The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) was a U.S.black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society. The group's socialist orientation caught the attention of the fledgling American communist movement and the ABB soon evolved into a propaganda arm of the Communist Party of America. The group was terminated in the early 1920s.
During the second decade of the 20th century, a socialist movement for the liberation of American blacks began to develop in the Harlem section of New York City.[1] The movement included a substantial number of immigrants from the British West Indies and other islands from the Caribbean region, who, having been raised and educated as part of a racial majority population in their homelands, had found themselves thrust into the position of an oppressed racial minority in America.[1] As products of the unequal system of colonialism, many of these newcomers to America were predisposed to hostility towards capitalism and the notion of empire-building.[1]
One of these transplants from the Caribbean was Cyril Briggs, born in 1888 on the island of Nevis, who immigrated to Harlem in the summer of 1905.[2] In 1912, Briggs was hired as a journalist by one of the black community's leading newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News. He worked there throughout the years of the First World War.[2] Inspired by the rhetoric of "national self-determination" espoused by President Woodrow Wilson, in September 1918 Briggs launched a monthly publication called The Crusader, to promote the idea of "repatriation" of blacks to a decolonized Africa, a concept similar to the contemporary notion among some European Jews of Zionism and "return" to Palestine.[3]
The Crusader was started by George Wells Parker, a black businessman from Omaha, Nebraska, as the official organ of the League of Legends, a pan-African nationalist group.[3] Parker published articles in the journal proclaiming that Africa was the cradle of civilization and arguing the superiority of the black race. He contributed financially to the publication, which was essentially a vehicle for his views.[4]
In February 1919, Briggs began to change his ideas, and his new thinking was expressed in articles in the Crusader. He began to draw parallels between the plight of black workers in the United States and impoverished working class whites, who were mostly recent immigrants or their descendants from Europe.[5] Over ensuing months, Briggs began to consider the system of capitalism as the villain, and he argued in favor of a common cause and common action by workers of all races.[5]
The Crusader eventually reached a total readership of 36,000 persons, mostly in Harlem.[6]
Establishment of organization
The summer of 1919 in America was a time of racial rioting and violence, remembered retrospectively by historians as the "Red Summer." Returning soldiers from European battlefields, including blacks with heightened expectations of freedom and equality and whites seeking a return to civilian employment and the status quo ante bellum, and new immigrant black workers from the rural South formed a volatile mixture which erupted in mob violence in Chicago, Omaha, and cities throughout the Midwest and South.
In response to these attacks, The Crusader advocated armed self-defense. Politically, Briggs drew comparisons between government attacks on white and black radicals. He identified capitalism as the underlying cause of oppression of poor people of all races. While endorsing a Marxist analysis, The Crusader advocated a separate organization of African-Americans to defend against racist attacks in the United States, and likened this to Africans' combating colonialism abroad.
In September 1919, The Crusader announced the formation of a new organization called the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), to serve as a self-defense organization for blacks threatened by race riots and lynchings. This was accompanied by the re-publishing of Claude McKay's poem If We Must Die.[7]
Not long afterwards, Briggs began to forge connections with pioneer black American Communists such as the Surinam-born Otto Huiswoud and Jamaican poet and writer Claude McKay.[8] These in turn connected Briggs and his publication with native-born white Communists including Robert Minor and Rose Pastor Stokes, who took a strong interest in the so-called "Negro Question."[8] Briggs would join the Communist Party himself in 1921.[8]
Conflicts with Marcus Garvey and the Bureau of Investigation
The ABB attempted to organize from inside the UNIA-ACL and advocated a policy of critical support for its leader, Marcus Garvey. ABB leaders Briggs and Claude McKay participated in the UNIA's 1920 and 1921 international conferences in New York. At the second conference, McKay arranged for Rose Pastor Stokes, a white leader of the Communist Party, to address the assembly.
The ABB became highly critical of Garvey following the apparent failure of the Black Star Line and Garvey's July 1921 Atlanta meeting with Grand Kleagle Clarke of the Ku Klux Klan. In June 1922, The Crusader announced that it had become the official organ of the African Blood Brotherhood. Arguing that the UNIA was doomed unless it developed new leadership, the magazine sought to convert the UNIA's membership to the ABB. In seeking to replace the UNIA, the ABB competed with Randolph's socialist publication The Messenger, which had called for Garvey's expulsion from the United States. In return, Garvey called for his followers to disrupt meetings of these oppositional groups.
In addition to the dispute with Garvey, Briggs and the ABB were targeted for investigation by police and federal law enforcement agencies. Historian Theodore Kornweibel reports[where?] that the government began manipulating radical organizations in conjunction with legal prosecution under the pretence of disrupting opposition to World War I. Following the end of the war, a government campaign against communists, anarchists, and other radicals was instituted at the direction of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer (himself the victim of two anarchist bomb attacks) in what came to be called the First Red Scare. Government agents were secretly planted in the UNIA, ABB and The Messenger. These agents provided intelligence to the Bureau of Investigation while in some case sabotaging meetings, and acting as agents provocateurs.
