Tenth Department Haitians Massively Mobilize
Greg Dunkel
Most immigrant communities, preoccupied with making a living, fitting in and solving their daily problems, do not organize themselves as a community to take on big political issues. The Haitian community in the '70s and '80s fit this model. They were quiet, hardworking and isolated from the wider communities by their language and traditions; their political focus was Haiti.
But beginning in 1990, the Haitian community in New York started to make a major impact on the political scene in New York.
AIDS March
Many demonstrations have been called historic. Some have stood the time test, others have faded. The April 20, 1990, march from Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, across the Brooklyn Bridge to Wall Street still resonates.
April 20, 1990, was a Friday, a work day, but still 100,000 or so Haitians assembled and marched, to the surprise and consternation of the cops and to the shock of the financiers on Wall Street. This was nearly one-third of all the Haitians living in the New York Metropolitan area. The financial moguls had their neighborhood clogged with tens of thousands of orderly but insistent Black people who were protesting a decision by the Centers for Disease Control that Haitians (and West Africans) carried AIDS. That's why the CDC had issued a ruling forbidding Haitians to donate their blood to blood banks.
Haitian children in U.S. schools were subjected to unmerciful teasing about being "dangerous and infected"; Haitian doctors, nurses and medical workers were afraid for their jobs. But most importantly, the national pride of Haitians was deeply impugned -- their blood, their life essence, was so unclean, according to the CDC, that they had to be officially shunned. They were the fourth "H" after homosexuals, hemophiliacs and hypodermic drug users. And they were the only nationality singled out by the CDC.
Even after this massive march in the streets, it still took a month or so of dawdling, advisory committee meetings, reports, studies and whatnots before the government felt that enough time had passed that it wouldn't appear to be bowing to pressure from the community. It did finally revise the ban.
The Aristide Campaign
The Haitian community had other issues on its agenda during 1990. In New York and other cities with large Haitian communities, massive support rallies that filled stadiums were organized on short notice after Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide's late decision in October to run for president. The communities' focus shifted to Haiti and the huge political events happening there.
The diaspora, Haitians living abroad in what Aristide called the Tenth Department (Haiti is made up of nine geographic departments), responded with hundreds of small meetings, parties, all sorts of appeals to help Aristide counter the millions his main opponent Marc Bazin was receiving from Washington.
His victory Dec. 16, 1990, (see the chapter in this book on "Aristide's crushing victory") produced an outburst of joy both in Haiti and in the diaspora.
The coup against Aristide Sept. 30, 1991, was followed by immediate protests in Washington, Miami, Boston, Montreal and New York, with a major protest in New York announced for Friday, Oct. 11. In the words of the New York Times, "... the police had not expected such a large turnout -- even though the 300,000 members of the Haitian community in New York have shown a readiness to voice their political concerns." (NY Times, October 12, 1991)
"After all," one cop explained to me on that day, "it's a work day. Who'd think so many people would show up?" Not many cops showed up at Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn, even after it was clear that tens of thousands of protesters were going to come out.
The march down Flatbush Avenue to the Brooklyn Bridge filled that wide street. When it got to the bridge, it was clear that the pedestrian walkway was too narrow so the marchers took and filled the entire Manhattan-bound side of the roadway. They started pouring into Manhattan's financial district around 11 a.m. and a large contingent headed toward Battery Park at the tip of Manhattan, where an official rally with speakers and a stage was scheduled. The most common chant was "Democracy or death" and there were a profusion of signs supporting President Aristide and denouncing the coup in English, French and Creole.
Another large contingent decided to go to the Stock Exchange. When they got there, the crowd grew silent, when Wilson Désir, Haiti's Consul-General in New York, mounted the steps of Federal Hall and said: "Not only in New York, but all over the world, Haitian people are demonstrating to tell the world community that Aristide is our leader and we want him back to power. I am asking you here today to continue demonstrating until we have what we want."
Ben Dupuy, then Haiti's ambassador at large, drew large cheers when he announced that the United Nations General Assembly had just passed a resolution condemning the coup.
When he came to speak at the United Nations Sept. 29, 1992, almost a year later, tens of thousands from the Haitian community along with progressive supporters came out. The Haitian communities in New York and elsewhere did keep up the pressure until the United States returned President Aristide on Oct. 15, 1994, not so much to stop the coup but to prevent a revolution.
The AIDS issue also resurfaced after the coup against President Aristide. Over 1,000 people were killed in the first few weeks of the coup and wave after wave of boat people began fleeing the vicious repression afflicting Haiti. Soon thousands of refugees, intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard at sea, were being held and "processed" in unfair hearings at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The vast majority were sent back to Haiti. Less than ten percent got political asylum in the U.S.
The United States Immigration Service stacked up about 300 Haitian refugees in Guantanamo, even though their asylum claims had been approved, because they had AIDS. Unable to legally return them to Haiti, the U.S. government kept these HIV-positive Haitians behind barbed-wire in a dusty, scorpion and rat-infested compound at Guantanamo.
The Haitian community and the Haiti solidarity movement didn't let the issue of the treatment of HIV-positive Haitians drop, even though they were concentrating on developments in Haiti. The demonstrations were small, generally a few hundred, but frequent and militant. About four to five thousand demonstrators did come out on Feb. 7, 1993, for a march through Manhattan on the United Nations. Finally, a federal judge ruled in June of 1993 that it was illegal to keep HIV-positive Haitians in Guantanamo.
A couple of the smaller demonstrations stand out. Under the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree wish the detainees a Merry Christmas. Another small, mainly Haitian demonstration in the Greenwich Village area, a march from the INS office in Lower Manhattan to Washington Square in late fall 1992 -- on the sidewalks. I was talking to a contingent of ACT UP, a predominantly North American gay and lesbian group working militantly around the AIDS issue, that had just joined the demonstration when the march stopped. The sidewalk had run out and the cops had blocked the demonstrators who had taken the street.
