Did you know…?

General Jean-Jacques Dessalines is credited for tearing the white band from the French tricolour, uniting the blue and red in a new flag. In the summer of 1803, this became the symbol of racial unity between blacks and people of color in the face of France’s final attempts to retake the colony through a desperate war of extermination. The symbol of the flag would later be made concrete in the nation’s 1805 inaugural constitution, which proclaimed that all citizens would henceforth be designated “black.”