The ABB enjoyed a period of notoriety following the Tulsa Riot of 1921. Tulsa had an ABB chapter and news reports credited the organization with inspiring resistance to racist attacks.
Fusion with Communist Party
The Crusader ceased publication in February 1922, following Garvey's indictment for mail fraud. Briggs continued to operate the Crusader News Service, providing news material to affiliated publications of the American black press. As cooperation with the Communist Party increased, the ABB ceased to recruit separately.
The leadership of the Communist International, while largely ignorant about the particulars of the situation of blacks in the United States, did understand the importance of ethnic and other non-class forms of oppression, and pushed the early CP to pay more attention to blacks in the U.S.[9] Before this intervention by the Comintern, the party had largely ignored blacks, and thus was not particularly attractive to black radicals like Briggs. Instead, it was the Bolshevik Revolution that attracted their attention.
Poet and ABB member Claude McKay had previously been active in the Left CommunistWorkers Socialist Federation in London and subsequently visited the Soviet Union several times in the mid-1920s, writing about conferences of the Communist International for African-American audiences. McKay's book, The Negroes in America (published in Russian in 1924 but not in the U.S. until 1979) argued, against the official Communist position of the time, that the oppression of black people in the U.S. was not reducible to economic oppression, but was unique. He argued against the color blindness that the Communists had inherited from the Socialist Party.
McKay argued vociferously for national self-determination in support of national independence for oppressed peoples, which to him meant an independent African-American government separate and apart from that of the United States. Subsequently, in the aftermath of the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, the CPUSA adopted a policy of national self-determination for African-Americans living in the American South. The policy was neglected after the Popular Front period began in 1935, but was not formally replaced until 1959.
As the Communist Party developed, it regularized its structure along the lines called for by the Communist International (Comintern). Semi-independent organizations such as the African Blood Brotherhood with its divergent Afro-Marxist political theories were anathema to the Comintern and its Soviet leaders, who believed all communist and Marxist–Leninist organizations should be unified in a single communist party and platform in each nation under Moscow's overall direction and control. In the early 1920s the African Blood Brotherhood was dissolved, with its members merged into the Workers Party of America and later into the American Negro Labor Congress. Many early ABB members, however, went on to be key CP cadres for decades.
Membership
The ABB had a total membership of fewer than 3,000 members at its peak.
Marcus Mosiah Garvey Jr. was a Jamaican political activist. He was the founder and first President-General of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, through which he declared himself Provisional President of Africa. Ideologically a black nationalist and Pan-Africanist, his ideas came to be known as Garveyism.
The Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League (UNIA-ACL) is a black nationalist fraternal organization founded by Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican immigrant to the United States, and Amy Ashwood Garvey. The Pan-African organization enjoyed its greatest strength in the 1920s, and was influential prior to Garvey's deportation to Jamaica in 1927. After that its prestige and influence declined, but it had a strong influence on African-American history and development. The UNIA was said to be "unquestionably, the most influential anticolonial organization in Jamaica prior to 1938," according to Honor Ford-Smith.
George Padmore, born Malcolm Ivan Meredith Nurse, was a leading Pan-Africanist, journalist, and author. He left his native Trinidad in 1924 to study medicine in the United States, where he also joined the Communist Party.
The American Negro Labor Congress was established in 1925 by the Communist Party as a vehicle for advancing the rights of African Americans, propagandizing for communism within the black community and recruiting African American members for the party.
Hubert Henry Harrison was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, race and class conscious political activist, and radical internationalist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by activist A. Philip Randolph as "the father of Harlem radicalism" and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers as "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time." John G. Jackson of American Atheists described him as "The Black Socrates".
The Communist Party USA, ideologically committed to foster a socialist revolution in the United States, played a significant role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during its most influential years of the 1930s and 1940s. In that period, the African-American population was still concentrated in the South, where it was largely disenfranchised, excluded from the political system, and oppressed under Jim Crow laws.
George Wells Parker was an African-American political activist, historian, public intellectual, and writer who co-founded the Hamitic League of the World.
Harry Haywood was an American political activist who was a leading figure in both the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). His goal was to connect the political philosophy of the Communist Party with the issues of race.
James W. “Jim” Ford was an activist, a politician, and the Vice-Presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA in the years 1932, 1936, and 1940. Ford was born in Alabama and later worked as a party organizer for the CPUSA in New York City. He was also the first African American to run on a U.S. presidential ticket (1932) in the 20th century.
Robert Berkeley "Bob" Minor, alternatively known as "Fighting Bob", was a political cartoonist, a radical journalist, and, beginning in 1920, a leading member of the American Communist Party.
Cyril Valentine Briggs was an African-Caribbean American writer and communist political activist. Briggs is best remembered as founder and editor of The Crusader, a seminal New York magazine of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s, and as founder of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a small but historically important radical organization dedicated to advancing the cause of Pan-Africanism.