A group of older Haitian women were sitting in the street, chanting, when I got to the front of the march. A cop came up and asked: "What are they saying?" A young Haitian man with the ACT UP contingent answered: "The street or death. They grew up under Duvalier." "Oh," was the response. The cop went back to the police commander, who shrugged and let the march proceed.
Struggles around Abner Louima & Patrick Dorismond
August 9, 1997, there was a disturbance outside Club Rendez-vous, a Haitian nightclub on Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn, and the cops grabbed a young Haitian man named Abner Louima. They beat him as they took him to the station house, beat him in the station house and then one of them, Charles Schwartz, held him down while another cop, Justin Volpe, shoved a toilet plunger into his rectum.
Police brutality is not new in the Haitian community, but this depraved infliction of human suffering sparked a wave of anger in the Haitian community and a strong response in the African American and Afro-Caribbean communities. August 16 saw some 20,000 people, mostly Haitians, march from the nightclub where the incident started to the 70th Precinct, where Schwartz and Volpe were assigned.
Chanting "Seven-oh, KKK, got to go," waving Haitian flags and beating drums, dancing in 90-degree heat, the crowd marched on the 70th precinct, where it stayed for nearly four hours, making clear its disgust with the actions of the cops. A number of signs also raised the fact that the United States was using cops from thos ver precinct, the 70th, in Haiti to train the new Haitian National Police to "respect" civil rights. There was another major march on Friday, August 29, 1997, which drew seven to ten thousand people and at least 2,500 cops, according to press reports.
March 16, 2000, two cops tried to entrap Patrick Dorismond in front of a Manhattan nightclub, called the Wakamba Lounge, a few blocks south of Times Square. They asked him if he had marijuana to sell them. Witnesses reported that Dorismond angrily rejected their request. Moments later, a third back-up cop shot and killed the young man who was scuffling with the first cops.
Mayor Rudolph Giuliani further inflamed the crisis in the days after Dorismond's death. At news conferences, Giuliani tried to demonize Dorismond as having been "no altar boy." (Actually, he had been one.) The mayor illegally produced juvenile arrest records that had merely resulted in two disorderly conduct pleas and a sealed juvenile arrest made when Dorismond was 13 years old.
Dorismond was a 26-year-old worker and came from a well-known Haitian family. On March 18, two days after he was killed,, a thousand people marched from the Wakamba Lounge through midtown Manhattan and blocked traffic to protest the killing. The people who marched -- Dorismond's family, neighbors, fellow workers, members of the Haitian community, African Americans, progressive whites -- expressed their grief and anger, as well as their determination to stop police brutality in New York. Phannon, a neighbor of the Dorismonds who had watched Patrick grow up, told me: "I am one angry Haitian woman. This is the last one. We don't need another. There won't be another."
Close to 20,000 angry Haitians and their allies joined Dorismond's funeral procession March 25, 2000. People sang, danced, drummed and shouted slogans against the police, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Police Commissioner Howard Safir. Some carried placards recalling the many victims of police violence. Others denounced the mayor as a "lougarou," a demon in Haitian folklore that sucks the blood of babies. The Haitian flag was seen everywhere.
In front of the Holy Cross Church where the funeral rites were held, a rebellion erupted as the body was carried out. Four demonstrators and 23 cops were injured and 27 people were arrested -- including an 80-year-old man and a pregnant woman who police brutally dragged by her hair.
There was another demonstration April 20, 2000, the tenth anniversary of the 1990 AIDS march, that was fueled by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's continued defamation of Dorismond. Over 10,000 people, mostly Haitian, marched from Grand Army Plaza in Brooklyn across the Brooklyn Bridge to rally in front of City Hall in lower Manhattan. "Uproot Giuliani" -- in Creole, "Giuliani, rache manyòk ou" -- was the sentiment expressed by most who marched.
Daniel Simidor, who chaired the rallies at both ends of the march, said, "Giuliani killed Patrick Dorismond twice: once with a bullet and the other with his mouth." At the opening of the first rally, he said, "This is a protest against police brutality inflicted on any person of color" -- Haitian, Jamaican, Latino or African-American.
Because of the revolutionary history of Haiti, both in the struggle against the French and the struggle against the U.S.-backed Duvalier dictatorships, Haitians in the Tenth Department, especially in New York City, came out in massive numbers against issues that affected them. They had an influence on the wider progressive community in New York, from the AIDS movement and the Afro-American, African and Caribbean-American communities that also have to confront police brutality and racism.
What stands out about these protests is that the most significant ones took place on workdays, which meant that their participants were engaging in a one-day strike and lost a day's pay to express their political views. This is not common in U.S. protests. In addition Haitian demonstrations have drawn a significant proportion of that community out into the streets, even though it is an immigrant community subject to pressures from the INS.
The 29 years Haitians spent protesting the Duvalier dictatorships has instilled in the fabric of that community a militancy and a spirit of struggle which have inspired progressives of all nationalities in New York and indeed, throughout the U.S.
===============
Go to: Haiti: A Slave Revolution 200 years after 1804 Table of Contents
To buy this book online with a credit card
To buy this book in person or through the U.S. mail
International Action Center
39 West 14th Street, Room 206
New York, NY 10011
email: iacenter@action-mail.org
En Espanol: iac-cai@action-mail.org
web: http://www.iacenter.org
CHECK OUT SITE http://www.mumia2000.org
phone: 212 633-6646
fax: 212 633-2889
To make a tax-deductible donation,
go to http://www.peoplesrightsfund.org
