[7] Firmin attended meetings of the Société as a regular member, but he was silenced by a racialist physical anthropology dominant at the time and due to racism.

The transcripts of the Société’s deliberations included in the Mémoires show that Firmin rose to speak only twice, and on both occasions he was silenced by racialist or racist comments.

[8] Supporters such as Admiral Hammerton Killick fought troops loyal to Pierre Nord Alexis, the Haitian military and provisional government's preferred candidate.

[9] Firmin's campaign ended when Killick died in an act of destroying his own ship, the Crête-à-Pierrot, which was under threat of capture by the Imperial German Navy's SMS Panther.

The recovered text was translated by Haitian scholar Asselin Charles and published in English as The Equality of the Human Races (Positivist Anthropology) in 2000, 115 years after its original publication.

[10] Following the ideas of Auguste Comte, Firmin was a stark positivist who believed that the empiricism used to study humanity was a counter to the speculative philosophical theories about the inequalities of races.

He was the first to point out how racial typologies failed to account for the successes of those of mixed race as well as one of the first to state an accurate scientific basis for skin pigmentation.

On the one hand, Firmin challenges the idea of brain size or cephalic index as a measure of human intelligence and on the other he reasserts the presence of Black Africans in Pharaonic Egypt.

[6] Anténor Firmin devised between 1875 and 1898 a Caribbean Confederation project which envisioned the unification of Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Jamaica and Puerto Rico.

Unlike other icons from the Cuban and Puerto Rican separatist movements, Betances celebration of the Haitian Revolution countered those who did not see Haiti as an ideal revolutionary model, thus excluding it in their own plans for a Hispanic Caribbean federation.