There was a Haitian man on the Titanic
Imagine That……………no one knew, like most of history, we were excluded.
His uncle was President of Haiti!
Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche was the only black man, a Haitian man, to perish
in the Titanic; that’s after he saved his wife and kids. Laroche was born
in Cap Haitian, Haiti , on May 26, 1889.
In the blockbuster film Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio’s role could have easily been played
by a Black man and it would have been historically accurate. In fact, the life story of
Haitian native Joseph Phillippe Lemercier Laroche is far more intriguing than the
movie’s lead character, but no one knew of his existence until recently.
The silence about the stranger-than-fiction life story of the Titanic’s only Black passenger
astonishes noted Titanic historian Judith Geller, author of Titanic: Women and Children First,
who said, “It is strange that nowhere in the copious 1912 press descriptions of the ship
and the interviews with the survivors was the presence of a Black family among
the passengers ever mentioned.”
The story of this interracial family was not known until 2000, three years after the movie’s
release, when the Chicago Museum of Science & Industry and the Titanic Historical Society
revealed the information as part of a Titanic exhibit.
Joseph Laroche was born into a powerful family. His uncle, Dessalines M. Cincinnatus Leconte,
was the president of Haiti . When Joseph Phillippe Lemercier was fifteen, he left Haiti
to study engineering in Beauvais , France . Several years later, he met Juliette Lafargue,
the 22- year-old daughter of a local wine seller. The two eventually married.
Despite having an engineering degree, Joseph’s skin color left him unable to find employment
in France . The Laroches decided to return to Haiti and booked second-class reservations on
the Titanic. After the ship struck an iceberg, Joseph loaded his wife and children onto a lifeboat
and he went down with the ship.
His body was never recovered.
Shortly before Christmas of that year, Juliette Laroche gave birth to their son, Joseph Laroche Jr.
Juliette never remarried
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