Haiti will create a national Jean Price-Mars Prize, with a first edition planned for 2027, Culture Minister Emmanuel Ménard announced at a day marking the 150th anniversary of the thinker's birth, Juno7 reported. The event was held on Friday, October 30, at the Hôtel Montana in Pétion-Ville.

Education Minister Vijonet Déméro announced a teaching kit for schools and a popular bilingual edition, in French and Kreyòl, of “Ainsi parla l'Oncle,” Price-Mars's 1928 essay on Haitian folk culture and its African roots.

The day, themed “Diplomacy, identity and national dignity,” was organized by the Education Ministry, the Haitian National Commission for UNESCO and the National Agency for Higher Education and Scientific Research. Speakers included sociologists Hérold Toussaint and Laënnec Hurbon, ethnologist Jhon Picard Byron and scholars from Gabon and the United States.

They revisited “La vocation de l'élite” (1919), in which Price-Mars (1876-1969) argued that Haiti's privileged minority owed a moral and civic duty to the rural majority. His grandson, Louis Henry Mars, said he saw culture as a way to bring elites and masses, cities and countryside, closer together.