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From Revolution to Reparations: Black August and Haiti’s Ongoing Struggle for Freedom
Haiti’s struggle for restitution is not a historical footnote—it is the next chapter in the global struggle for Black liberation.
Aug 30, 2025
As we mark Black August, the struggle that launched the global fight for Black liberation—the Haitian Revolution—remains unfinished. Over 200 years after enslaved Haitians lit the first beacon of Black resistance in August 1791 and set a precedent for abolition by winning their freedom, they are fighting the next chapter in the struggle for Black economic and political liberation—one that could set another precedent, this time for reparative justice.
On August 22, 1791, Haitians revolted against their French enslavers, liberating themselves and forming the world’s first free Black Republic, and the first country to abolish enslavement. The Haitian Revolution was not just a simple victory against one of the world’s most powerful empires. It was a global rupture, proof that Black freedom was possible and European domination was not inevitable. It lit the fire of revolution globally, inspiring enslaved and colonized people worldwide. As Frederick Douglass, one of the 19th century’s leading advocates for Black rights in the United States, said in his speech to the 1893 World’s Fair in Chicago, “[in] striking for their freedom, [Haitians]... struck for the freedom of every black man in the world.”
France and other enslaving countries realized the power of the Haitian Revolution as a herald of global Black liberation and a threat to their supremacy. They sought to punish Haiti for the crime of being Black and free. In 1825, France sent a fleet of 14 warships equipped with 528 canons to Port-au-Prince and demanded that Haiti pay 150 million francs as compensation for the loss of what they considered their “property,” including captive Haitians. In exchange for this payment, France would recognize Haiti’s independence—an independence already paid for by the blood and lives of the Haitians who fought Napoleon’s army and won.
The strength of Haiti’s claim poses just as much of a threat to the global white supremacist order now as the success of Haiti’s revolution did in 1804.
Under threat of attack and re-enslavement, Haitian President Jean-Pierre Boyer and his allies agreed to pay. The ransom—and subsequent extortionate loans by French banks to finance payments—crushed Haiti’s economy, prevented it from investing in its own development, and left it vulnerable to foreign intervention and exploitation that further impoverished and destabilized the country. Many of the conditions used to paint Haiti as a “failed state” today can be traced directly to that original grave injustice.
The Independence Ransom and other measures delayed broader liberation, but the promise of Black freedom and autonomy that Haiti gave the world remained alive. In his speech, Douglass called Haiti “the Black man’s country, now forever”—and Haitians are still fighting for their freedom and inspiring others. These are the struggles we honor during Black August, born in the 1970s in California’s prison system to commemorate the lives and assassinations of revolutionary brothers Jonathan and George Jackson: the Nat Turner rebellion in Virginia in August 1831; the March on Washington on August 28, 1963; and every uprising that has dared to defy enslavement and racial capitalism.
This August, Haiti stands at the heart of another urgent struggle: the fight for restitution for the Independence Ransom. Calls for France to pay restitution have increased in recent years, not just from Haitians but from all around the world. The strength of Haiti’s claim poses just as much of a threat to the global white supremacist order now as the success of Haiti’s revolution did in 1804. In fact, when the United States and its powerful allies realized the power of Haiti’s claim to balance the global economy in 2004, they overthrew Haiti’s democracy rather than risk its claim succeeding.
Haiti’s struggle for restitution is not a historical footnote—it is the next chapter in the global struggle for Black liberation. Restitution would not only address the grave injustice done to Haiti, it would also lay a powerful legal and political foundation for broader reparations. Just as Haitians won their freedom in 1804, they will eventually win restitution for themselves and unlock the door to reparations for all. But that victory will require sustained pressure—on France, the United States, and the banks and companies that facilitated and profited off this economic extraction—not just from Haitians, but from all people who wish to honor the memories of those who paid the ultimate price in the fight for liberation. This means support for restitution, but also for a democratic, sovereign government that will assert the claim and otherwise be accountable to the Haitian people.
This Black August is not just a commemoration, it is a call to action. It is a call to join the 60-plus leading organizations from Haiti, the United States, the Caribbean, France, and beyond that sent a letter to French President Emmanuel Macron demanding restitution and reparations. And it is, above all, a call to remember Haitians’ pivotal role in the global Black struggle for liberation and to recommit ourselves to the unfinished work they started in 1791.
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Sorry, Trump, Slavery Was Horrific and Central to the Rise of American Capitalism
Capitalist cotton slavery was how United States seized control of the lucrative world market for cotton, emerging thereby as a rich and influential nation.
