François Duvalier, 1957
*François Duvalier was born on this date in 1907. Also known as Papa Doc, he was a Haitian politician and Vodouisant.
Duvalier was born in Port-au-Prince, the son of Duval Duvalier, justice of the peace, teacher, and journalist, whose family came from Martinique, and Ulyssia Abraham, a baker. His aunt, Madame Florestal, raised him as a child. The racism and violence that occurred during the United States' occupation of Haiti, which began in 1915, inspired black nationalism among Haitians and left a powerful impression on the young Duvalier. He was also aware of the latent political power of the poor Black majority and their resentment against the small mulatto (black and white mixed-race) elite. He earned a medical degree from the University of Haiti in 1934 and served as a staff physician at several local hospitals.
In 1938, Duvalier co-founded the journal Les Griots. In 1939, he married Simone Duvalier Ovide, with whom he had four children. Duvalier graduated from the Graduate School of Public Health of the University of Michigan on a scholarship that was meant to train Black doctors from the Caribbean to take care of African American service members during World War II. In 1943, became active in a United States–sponsored campaign to control the spread of contagious tropical diseases, helping people experiencing poverty to fight tropical diseases that had ravaged Haiti for years.
His patients affectionately called him "Papa Doc", a moniker that he used throughout his life. Duvalier supported Pan-African ideals and the négritude movement, both of which led to his advocacy of Haitian Vodou, an ethnological study of which later paid enormous political dividends for him. In 1946, Duvalier was appointed Director General of the National Public Health Service. In 1949, he served as Minister of Health and Labor, but when Duvalier opposed Paul Magloire's 1950 coup d'état, he left the government and resumed practicing medicine. In 1954, Duvalier abandoned medicine, hiding out in Haiti's countryside from the Magloire regime. In 1956, the Magloire government was failing, and although still in hiding, Duvalier announced his candidacy to replace him as president. In December 1956, an amnesty was issued, and Duvalier emerged from hiding, and Magloire conceded defeat.
The two frontrunners in the 1957 campaign for the presidency were Duvalier and Louis Déjoie, a mulatto landowner and industrialist from the north. Duvalier promised to rebuild and renew the country, and rural Haiti solidly supported him, as did the military. He was elected president of Haiti in the 1957 general election on a populist and black nationalist platform. After thwarting a military coup d'état in 1958, his regime rapidly became more autocratic. An undercover government death squad, the Tonton Macoute, indiscriminately tortured or killed Duvalier's opponents; the Tonton Macoute was thought to be so pervasive that Haitians became highly fearful of expressing any form of dissent, even in private.
Duvalier further sought to solidify his rule by incorporating elements of Haitian mythology into a personality cult. He was unanimously re-elected president in 1961, as the only candidate. Afterwards, he remained in power until he died in 1971. He was succeeded by his son, Jean‑Claude, who was nicknamed "Baby Doc." On February 8, 1986, when the Duvalier regime fell, a crowd attacked Duvalier's mausoleum, throwing boulders at it, chipping off pieces from it, and breaking open the crypt. Duvalier's coffin was not inside, however. A prevailing rumor in the capital, according to The New York Times, was that his son had removed his remains upon fleeing to the U.S. Air Force in a transport plane to Paris the day before.
