From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870–1964

5. “To Carry the Dance of the People Beyond”: Jean-Léon Destiné, Lavinia Williams and Danse Folklorique Haïtienne

5 “To Carry the Dance of the People Beyond” Jean-Léon Destiné, Lavinia Williams and Danse Folklorique Haïtienne Developing effective cultural relations proved to be an important element in the Pan American project. U.S. African Americans, Caribbeans, Latinos and a few U.S. government officials understood that building and improving cultural programs and promoting the exchange of ideas (economic, technical and artistic) across boundaries might “break down some of the racial barriers” in the United States and in the international arena.1 During the early 1940s, as described in the previous chapter, Walter White and the NAACP conveyed serious concerns to Nelson Rockefeller and others about the long-term “success” of the Good Neighbor Policy if the United States failed to address the issue of “color prejudice” and neglected to highlight some of the contributions that nonwhite citizens had made to inter-American affairs. Robert G. Caldwell, a cultural relations official in the U.S. government , agreed with White. Caldwell affirmed that the United States could not “overlook . . . the fairly complex racial question of Latin American peoples.”2 Several intellectual and educational programs were implemented at the state and federal levels but few critically addressed race, racism and imperialism in the Americas.3 At the local level, U.S. African Americans, Caribbeans and a few liberal whites in the United States believed that it was important to inform the U.S. American public about two main issues in the context of interAmerican affairs: first, that there existed significant populations of Africandescended peoples in Latin America and the Caribbean; and second, that their struggles and achievements proved important to the success of Pan Americanism and of race relations in the United States. In March 1942, Frank R. Crosswaith, chairman of the Negro Labor Committee, wrote to Walter White about a ten-week lecture series on “The Negro in the Western To Carry the Dance of the People Beyond · 155 Hemisphere” being offered by Ruediger Bilden, an anthropology professor at Fisk University and a research fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation. The Harlem Labor Center on 125th Street sponsored the three-dollar-a-seat Bilden lectures.4 In Chicago, the Pan American Good Neighbor Forum, an interracial and nonsectarian organization approved by Rockefeller’s Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs (CIAA) office, which advocated the improvement of inter-American relations, also held several talks on “the relations of Negroes in the entire hemisphere.”5 These lectures and information sessions rarely affected U.S. foreign policy in the Americas or the political affairs of Caribbean and Latin American nations, but they informed many individuals about the history and central roles black people and cultural relations played in the development of Pan Americanism. The cooperation between the Haitian government and Walter White in the development of Haitian tourism served as one example of the significance of cross-cultural relations in inter-American affairs. Yet if the Haitian tourist industry in the 1950s prospered, what attracted middle- and upper-class travelers? Notions of a “primitive” and “mysterious” Haiti intrigued many tourists. Haiti symbolized the Africa of the West, without the long voyage, and maintained some semblance of U.S. influence. As scholars Gérarde Magloire and Kevin Yelvington assert: “In the anthropological imagination of Haiti with its legacy of colonial and neocolonial ethnography, itself a cousin to travel narratives, ‘Africa,’ ‘Vodou’ and ‘Race,’ among others, have remained key images in the representation of Haiti as a whole.”6 This “anthropological imagination” intersects with popular ideas, and the images of “Africa,” “Vodou” and “Race” become “synecdoches , standing for ‘African savagery’ as part of a larger colonial discourse on the religions of ‘primitive’ people regarded as fetishistic, superstitious, cannibalistic. . . .”7 Dance, in particular, Haitian folkloric dance, among other cultural art forms, served as the vehicle through which many tourists authenticated their racist and paternalistic beliefs. Yet ethnographers and Haitian and U.S. African American choreographers of Haitian folkloric dance utilized this art form and shaped it to affirm their connections to an African past and a history of racial slavery in the Americas. As part of an ideological movement to study indigenous traditions such as indigénisme and négritude, Haitian folkloric dance served two additional purposes. First, it constructed a perception of an authentic Haitian cultural identity that attempted to force the Haitian aristocracy to recognize the sacred and secular contributions of the black masses to the formation of the nation and 156...