At the same time that localities across the country are in the process of erasing monuments to Confederates and slave-owners, New York City is preparing to honor a black man who ordered the murder of every white man, woman, and child under his control, resulting in 3,000 to 5,000 race homicides.

In New York City, street co-namings – in which a thoroughfare takes on an additional, ceremonial name in honor of a distinguished figure – rarely generate much fuss, and their approval is typically pro forma. But yesterday, a city council committee voted to co-name a street in Brooklyn after Jean-Jacques Dessalines, emperor of Haiti after the island won its independence from France in 1804. The council's designation of a two-mile stretch of Rogers Avenue in Brooklyn as Jean-Jacques Dessalines Boulevard sparked some controversy because Dessalines was an enthusiastic advocate of racial murder. Following the defeat of Napoleon's forces and their retreat from Hispaniola, Dessalines named himself Governor-General-for-Life and decided to wipe the slate clean. Heeding the words of his personal secretary Louis Boisrond-Tonnerre, framer of the Haitian Act of Independence, who declaimed, "we should use the skin of a white man as a parchment, his skull as an inkwell, his blood for ink, and a bayonet for a pen," Dessalines ordered the murder of virtually every white man, followed soon afterward by all white women and children, in the new nation. Between 3,000 and 5,000 people were butchered in a few months.



Jean-Jacques Dessalines (portrait by Louis Rigaud).

As Barron observes, Haiti's history is bloody and terrible, and there was no shortage of horrendous acts against the slaves brought to Haiti to cultivate sugarcane. In that perspective, perhaps the race massacre ordered by Dessalines is understandable, at least as vengeance.

But the man was what today we call an ethnic cleanser or even a genocider. Ethnic cleansing results when one group feels so aggrieved by another group that it collectively decides that mass murder is appropriate until the last member of the enemy group available is killed.

Vengeance is clearly on the mind of some in New York:

Rodneyse Bichotte, a Brooklyn member of the state assembly who claims direct descent from Dessalines, defended the excesses of the Haitian revolutionaries as a legitimate response to oppression, and said that Dessalines "sought to stop those who were evil." She also made pointed reference to "George Washington, the first President of this great mighty state, who sold slaves for a keg of molasses," and "our beloved Abraham Lincoln, who expressed opposition to racial equality." Jumaane Williams, the council member who sponsored the co-naming legislation, said that "most of the world owes a debt to Haiti that has never been repaid." Considering the insulting remarks toward Haiti made by the "orange bigot in the White House," he said, the co-naming of Rogers Avenue is "the least we can do."

There seems to be nobody on the left who is willing to speak out against the madness.