The American right wing has been obsessed with Haiti as a bogeyman—a literal bête noire—since the Haitian Revolution. In the antebellum South, fears of Haitian “contagion”—that Haitians would come and spur an armed freedom movement among American slaves—motivated state militia crackdowns and white vigilante mobs alike. (Indeed, various early attempts at self-emancipation, from Black-led efforts to John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry, were explicitly inspired by the Haitian uprising.)
That future Haitians had fought alongside Continental forces during the American Revolution, and that the defeat of Napoleon’s forces by the Haitian General Jean-Jacques Dessalines paved the way for the Louisiana Purchase and the expansion of the U.S., rarely factored into American imaginations. Instead, Americans saw Haiti as a savage, alien place—home to a strange religion, vodou, and terrifying folk tales, particularly of the zombie, a Haitian creation that would be imported into U.S. pop culture during the early twentieth-century occupation.
These deeply ingrained attitudes, many of them unconscious and unexamined, were waiting for the Haitians in Springfield. At first, the new arrivals were welcomed, said Vilès Dorsainvil, the head of Springfield’s Haitian Community Help & Support Center—who himself moved from Port-au-Prince to the Ohio town in early 2021. The Biden administration’s immigration policy toward Haitians was schizophrenic: deporting tens of thousands to the U.S. policy–wracked country while granting hundreds of thousands of others temporary legal residency and providing an opportunity to work and contribute to the communities that hosted them.
“We were just here working peacefully and caring about our family and all of this. The community was OK. There was still a group of people in Springfield who saw the coming of the Haitians as a threat. But normally, generally, the community was so open with us,” he told me.
Then, in 2023, tragedy struck. A Haitian man—who had moved to Brazil in the aftermath of the earthquake, then came through Mexico in 2022—was driving through town when he crossed a median and plunged into a school bus. Several students were injured, and 11-year-old Aiden Clark was killed. School bus crashes are rare, but not unheard of nationally: From 2013 to 2022, there were 976 crashes in the U.S. involving school buses, killing a total of 1,082 people, according to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. But instead of being treated as a referendum on traffic or bus safety—or a sign to spark an effort to make sure immigrants get the proper training and licensing to drive (the Haitian driver, who has been convicted of manslaughter and fourth-degree vehicular homicide, had an Ohio ID card but a Mexican driver’s license)—Clark’s death became a rallying point for nativists and xenophobes, inside Springfield and out.