Jacob Lawrence was an African American painter whose 1938 Toussaint series — including 'General Toussaint L'Ouverture' — made the Haitian Revolution part of Black modern historical art.
Renda places his work inside the wider Harlem Renaissance effort to reclaim Haiti as a source of Black political imagination rather than imperial spectacle: where marines and travel writers had presented Haiti as primitive backdrop, Lawrence drew on Toussaint and revolutionary history to produce heroic, modern Black visual culture. His image of Toussaint moves Haiti from ethnographic object to historical subject, linking the revolution cluster to twentieth-century American art and African American responses to the occupation.
In the ScholarshipHow historians have read this figure.
How historians and scholars have interpreted this figure across different analytical traditions.
Renda's Taking Haiti situates Jacob Lawrence's Haitian Revolution series (1937–1938) within the Harlem Renaissance's engagement with Haiti — reading it as a visual counter-narrative to the occupation's justifying ideology. Renda argues that Lawrence's choice to paint the Haitian Revolution at the moment when the U.S. was completing its withdrawal (1934) was a political as well as artistic act: a reclamation of Haitian revolutionary history as a story of Black liberation rather than of chaos and barbarism requiring American management. Lawrence's series transforms the occupation's racial narrative through the very medium that the occupation's visual culture had used to construct it — producing images that demanded a different relationship between Black American viewers and the Haitian history the occupation had disfigured.
Lawrence's Haitian Revolution series was a political reclamation — transforming the occupation's racial narrative through the very visual medium the occupation had used to construct it, demanding a different relationship to Haitian history.
TimelineAcross the historical record.
- 1915
U.S. Occupation of Haiti
His Haiti-facing work was part of the Depression-era Black artistic response to the occupation, refusing its reduction of Haiti to primitive spectacle.
RelationshipsPeople connected to this life.
- Allied withArna Bontemps
Both are part of the Harlem Renaissance Haiti cluster documented by Renda — writers, artists, and performers who turned to revolutionary Haiti for Black political imagination.
- Allied withAugusta Savage
Both appear in Renda's occupation-afterlife chapter as Black visual artists who reclaimed Haiti as revolutionary archive; Savage's 'La Citadelle — Freedom' parallels Lawrence's Toussaint series.