Aug 28, 2025
The malevolent racist and fascist leader Donald Trump, aka “the president of the United States,” has recently ordered a review of the national Smithsonian museums’s presentation of US history, complaining that the museums focus too much on “how bad slavery was” and on other wrongdoings in the noble American record. Trump grumbles that public exhibits on past problems like Native American genocide and Black slavery are nasty, “woke,” and “radical left” distractions from the bigger and more inspiring story of white-ruled America’s glorious rise to capitalist wealth and power. He wants mindless patriotic celebration, not factually informed criticism.
This raises two interesting and curiously related questions:
- How bad was the Black chattel slave system that reigned across the US South from the Declaration of Independence until abolition during and after the Civil War?
- What did that system have to do with America’s supposedly glorious rise to wealth and power?
The answer to the first question depends in no small part on what strikes one as bad. If you are a racist Amerikaner pig like Trump and many of his backers, you are likely to think that US slavery wasn’t bad at all because it subjected people you hate, fear, and view as inferior and unworthy to deserved oppression, control, and exploitation. You might even think, like the demented racist Dinesh D’Souza, that slavery was good for the slaves because it provided paternalistic discipline and direction to lazy, childlike savages.
If you are a decent person with a heart for humanity regardless of skin color, however, you are right to suspect that slavery was not merely bad but horrific almost beyond words—a monumental crime at the heart and soul of an imperialist and capitalist nation that remains starkly racist partly because of its failure to deal honestly and seriously with the reality and legacy of that foundational transgression.
The answer to the second question depends on whether or not you are willing to look into some cold hard facts on slavery’s centrality to the rise of the United States as a power in the world capitalist system.
What “Made the United States Powerful and Rich”
Historian Edward Baptist’s 2014 study, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, eviscerated Americans’ tendency to see slavery as a quaint and archaic “premodern institution” that had nothing really to do with the United States’ rise to wealth and power. In this tendency, slavery becomes something “outside of US history,” even an antiquated “drag” on that history.
That tendency replicates a fundamental misunderstanding curiously shared by antislavery abolitionists and slavery advocates before the Civil War. While the two sides of the slavery debate differed on the system’s morality, they both saw slavery as an inherently unprofitable and static system that was out of touch with the pace of industrialization and the profit requirements of modern capitalist business enterprise.
Nothing, Baptist shows, could have been further from the truth. Unlike what many abolitionists thought, the savagery and torture perpetrated against slaves in the South was about much more than sadism and psychopathy on the part of slave traders, owners, and drivers. Slavery, Baptist demonstrates, was an incredibly cost-efficient method for extracting surplus value from human beings, far superior in that regard to “free” (wage) labor in the onerous work of planting and harvesting cotton. It was an especially brutal form of capitalism, driven by ruthless yet economically “rational” torture along with a dehumanizing ideology of racism.
It wasn’t just the South, home to the four wealthiest US states on the eve of the Civil War, where investors profited handsomely from the forced cotton labor of Black slaves. By the 1840s, Baptist shows, the “free labor North” had “built a complex industrialized economy on the backs of enslaved people and their highly profitable cotton labor.” Cotton picked by Southern slaves provided the critical cheap raw material for early Northern industrialization and the formation of a new Northern wage-earning populace with money to purchase new and basic commodities.
At the same time, the rapidly expanding slavery frontier itself provided a major market for early Northern manufactured goods: clothes, hats, cotton collection bags, axes, shoes, and much more. Numerous infant industries, technologies, and markets spun off from the textile-based industrial revolution in the North. Along the way, shipment of cotton to England (the world’s leading industrial power) produced fortunes for Northern merchants and innovative new financial instruments and methods were developed to provide capital for, and speculate on, the slavery-based cotton boom.
All told, Baptist calculates, by 1836 nearly half the nation’s economy activity derived directly and indirectly from the roughly 1 million Black slaves (just 6% of the national population) who toiled on the nation’s Southern cotton frontier. Sectional differences aside, The Half Has Never Been Told shows that “the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the United States powerful and rich” decades before the Civil War.
Capitalist cotton slavery was how United States seized control of the lucrative world market for cotton, the critical raw material for the Industrial Revolution, emerging thereby as a rich and influential nation in the world capitalist system by the second third of the 19th century.
