Black History Month: Haiti and the Architecture of Freedom
Cap-Haitien’s historic Cathedral in the city center, photo taken in September 2025
In 1779, before the United States became a sovereign nation, more than 500 Black soldiers from Saint-Domingue crossed the Atlantic to fight in the American Revolutionary War.
They fought at the Siege of Savannah, one of the most brutal battles of the revolution, as part of the Chasseurs-Volontaires de Saint-Domingue, a battalion of men who volunteered their lives to fight against the British colonists. After their service, many of these men returned home to Haiti, carrying the memory of what could be won when individuals refused to accept the terms of their oppression; and then ignited a revolution of their own.
Twenty-five years later, they won it.
On January 1, 1804, Haiti became the first Black republic and the first nation in the western hemisphere to permanently abolish slavery. Haiti’s freedom was won, at extraordinary cost, from Napoleon's France, one of the most powerful colonial empires on earth. The United States gained a tremendous amount of territory due to the Louisiana purchase - a direct consequence of the Haitian Revolution. Other reverberations of this historic event are still evident today.
The liberator Simón Bolívar was also greatly influenced by the Haitian Revolution. When his own campaigns for South American independence faltered, it was Haiti's President Alexandre Pétion who sheltered him, armed him, and sent him back to Venezuela with soldiers and supplies — asking only that he abolish slavery in the lands he freed. The independence of Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia all carry a Haitian thread.
Jean Baptiste Point du Sable — son of a Haitian mother — built the first permanent settlement at the mouth of the Chicago River in the 1780s and is recognized today as the founder of Chicago. Rodolphe Lucien Desdunes, an American civil rights activist in New Orleans with Haitian roots, helped organize the legal challenge that became Plessy v. Ferguson — one of the most consequential civil rights cases in American history. Edwidge Danticat, born in Port-au-Prince, became the first Haitian American to receive a MacArthur Grant, and has written several bestselling novels, essays, and short stories that serve as vessels of the Haitian experience at home and abroad.
Haiti’s history reminds us that the world can always be made differently than it was found. At SOIL, we are proud to have spent twenty years working alongside Haitian community organizers, public servants, students, and changemakers to realize a brighter future for Haiti, where waste is transformed to resource and human dignity is afforded to all. What we have witnessed in these two decades of work has not made us charitable, it has made us humble.
We are humbled by our clients, who make ends meet for their families despite impossible circumstances. By the hard work of our compost team, who, year after year, transform hundreds of tons of human waste into living soil. By the artists, the musicians, the teachers, and the organizers who carry the work of 1804 forward not as history, but as a daily practice.
Haiti does not need charity. It is owed respect.
This Black History Month, we choose to shine a light on Ayiti, her people, and our team here at SOIL.