The Haitian Revolution (1789–1804) in Saint-Domingue (later Haiti) and the African Protestant movement in the early United States coincided to produce a collective of protest literature by Black authors against the unequal treatment and inhumane bondage of Black people. Black Atlantic revolutionary literature offers a countervailing narrative to a historiography of the Haitian Revolution based on analysis from contemporary literary works by white writers. This repertoire of Black literature presents the history of expanding political and social freedoms across the Atlantic world. Black writers constructed disparate revolutionary views of freedom. In Saint-Domingue, Toussaint Louverture and Jean-Jacques Dessalines pursued different policies, and Julien Raimond advocated predominantly for enfranchisement of gens du couleur, free persons with African and European parentage. African American clergy Lemuel Haynes, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen looked to Christian Republicanism to end slavery, while Freemason leader Prince Hall embraced revolutionary violence as legitimate to secure Black liberation. The geopolitical triumphs of the Haitian Revolution inspired transitions in Black Atlantic literature toward resistance writing throughout the nineteenth century. The revolutionary-era collective established a literary foundation upon which later Haitian and Black American authors published works heralding the birth of an independent Black republic in the Caribbean.

On December 10, 1948, the UN General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Drafted by a panel of notables chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, the Declaration is framed in the language of dignity from its first sentence. Four months later, black singer, actor, and activist Paul Robeson’s invocation of dignity fatally damaged his career. Robeson asserted that the Soviet Union guaranteed the dignity of blacks. On first glance, Robeson would seem to be echoing the UN language, but in fact, Robeson had been speaking and writing about dignity continuously since his 1919 graduation speech from Rutgers. Black Americans, led by Robeson, would use the language of dignity in their petitions imploring the UN to investigate the oppression of African Americans as well as informally, in black social spaces. This chapter tracks the efforts of Robeson (himself often described as personifying dignity in his artistic performances) to advance a notion of dignity that subversively mimicked regnant liberal and Christian understandings of the concept. In doing so, he recovers a vernacular sense of dignity with a quite different provenance than the European Christian tradition – but closely connected with the instincts of African American Christians such as Robeson’s preacher father.