“Crimes Which Would Disgrace a Nation of Savages”
The returns were wrung through soul-numbing exploitation overlaid with savage racist torture. Chronicling the horrifying violence and terror inflicted on millions of Black Americans who suffered in bondage over the eight decades between US national independence (1783) and the US Civil War (1861-1865), Baptist documents how the Southern slave engine of American capitalist accumulation murdered Blacks in huge numbers and “stole everything” from surviving slaves through “the massive and cruel engineering required to rip a million people from their homes, brutally drive them to new, disease-ridden places, and make them live in terror and hunger as they continually built and rebuilt a commodity-generating empire…”
Over a generation, The Half Has Never Been Told shows, the infant US South grew from a thin coastal belt of burned-out tobacco plantations into a giant continental Empire of Cotton. This remarkable expansion was rooted in regular and ferocious white violence. The brutality and bloodshed included mass-murderous Indian Removal (cotton slavery required constant Westward territorial extension), forced slave migrations, the endemic fracturing of slave families, and he ubiquitous and systematic torture of Black slaves. As Baptist observes:
In the sources that document the expansion of cotton production, you can find at one point or another almost every product sold in New Orleans stores converted into an instrument of torture [used on slaves]: carpenters’ tools, chains, cotton presses, hackles, handsaws, hoe handles, irons for branding livestock, nails, pokers, smoothing irons, singletrees, steelyards, tongs. Every modern method of torture was used at one time or another: sexual humiliation, mutilation, electric shocks, solitary confinement in “stress positions,” burning, even waterboarding… descriptions of runaways posted by enslavers were festooned with descriptions of scars, burns, mutilations, brands, and wounds.
“What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” the great abolitionist Frederick Douglass asked in 1852. “A day,” Douglass answered, “that reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim.” Further:
To him, your celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your religious parade, and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud, deception, impiety, and hypocrisy—a thin veil to cover up crimes which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on the earth guilty of practices, more shocking and bloody, than are the people of these United States, at this very hour… Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last, lay your facts by the side of the everyday practices of this nation, and you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival.
Mein Trumpf’s Beloved Confederacy
The slave state Confederacy (1861-65) formed, seceded from the United States, and waged a Civil War against the nation’s non-slave states—an epic struggle that cost more than half a million lives—precisely to defend and preserve “the gross injustice and cruelty” of Black chattel slavery. The “cornerstone” of the Southern secessionist government, Confederacy Vice President Alexander Stephens explained on March 21, 1861, was “the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man, that slavery subordination to the superior race is his natural and normal condition.”
The Nazi regime of the 1930s and 1940s also believed (to say the least) in the natural inferiority of certain subordinated races (as did late 20th century right-wing US academics like Charles Murray, Richard Herrnstein, and Stephen Pinker). Such was the harsh reality of the treasonous breakaway Southern government whose “beautiful monuments and statues” the deranged white supremacist and fascist thug Trump has called “ours” and considered “part of a Great American Heritage” of “Winning, Victory, and Freedom.”
This history is worth keeping in mind after Trump47 and his white nationalist Christian fascist Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have sickeningly and tellingly ordered the renaming of US military bases after Confederate Slave Power military leaders and “war heroes.” Hegseth is the member of an evangelical sect whose pastor claims that the best period in US race relations was the slave era.
Plenty of Trump’s neo-Confederate supporters would like nothing more than the restoration of Black enslavement, trust me.
A “Quintessential American Story”
Some words on Thomas Jefferson, the removal of whose statue from New York City Hall once sparked Trump’s anger… One of many wealthy white widowers who used young Black female slaves for sexual release before and after the American “revolution” (which was fought partly to ensure the survival and expansion of North American Black chattel slavery), the author of the Declaration of Independence enjoyed prominence as a “revolutionary leader” while keeping some of his own children as slaves.
Henry Wiencek’s rightly heralded volume, Master of the Mountain: Thomas Jefferson and His Slaves (2012) dug into previously overlooked evidence in Jefferson’s papers and archaeological work at Jefferson’s Monticello site to paint a depressing picture of Jefferson’s stunted, penny-pinching world. As one reviewer noted:
Wiencek’s Jefferson is a man of business and public affairs who makes a success of his debt-ridden plantation thanks to what he calls the “silent profits” gained from his slaves and thanks to a skewed moral universe that he and thousands of others readily inhabited. We see Jefferson taking out a slave-equity line of credit with a Dutch bank to finance the building of Monticello and deftly creating smoke screens when visitors are dismayed by his apparent endorsement of a system they thought he’d vowed to overturn. It is not a pretty story. Slave boys are whipped to make them work in the nail factory at Monticello that pays Jefferson’s grocery bills. Parents are divided from children in his ledgers… Slaves are bought, sold, given as gifts, and used as collateral for the loan that pays for Monticello’s construction—while Jefferson composes theories that obscure the dynamics of what he himself called “the execrable commerce.” Many people saw a catastrophe coming and tried to stop it, but not Jefferson. The pursuit of happiness had become deeply corrupted, and an oligarchy was getting very rich. Is this the quintessential American story?
