Ultimately, Dessalines sent a letter to Thomas Jefferson calling for closer ties between Haiti and the US but Jefferson ignored the letter. In similar fashion, the calls by many blacks (protest, letters, boycotts) to NFL owners to hire Colin Kaepernick back is currently being ignored with Donald Trump explicitly threatening those owners not to hire him. The NFL owners have claimed that there is no collusion between them to blackball Kaepernick, indeed that could be true, but just like there was no direct accord between France, the US and other European countries to punish the newly independent nation, there was clearly an implicit agreement which resulted to an embargo on the country that has until this day economically crippled Haiti. The same principle of silencing and punishing any black protest and/or rebellion by whites in power through means of economic sanctions apparently still applies today as it did during the eighteenth/nineteenth centuries.
The NFL owners supposedly sympathize with Kaepernick’s protest and fight for injustice, but one of their main arguments, including Roger Goodell’s, is that the NFL games are not the right place to protest against political issues and they suggest there is a “proper way” to protest injustice against black and brown people. Similar to how Thomas Jefferson was sympathetic to the idea of the Haitian revolution because it compared to the struggle the US faced earlier for independence from a European power. Nonetheless, as a slaveholder popular among other Virginia slaveholders, Jefferson also feared the idea of a slave revolt in his own backyard. So he suggested that the slave owners in Haiti should aim for a compromise similar to that of British slaveholders made with Jamaican escaped slaves in 1739, by which the runaway slaves would remain in the five main towns they are occupying (Accompong, Trelawny Town, Moore Town, Scott's Pass and Nanny Town) and would be living under their own rulers but under British supervision. The same narrative still exists with the white NFL owners trying to dictate how the black players should protest and fight for justice.
History Of Silencing The Black Voice