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Lost Among the Debris: History

haiti1.jpg
According to a caption in today’s New York Times, the AP Photo above shows “Looters on Monday at the house of former President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, where family and school pictures lay among the debris.” (Haitian Rebels Enter Capital; Aristide Bitter, by Tim Weiner and Lydia Polgreen)
What is not stated, is that the painting in the foreground depicts Toussaint L’Ouverture, the revolutionary who lead the slave revolt that brought freedom to Haiti, the first free Black republic in the world.
This would be like seeing a painting of Thomas Jefferson or George Washington amid a pile of post-revolution trash at the White House and calling it “personal effects and ephemera.”
See also: The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (non-fiction account);
All Souls’ Rising, by Madison Smartt Bell (fictionalized account).

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