Another Black Massacre Cover Up In Western Education
For a one-week period in 1937, up to 25,000 Haitian men, women and children were murdered by Dominican soldiers and civilian conscripts. Some of them were shot, but most were beaten or hacked to death with swords and machetes.
The massacre was carried out as an ethnic cleansing of Haitians by the ruthless, anti-Haitian dictator Rafael Trujillo. An estimated 200,000 Haitians in search of work, migrated to the Dominican Republic between 1910 and 1930. As a result of the massacre, virtually the entire Haitian population in the Dominican frontier was either killed or forced to flee across the border. Some drowned while trying to flee to Haiti across the Dajabón River that divides the two countries on the island.
The story of the genocide is little known in Haiti and the Dominican Republic and it will likely not be taught in Florida schools after the state Department of Education, at the behest of Republican Gov. Ron DeSantis, ruled on Thursday that schools will not be allowed to offer a new Advanced Placement course on African American history because it “significantly lacks educational value.” Schools, however, are free to offer an Advance Placement course on European history.
The Haitian genocide of 1937, known as the “Parsley Massacre,” is not commonly taught in American schools nor is it included in history books in the Dominican or Haitian schools. The massacre is but one more example of mass brutality against people of color that have been carefully expunged from western history books.
The shibboleth got its name from the practice when the Dominican soldiers found someone they considered suspicious. The soldiers would hold out a sprig of parsley or perejil, in Spanish, and ask the suspect what it was.
Haitians primarily speak French and the French-based Haitian Creole, while Dominicans speak Spanish. Haitians, even those fluent in Spanish, often pronounce the “r” in perejil with a flat “y” sound, while Dominicans give it a heavy trill. Failure to trill the “r” meant death, regardless of age or gender.
Dominicans still refer to the massacre as “el corte” (the cutting) and Haitians know it as kouto-a (the knife).
After word of the massacre leaked out, the Dominican government told the world that the massacre was a spontaneous skirmish by Dominican farmers protecting their property and livestock from Haitian thieves. The Dominican government later defended the massacre as a response to illegal immigration by “undesirable” Haitians, and recognized “no responsibility whatsoever” for the killings.
Dictator Trujillo was reported to have ordered the killings of Haitians in response to reports of Haitians stealing cattle and crops from Dominican borderland residents. Armed forces killed Haitians with rifles, machetes, shovels, knives, and bayonets. Haitian children were reportedly thrown in the air and caught by soldiers’ bayonets, then thrown on their mothers’ corpses.
At first, Haitian President Sténio Vincent prohibited any discussion of the massacre and “declared that the good relations between Haiti and the Dominican Republic have not suffered any damage.” The U.S. eventually learned of the attacks and President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Vincent sought reparations of $750,000. The Dominican government paid $525,000 ($9,896,006.94 in 2021 dollars), or around $30 per victim. But because of deep corruption, survivors on average received only 2 cents each.
No high ranking Dominican government official was ever prosecuted or sentenced for the massacre. The Dominican and Haitian governments reached a peaceful resolution in early 1938, and a report by League of Nations said that neither Trujillo nor his government shared any present or future responsibility for the massacre.
Haiti gained independence in 1804 from France in a revolution led by former slaves. Haitian troops occupied the Dominican Republic, then ruled by Spain, for 22 years, to 1844, when the Dominican Republic won its own independence. Many poor Haitians continued to find work in the Dominican sugar cane fields.
Relations between the two nations have long been strained by competition for resources, often exacerbated by the U.S. The Dominican Republic, formerly the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo, occupies five-eighths of the land with 10 million inhabitants. Haiti, the former French colony of Saint-Domingue, is on the western side of the island and has about the same population as Santa Domingo, but with an estimated 200 people per square kilometer.
America supported the future dictator Trujillo, who was trained in the U.S., rose through the ranks of the National Guard and with the help of the U.S. Marines, was instrumental in establishing his base of support within the Dominican armed forces. Trujillo ruled the Dominican Republic from February 1930 until his CIA-sponsored assassination in May 1961. By 1960, Trujillo had amassed a net worth of $800 million ($8.02 billion today).
The history of Haiti and the Dominican Republic are fraught with U.S. domination. After 28 revolutions in 50 years, the U.S. invaded the Dominican Republic, occupying the island through 1924. In 1916, the Marines landed in the Dominican Republic and established effective control of the country within two months. That year, U.S. occupations of Haiti and the Dominican Republic led to clashes that killed 290 Marines, more than 3,000 Haitians, and hundreds of Dominicans.
It was one of the many interventions in Latin America undertaken by U.S. military forces in the 20th century. Combined with the U.S. occupation of Haiti, the Marines controlled all of Hispaniola “through censorship, intimidation, fear, and military force,” according to one Dominican observer.
The finances of Haiti and the Dominican Republic were controlled by National City Bank of New York, which allowed American businesses to acquire Dominican properties to cultivate sugar. American corporations forced Haitians to migrate to the Dominican Republic and work on sugar plantations in poor conditions while Marines spread white supremacist ideology based on Jim Crow laws existing in the U.S.
Enmity has continued through the years between Haiti and the Dominican Republic. In 2013, the Dominican Republic’s Constitutional Court ruled to retroactively bar citizenship from Dominicans born after 1929 who do not have at least one parent of Dominican blood, effectively denationalizing an estimated 250,000 Haitian immigrants born after 1929. For the first time in its 169 years of existence, the Dominican Republic defines Dominican identity in terms of racial and linguistic characteristics.
In 2021, the Dominican Republic announced plans to build a fence along its border with Haiti, which extends for about 236 miles. In 2022, the Dominican Republic increased deportations of Haitians and created a police unit focused on foreigners. It is estimated that about 500,000 Haitian migrants are living in the country — many of them there illegally.
The massacre of the Haitians was but the latest in a history of violence between the two countries. After Haiti established its independence on Jan. 1, 1804, Haitians sought to control the whole island, which led to a 22-year Haitian military occupation of the east (1822–1844) and a series of invasions (1805–1857).
In 1805, the so-called “Beheadings of Moca” was part of a series of violent incursions by Haitians. Raids were carried out by 40,000 Haitian soldiers who killed an estimated 500 Dominicans and beheaded 40 children. The event was described in Haiti as an effort to fight slavery in Santo Domingo.
One particularly brutal massacre participant was the Haitian, Jean Zombi. One time, Zombi stopped a white man on the street, stripped him naked, and took him to the stair of the Presidential Palace, where he killed him with a dagger. In Haitian Vodou tradition, the figure of Jean Zombi has become a prototype for the zombie.
By the end of April 1804, Haitians had killed 3,000 to 5,000 people and white Haitians were practically eradicated. The Haitian constitution also banned white men from owning land, except for people already born or born in the future to white women who were naturalized as Haitian citizens and the Germans and Poles who got Haitian citizenship. The “Beheadings of Moca” helped to create a legacy of racial hostility in Haitian society.