Population Research Discovery Seminars

Co-Sponsor(s):

Population Health Initiative

Starting in 1824, sailing southward from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other ports – in pursuit of President Jean-Pierre Boyer’s promise of citizenship, land, and prosperity – hundreds of migrants settled along Samaná Bay in the northeastern peninsula of Ayiti (the Taíno name for Hispaniola). The Caribbean became a new home for African American families who dreamed of freedom in the wake of the Haitian Revolution – men, women, and children intent on building a better life beyond the borders of the antebellum United States. Samaná is now a Dominican province, but then it was part of an island-wide, unified Haitian republic. Received as fellow “children of Africa”, these new Haitians became stewards of both land and sea in Samaná, experiencing freedom in ways unimaginable for their counterparts who stayed in the antebellum United States.

Leveraging this history, Professor Matthew Alexander Randolph (UW Department of American Ethnic Studies) proposes the nineteenth-century Caribbean as a space to rethink timelines of refuge, aid, and asylum in the Americas. In this seminar, Randolph will discuss how Haitian historical actors challenged the uneven geographies of freedom of the era by positioning their country as a promised land to Black communities in North America. In particular, this presentation underscores Haitian President Boyer’s explicit rhetoric of his country in the 1820s as an asylum for Black migrants leaving slave societies: a “land of true liberty” for the wider African diaspora, when Haiti stood virtually alone as an island of freedom. The solidarity of the Haitian government and its citizens for African Americans in the United States certainly represents early and exemplary Pan-Africanism, but that is not the only lesson. Black internationalism, emerging from the early Haitian republic and African American migrants themselves, also led to imaginative and innovative approaches to asylum in theory and practice.

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Matthew (Matt) Alexander Randolph is an Assistant Professor of African American Studies in the Department of American Ethnic Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle. After graduating with a BA in History and Spanish at Amherst College, Matt received MA and PhD degrees in History from Stanford University, where he served as a graduate fellow for the Department of African & African American Studies and traveled to France as an exchange student at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris.

Building on his dissertation (Harboring Freedom: African American Migration and Imperial Rivalries in Samaná Bay, 1822-1871), Matt is writing his first book on the transplantation and transformation of Black identity that took place as part of nineteenth-century Haitian emigration initiatives. In the pursuit of citizenship and prosperity otherwise unimaginable in the antebellum United States, African American migrants relocated to Haiti and (re)created a sense of home as stewards of the land and water of the Samaná peninsula (in what is now the Dominican Republic). This research engages with and contributes to several fields and discourses, including Black Geographies/Ecologies, Caribbean Studies, Pan-Africanism, Black Internationalism, and Afrofuturism.

In addition, Matt has ongoing interests in the crossroads of race and nation during Parisian world’s fairs; the U.S. Civil Rights and Black Power movements; human rights history; and the global travels of Frederick Douglass. Matt’s scholarship has been supported by a 2022 Fulbright grant for the Dominican Republic, which complemented travel to archives across the United States, France, and Spain. He has presented his research beyond the United States at conferences in several countries, including the Dominican Republic, Martinique, and Senegal. In 2025, he received the Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize from AAIHS (African American Intellectual History Society) for his conference paper, “Migrating Mariners: African American Emigration, Maritime Poetics, and the Afterlives of Slavery on Caribbean Shores.”