A quintessential American story indeed, one that is embodied very well in the history of Trump himself, son of a Klansman.
How bad was Black chattel slavery? For decent human beings it was horrific and criminal—religious humanists commonly join 19th-century abolitionists in calling it sinful—almost beyond words and moral comprehension! And this epic crime of “revolting barbarity” lay at the underlying material-historical and historical-material heart and foundation of the rise of the white supremacist American capitalism that the depraved real estate parasite and fascist leader Trump wants to see more properly celebrated in the national culture.
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Racist Trump Rebuked for Demanding Smithsonian Stop Focusing on 'How Bad Slavery Was'
The White House said it would expand its review of museums' historical content to other institutions after it holds the Smithsonian "accountable."
Aug 20, 2025
A week after the White House announced it was examining the Smithsonian museums' exhibits to ensure they align with President Donald Trump's own "interpretation of American history," the president on Tuesday said the publicly funded museum system is "out of control" and contains materials that are overly negative about one of the most significant aspects of U.S. history: chattel slavery and its legacy.
"Everything discussed is how horrible our Country is, how bad Slavery was, and how unaccomplished the downtrodden have been—Nothing about Success, nothing about Brightness, nothing about the Future," said the president on his social media platform, Truth Social.
Trump's comments came days after Russell Vought, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, sent a letter to the Smithsonian—which includes 21 museums, 14 educational centers, and a zoo—ordering officials at eight of its museums to turn over information about exhibits that are being planned to commemorate the United States' 250th anniversary next year.
The officials were given 120 days to adjust the "tone, historical framing, and alignment with American ideals" to match the administration's view of history—which, judging from Trump's comments, doesn't include the history of how Black Americans were impacted by enslavement, despite the fact that Republicans at the party's 2020 national convention claimed credit for abolishing the practice.
"Anyone who thinks there’s ANYTHING GOOD about enslaving human beings has no business running ANY country… much less the world's most influential democracy," said U.S. Rep. Jim McGovern (D-Mass.) in response to Trump's comments.
The White House also pushed the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History this month to remove references to the president's two impeachment trials—once for pressuring Ukraine to investigate his political opponents and once for inciting his followers to attack the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.
"Anyone who thinks there's ANYTHING GOOD about enslaving human beings has no business running ANY country… much less the world's most influential democracy."
In May, NBC News reported that after Trump issued his executive order demanding the Smithsonian take down exhibits that he claimed "divide Americans based on race," officials removed at least 32 artifacts from the National Museum of African American History and Culture, including a hymn book owned by Harriet Tubman, a former slave who later fought for the abolishment of the institution.
The White House told NBC News Tuesday that Trump plans to hold the Smithsonian "accountable" and "then go from there," expanding his review of museums to other institutions.
In his post at Truth Social Tuesday, Trump said his attorneys will "go through the Museums, and start the exact same process that has been done with Colleges and Universities where tremendous progress has been made"—a reference to the pressure the White House has placed on universities including Columbia and Harvard to suppress academic freedom and curb free speech.
The administration has pushed some schools to end diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives while coercing hundreds of millions of dollars in settlement payments.
Presidential historian Douglas Brinkley told The New York Times Tuesday that it was "the epitome of dumbness to criticize the Smithsonian for dealing with the reality of slavery in America."
"It's what led to our Civil War and is a defining aspect of our national history," said Brinkley. "And the Smithsonian deals in a robust way with what slavery was, but it also deals with human rights and civil rights in equal abundance."
Cornell William Brooks, a professor at Harvard, warned that "the SAME propaganda that said slavery wasn't so bad allowed people to feel so good about lynchings they mailed thousands of postcards" showing people who were lynched at public gatherings.
"My enslaved ancestors were kidnapped to South Carolina and subsequently beaten, raped, and humiliated," said Brooks. "'Brightness' is IN the history. Read the slavery narratives, talk to some Black people, OR just visit our powerful Smithsonian museums."
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