In 1791, fearless Black slaves in this Caribbean French colony unleashed the first ever and only successful Black slave revolution in history, the Haitian Revolution.

In 1804, rebel troops vanquished France's Napoleon Bonaparte's most elite troops sent to quelch the rebellion, and Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the leader of the revolution founded the nation of Haiti as a refuge for freedom, and human rights for all people.  

 

Haiti thus became the first nation in the world to ban the practice of slavery in its laws, the first Black republic in the world, and the second republic founded in the Americas after the U.S. which did not ban slavery until 1863, some 50 years later.

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Haitians then marched on and freed their next-door neighbors on the same island, the Dominican Republic, from the Spanish, and banned slavery there too. And then later helped free Bolivia, Venezuela, Panama, Cuba, and other enslaved peoples in the region

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THE FIRST NATION CREATED
ON THE PRINCIPLE OF
FREEDOM FOR ALL PEOPLE