1921: (The UP Meets the NAACP — While Harding and US Officials Declined the UP’s Requests for Formal Conversations Vincent and Thoby Meeting with NAACP Leade…

1921: (The UP Meets the NAACP — While Harding and US Officials Declined the UP’s Requests for Formal Conversations Vincent and Thoby Meeting with NAACP Leaders W. E. B. Du Bois James Weldon Johnson and Treasurer Addie Hunton, the Relationship Between the UP and NAACP Having Blossomed Over Two Years, In 1920 the NAACP Sending Johnson to Haiti for a Two-Month Fact-Finding Mission — Johnson Reporting in the Nation That US Marines Were “Violently Steeped in Color Prejudice” and That They Raped and Assaulted Women So Frequently It Was Not Viewed as a Crime, Johnson Drawing the Connection Between Violence Against Haitian Women and Early Twentieth-Century Anti-Black Violence in the United States): The timing of the Union Patriotique’s arrival in the United States was inopportune and compromised some of the imagined goals of the diplomatic trip. While Harding and other US government officials declined the UP’s requests for formal conversations, Vincent and Thoby met with the leaders of the NAACP, who had questioned the occupation from the beginning. NAACP president W. E. B. Du Bois, Secretary James Weldon Johnson, and Treasurer Addie Hunton received the UP delegation. The relationship between the two organizations had blossomed over the prior two years. In 1920, while the United States wavered on sending a commission to investigate the occupation, the NAACP sent Johnson to Haiti for a two-month fact-finding mission. In a series of articles in the Nation, Johnson reported that US Marines were steeped in color prejudice and that they raped and assaulted women so frequently that it was not viewed as a crime. According to Johnson, the violations against Haitian women and men resembled early twentieth-century anti-Black violence in the United States. The connection Johnson drew was not metaphorical but structural: the same racial logic that sanctioned lynching in Mississippi sanctioned the brutalization of market women in Port-au-Prince. The occupation was Jim Crow with a passport.