“Go Tell the World: Africa and Haiti’s enduring Gifts to the (Western) World”

A pioneer from Haiti founded the great city of Chicago: Jean-Baptiste Point DuSable. Now, the first elected U.S. Pope in history is also from Chicago: Cardinal Robert Francis Prevost (“Pope Leo XIV”). DuSable and Pope Leo XIV—the most powerful person of the Roman Catholic expression of the Christian faith—have Haitian roots 🇭🇹 and of African ancestry.

Through Haiti, Africa has poured forth its gifts 🎁 upon the Western world—echoes of resilience, rhythm, revolution, heroic leadership, human freedom—including:

1. The first Black Governor: Toussaint Louverture
2. The first Black President: Jean-Jacques Dessalines
3. The first Black Emperor: Jean-Jacques Dessalines (Jacques I)
4. The first Black King: Henry Christophe
5. The first Black woman President: Ertha Pascal-Trouillot
6. The only country in the world that had a successful slave revolution and the first independent country in the Western world that abolished slavery.

Haiti may be a small nation currently facing political turmoil and humanitarian crises—what the great African American poet Langston Hughes once called paradoxically a ‘troubled island’—yet it remains a profoundly influential country with a complex and impactful social and political history in the global human story.