Colonial white political democratization explicitly excluded free people of color

Evidence

In January orders from the colonial minister arrived calling for the formation of a short-term, consultative assembly in the colony; whites in Saint- Domingue instead held elections for a permanent assembly. Elections took place in February 1790, with the vote granted to all whites who had lived in the colony for at least a year. This policy was more liberal than the one currently in place in France (which had economic requirements for suffrage), and helped assure a tenuous unity between white property owners and poorer whites. It was a democratization based on racism: property-owning free people of color were again excluded from political participation. Indeed poor whites in the colony quickly came to exert much of their political energy and violence against wealthy free-coloreds. — Dubois, Laurent, Avengers of the New World_ The Story of…, 272

Categorization

• QUESTION: How did this racist democratization among whites push free people of color toward their own political mobilization?