1912-04-12: (Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche Dies When the RMS Titanic Sinks, the Wealthiest Black Passenger Aboard the Ship, His Story Largely Forgotten b…

1912-04-12: (Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche Dies When the RMS Titanic Sinks, the Wealthiest Black Passenger Aboard the Ship, His Story Largely Forgotten by the Titanic Historiography That Preferred to Remember Its White Victims): On April 12, 1912, Joseph Philippe Lemercier Laroche died when the RMS Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic. Laroche, a Haitian-born engineer who had studied in France and married a French woman, was traveling with his wife and two daughters from France to Haiti, where he hoped to find better professional opportunities than those available to a Black man in early twentieth-century Europe. He was the wealthiest Black passenger aboard the ship. His wife and daughters survived; he did not. His story was largely absent from the Titanic historiography that dominated the twentieth century, an erasure consistent with the broader pattern of rendering Black lives invisible within narratives of universal tragedy. The Titanic remembrance industry preferred its victims white and wealthy. Laroche was wealthy. He was not white. He was forgotten.