Richard Benjamin Moore was a Barbados-born Afro-Caribbean civil rights activist, writer and prominent socialist. He was also one of the earliest advocates of the term African American, as opposed to Negro or "black".
Manning Rudolph Johnson AKA Manning Johnson and Manning R. Johnson was a Communist Party USA African-American leader and the party's candidate for U.S. Representative from New York's 22nd congressional district during a special election in 1935. Later, he left the Party and became an anti-communist government informant and witness.
Williana "Liana" Jones Burroughs was an American teacher, communist political activist, and politician. She is best remembered as one of the first women to run for elective office in New York.
Otto Eduard Gerardus Majella Huiswoud was a Surinamese political activist who was a charter member of the Communist Party of America. Huiswoud is regarded as the first black member of the American communist movement. Huiswoud served briefly as the Communist Party's representative to the Executive Committee of the Communist International in 1922 and was a leading black Comintern functionary during the decade of the 1920s.
Lovett Huey Fort-Whiteman was an American political activist and functionary for the Communist International (Comintern).
The Negro Sanhedrin was a national "All-Race Conference" held in the American city of Chicago, Illinois, from February 11 to 15, 1924. The gathering was attended by 250 delegates representing 61 trade unions, civic groups, and fraternal organizations in a short-lived attempt to forge a national program protecting the legal rights of African-American tenant farmers and wage workers and extending the scope of civil rights.
The Yokinen Show Trial was a March 1931 public disciplinary proceeding conducted by leaders of the Communist Party, USA (CPUSA) against August Yokinen, a Finnish-American Communist janitor who allegedly denied several African Americans entry to a dance at the Finnish Workers Club in Harlem and made racially disparaging remarks against several African-American members of the organization at a social event. Attended by more an audience of 2,000 people, the "party trial" of Yokinen was publicized across America and was intended to emphasize the CPUSA's commitment to eliminate "White Chauvinism" from its ranks and to thereby bolster its status in the eyes of the black American working class and among white intellectuals seeking an end to racism.
Wilfred Adolphus Domingo was a Jamaican activist and journalist who became the youngest editor of Marcus Garvey's newspaper, the Negro World. As an activist and writer, Domingo travelled to the United States advocating for Jamaican sovereignty as a leader of the African Blood Brotherhood and the Harlem branch of the Socialist Party.
Grace P. Campbell was the first African-American woman to run for state office in New York. She was also the first female African-American member of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party of America.
References
Footnotes
1 2 3 Mark Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-36. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998; p. 4.
Eric Arnesen, Black Protest and the Great Migration: A Brief History with Documents. New York: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.
Anthony Dawahare, Nationalism, Marxism, and African American Literature Between the Wars: A New Pandora's Box. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2002.
Michael C. Dawson, Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary African-American Political Ideologies. Chicago: University Of Chicago Press, 2003.
Theodore Draper, The Roots of American Communism. New York: Viking Press, 1957.
Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist. Chicago: Liberator Press, 1978.
Robert A. Hill (ed.), The FBI's RACON: Racial Conditions in the United States during World War I. Ithaca, NY: Northeastern University Press, 1995.
Robert A. Hill, "Racial and Radical: Cyril V. Briggs, The Crusader Magazine, and the African Blood Brotherhood, 1918-1922." Introductory essay to The Crusader. New York: Garland Publishing, 1987.
Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America. London: Verso Books, 1998.
Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. "Investigate Everything": Federal Efforts to Compel Black Loyalty During World War I. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002.
Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. Seeing Red: Federal Campaigns Against Black Militancy, 1919-1925. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999.
Jacob A. Zumoff, The Communist International and US Communism, 1919-1929. [2014] Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015.
Unpublished material
Maria Gertrudis van Enckevort, The Life and Work of Otto Huiswoud: Professional Revolutionary and Internationalist (1893–1961). Mona, Jamaica: University of the West Indies, 2000. PhD dissertation.
Minkah Makalani, For the LIberation of Black People Everywhere: The African Blood Brotherhood, Black Radicalism, and Pan-African Liberation in the New Negro Movement, 1917-1936. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2004. PhD dissertation.
Theman Ray Taylor, Cyril Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood: Another Radical View of Race and Class in the 1920s. Santa Barbara, CA: University of California at Santa Barbara, 1981. PhD dissertation.
Maurie I. Warren, Moses and the Messenger: The Crisis of Black Radicalism, 1921-1922. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, 1974. Bachelor's thesis.
Jacob A. Zumoff, The Communist Party of the United States and the Communist International, 1919-1929. London: University of London, 2003. PhD dissertation.
Theodore Kornweibel Research Papers, 1910-1960. Research materials assembled by Theodore Kornweibel. The collection consists of copies of FBI and other federal agency records, including case files obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, detailed notecards, printed federal documents, and Kornweibel's correspondence with federal agencies. Newberry Library, Chicago.
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