The Black Lives Matter movement that erupted across the United States following the police killing of George Floyd in May 2020 resonated deeply in Haitian communities both in the diaspora and in Haiti itself, connecting American struggles against anti-Black racism and police violence to Haitian experiences of state brutality, systematic inequality, and the ongoing struggle for dignity and justice.
Haitian Americans were prominent participants in Black Lives Matter protests in cities across the United States, bringing their dual consciousness as Black Americans and as members of the diaspora of the world’s first Black republic to demonstrations that felt connected to a much longer arc of Black liberation history. For many Haitian Americans, the movement felt like an extension of the values that had driven the Haitian Revolution more than two centuries earlier.
In Haiti, commentators drew explicit connections between the American protests and Haiti’s own PetroCaribe accountability movement, noting parallel demands for justice, accountability, and the end of systems that exploited and endangered Black lives. The Haitian protest movement’s language of dignity and accountability resonated with the Black Lives Matter framework in ways that Haitian activists found both validating and illuminating.
Cultural figures in both Haiti and the diaspora used the moment to revisit Haiti’s role in the broader Black Atlantic tradition — as the site of the only successful slave revolution in history, as a country that had paid dearly for its assertion of Black freedom, and as a nation whose struggles remained connected to the global struggle for racial justice that the summer of 2020 had brought to the world’s attention.