FIRMIN, ANTÉNOR (18 October 1850–19 September 1911), Haitian politician, Pan-Africanist, and pioneering anthropologist. His major work, De l’égalité des races humaines (On the Equality of the Human Races), was published in Paris in 1885 but was internationally ignored for over a century. It was rediscovered in 1988 when Jacques Raphael George, a Haitian undergraduate at Rhode Island College, brought it to the attention of his anthropology professor, Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban. The book was translated into English for the first time in 2000 and is now considered a groundbreaking work in the history of anthropology.
Firmin was born to working-class parents in Cap-Haïtien and was only a few generations removed from the Haitian Revolution. He was a precocious student and, in his twenties, founded a newspaper, Le Messager du Nord, and served as Haiti’s ambassador to Venezuela.
He moved to Paris in 1883 and was granted membership in the Society of Anthropology of Paris. The society had been founded by Paul Broca, famous not only for his discovery of the region of the brain that governs language but also for his belief that races constitute different species and for his invention of twenty-seven different instruments for measuring skulls. Firmin was one of three Black members of the society, which regularly debated theories of race. He recalled witnessing a discussion at the first meeting he attended as to whether the sweat of African people smelled different from that of Creole people.
In response to the scientific racism of the society, Firmin began writing De l’égalité des races humaines, the title of which is a rebuttal to Count Arthur de Gobineau’s notorious Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races, which developed the concept of the Aryan master race. Firmin argued that an empirical, positivist study of humanity clearly disproved the existence of a biological racial hierarchy. Though the publication of Firmin’s book was announced at a society meeting, it was never mentioned again, and Firmin was often shouted down or silenced when he attempted to counter racist theorizing at society meetings.
Though Firmin’s ideas were suppressed in Europe, they were influential in Haiti and in the early Pan-African movement. A scholar of African history, Firmin lauded the achievements of African culture and society and was one of the first to argue that Ancient Egyptians were Black and that Egypt was the fountainhead of Western civilization. He helped organize the First Pan-African Congress in London in 1900, for which W.E.B. Du Bois drafted the general report. Firmin returned to Haiti in 1889 and was appointed minister of finance and external relations. He negotiated with Fredrick Douglass, then the US ambassador to Haiti, and prevented the US from building a military base at the Môle of St. Nicolas. After a failed presidential candidacy in 1902, Firmin was exiled to St. Thomas, where he lived until his death in 1911 at the age of sixty-one.