The decades between the First and Second World Wars in the Caribbean were marked by intense political contestation, as activists across the region rallied against colonialism, economic exploitation, and racism. This session features new work on Black political activism in the interwar Caribbean, drawing on case studies from Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Trinidad, and the Dominican Republic. The presenters call attention to a diverse group of activist leaders—sugar workers and disabled soldiers, journalists and intellectuals, politicians and militant organizers—to offer new perspectives on the aims, strategies, and outcomes of Black protest during this turbulent period. The papers reveal how activists forged networks of solidarity with local and international allies in order to support their work, while also facing state repression through censorship, arrest, deportation, police violence, and other forms of marginalization.

In the first paper, Reena Goldthree explores disabled soldiers' multi-decade fight for adequate pensions, medical care, and vocational support in the British Caribbean. In the aftermath of World War I, disabled soldiers confronted colonial officials who conspired to pay Black colonial troops on a lower scale than their white British counterparts. Invoking the rhetoric of "British Justice," disabled soldiers insisted that their status as war veterans entitled them to robust compensation and challenged the parsimony of the colonial state. Their critique of colonial policies exposed the failures of British colonial governance and helped to galvanize popular movements for political and economic reform in the 1920s and 1930s. In the second paper, Frances Peace Sullivan examines the militant transnational political networks that developed in the heart of the U.S.-controlled sugar zone in northeastern Cuba. Sullivan shows how rural sugar workers fought oppressive living and working conditions by linking their struggle to internationalist movements against capitalism, racism, and fascism. Sullivan's work reorients Caribbeanist scholarship on interwar-era internationalisms by foregrounding the cosmopolitan outlook and transnational political vision of working peoples in Cuba’s rural enclaves. In the third paper, Matthew Casey analyzes a forgotten series of public protests in the Dominican Republic organized by Dominican and Haitian activists in the 1920s and 1930s. The protests provided a shared forum for politicians and activists from both countries to critique the U. S. occupation of Haiti, while also mobilizing support for new political agendas. In the final paper, Natanya Duncan traces the political trajectories of two trailblazing activists—Amy Ashwood Garvey and Maymie de Mena Aiken—and investigates how they cultivated new activist networks following their prominent work with the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). During the 1930s and 1940s, Ashwood and de Mena joined the growing movement for representative government and racial equality in Jamaica and ran for office on the ticket of a local independent political party. Reconstructing Ashwood's and de Mena's political campaigns, Duncan reveals how both women drew upon their extensive leadership experience in the UNIA to mobilize voters and recruit other women to pursue elected office.