scholarship is redeeming Haiti’s founding father. According to Haiti’s constitution, all Haitians, regardless of skin colour, would be considered black in the eyes of the law. In Dessalines’ philosophy, race was an ideological concept. By securing Haitian citizenship, a person became black.

France refused to accept Haitian independence till 1825, when Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer agreed to pay 150 million francs – equivalent to $21 billion today – for the loss of human and territorial “property”.

Jefferson imposed an embargo on Haiti, cutting off trade with the country from 1806 to 1808, and the US refused to recognise Haitian independence until 1862.

Dessalines was assassinated in 1806 by opponents within his own government.

The international smear campaign almost succeeded in erasing Dessalines’ revolutionary legacy. As one opponent to the Little Haiti street renaming claimed, Dessalines is “obscure to most Americans”.

But as scholars have revised the long-dominant racist narrative about Dessalines, public interest in the abolitionist has grown.

As the Haitian-American New York Assembly woman Rodneyse Bichotte said in Brooklyn, the newly named Dessalines Boulevard is “undoing in a concrete and tangible way centuries of the trivialisation of our history”.