This dissertation explores the struggles of several groups of labor leaders, students and professionals of African descent, as they worked to achieve the unfulfilled promise of political, civil and social equality in Colombia between 1885 and 1947. It traces the individual and collective actions that black and mulatto people of Colombia’s Caribbean and Pacific coasts used to navigate a racial order and political regime dominated by the ideas of racial harmony in an age in which the ideology of “black renaissance” emerged in the Americas. Following their life histories and political trajectories, this work also reconstructs Afro Colombian efforts to get access to land, education, and housing as well as their political initiatives to assert control of their working conditions during the export boom and industrialization that took place in Colombia between 1885 and 1947. Integrating intellectual, social and political history, my dissertation seeks to place marginalized people and regions at the center of the political, social, racial and economic transformations of Colombia during the transition from nineteenth to twentieth century, with attention to broader histories of citizenship, mestizaje, national identities, and black internationalism
