The African Blood Brotherhood, its Relations and Legacy
🎧 Articles
The African Blood Brotherhood, its Relations and Legacy
🎧 Articles

The African Blood Brotherhood, its Relations and Legacy

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Combining the insights of previous scholarship with information gathered from Bureau of Investigation (BOI, predecessor of the FBI) surveillance documents, Ian Szabo presents a new angle on the history of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), illustrating the organizations’ particular synthesis of Black radical politics and Marxism, as well as revealing the racial fantasy through which contemporaneous mainstream U.S. media and the state understood its methods and goals.
Read By: Luke

Part of the cover design for the May 1919 issue of The Crusader.

Introduction

Since the Summer of 2020, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has re-entered the national stage in response to the police murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, among many others, through its organization of mass revolts and protests throughout the United States. The response from the organized and unorganized political Left, socialists, communists, and anarchists, was to mobilize in solidarity. On the other hand, the centrist and right-leaning U.S. media, as well as the Trump administration, reacted by fixating on claims of property damage. And although some elements of the former echoed BLM’s concerns about police violence, the latter actively encouraged, funded, and participated in further violent repression, which included tear gassing protests in front of the White House on national television. Both camps rely on an old image long imprinted in the U.S. symbolic landscape that characterizes leftists as dangerous outside agitators, a stereotype meant to undermine solidarity, erode the legitimacy of struggles against racial oppression, and justify violent suppression of these struggles by the state while understating the violence of white supremacy.

A century ago, the trope of an ‘outside agitator’ capable of convincing populations of the oppressed to riot against the white establishment was just as common. At the height of the Jim Crow era, one of the organizations singled out for this treatment by mainstream white America was the Harlem-based Black communist African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). Although the ABB was only one in a long line of socialist, communist, and African liberation organizations, and despite its short five-year existence, it played an outsized role as both the general enemy of Jim Crow segregation in the 1920s and as one of the major organizations shaping the international communist movement’s relationship to black and anti-imperialist politics across the world. This essay continues in the tradition of more recent scholars, such as Mark I. Solomon and Minkah Makalani, eager to underscore the originality, independence, and importance of the ABB.1 Although this essay strives for as much usage of primary sources possible, it is difficult to surpass Colin Grant’s masterful Negro With a Hat on the relationship between the ABB and Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement and African Communities League (UNIA).2 Another major influence is an understanding of the interplay between Marxist anti-imperialism and the black radical tradition documented in Cedric Robinson’s influential Black Marxism, which provides historians the capacity to interface these pre-existing bodies of empirical research into a deeper historical narrative.3 My hope is thus to build on these historians’ contributions by not only diving into additional primary documentation less discussed by prior scholars, but doing so through the novel interpretive frame such documentation demands. The present transforms how we interpret the past, and thus the baroque fantasies about BLM discussed above transform how we interpret the ABB. 

This essay is theoretically divided between a historical interrogation of the contemporaneous mainstream narratives about the ABB alongside an identification of what their activity meant to themselves and their collaborators. Robinson’s analysis of the black radical tradition provides a robust understanding of the historical context, as well as a method for understanding the origins of the organization, and how it changed.4 From this analysis we are able to have a more thorough reading of the ABB while zooming in from a macro-historical to a micro-historical lens. How the ABB’s black nationalism interacted with the Leninist politics of the Communist movement in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution is an essential part of its story, and Robinson provides ample analysis to provide an answer to that question to which this essay aims to provide only more primary historical grounding. However, this essay also pushes back against Robinson to a degree, as Black Marxism tended to separate Marxism and Black Radicalism into two distinct historical tendencies whereas in the case of the ABB we see their merger and mutual transformation of one another. As it was outside of the scope of Black Marxism, Robinson also does not discuss the discourse around many Black Radical movements in wider society, especially the reaction of white America. 

As for primary sources, this essay relies on four source compilations, that of the newspaper of the ABB, The Crusader, the affiliated and more popular magazine The Messenger, compilations of selected works taken from The Crusader, the disparate articles from other newspapers reporting on the ABB such as the New York Times and Chicago Whip, and the FBI’s own files on the organization. The FBI files and disparate articles allow a window into understanding how the ABB would have been seen from the outside or by those keeping tabs on them, both of which I argue were characterized by a degree of racial fantasy. What the FBI files also do, however, is allow a window into the everyday life of the ABB, such as how many people sat in on meetings and where those meetings took place. The newspaper of the ABB reveals that the organization had a highly cultured social base, mainly composed of “political agitators and journalist-propagandists.”5 To a large degree, the ABB was a classic example of an organization residing on the first side of the merger between socialism and the labor movement, as it sought to articulate its particular vision of black radicalism through the universalist lenses of socialism and eventually communism.

The ABB’s Social Base & the Political Thought of Cyril V. Briggs

Any form of working class organization requires, rather obviously, a social base from which it would emerge, thus without the first great migration of the early twentieth century the ABB would never have been possible. Episodes like the 1906 massacre of two dozen black people by armed white mobs in Atlanta, alongside the generalized anti-black violence of Jim Crow, caused black workers to look for better opportunities in the rapidly industrializing north. During the first quarter of the twentieth century, far more work became available for black workers, with the Messenger reporting that “[t]here is work aplenty to absorb these workers in the steel mills, blast furnaces, mines, automobile factories, shipyards and docks” in 1923.6 During the First World War in particular, black laborers found work alongside immigrants while many native born white workers were conscripted into the military. When American soldiers returned home, some northern employers attempted to draw in more black workers to avoid hiring “more radical, more socialistic” immigrant workers.7 It was from among the radicalized black workers who became organized in various trade unions, as well as Socialist Party members, that the ABB would draw support, readership for its affiliated newspapers, and membership. 

The ABB was first established in 1919 by the founder and editor of The Crusader newspaper, Cyril Valentine Briggs, in Harlem, New York.8 Briggs found himself among the cosmopolitan African diaspora in Harlem at the height of the New Negro Movement after having moved from his birth place in the Caribbean island of Nevis in 1905. Due to a speech impediment, Briggs preferred to write rather than engage in the public speeches so popular in Harlem at the time, thus he became one of the leading writers and intellectuals at The Amsterdam News newspaper in 1912.7 This is not to say, however, that Briggs cloistered himself away in an office writing article after article. Throughout his career he remained embedded among many other black intellectuals and activists engaged in radical politics, especially from a socialist perspective. Briggs forged friendships with figures who would become members of the ABB such as the poet Claude McKay, activists Grace Campbell and Otto Huiswoud, and fellow journalists W.A. Domingo, Richard B. Moore, and Hubert Harrison, all of whom will be discussed to some extent below.

Due to his ideological commitment to African liberation and anti-colonialism, Briggs would find himself fundamentally in conflict with Wilsonian liberalism, Garveyism, and even the old Socialist Party. According to Solomon, Wilsonian liberalism had failed the most spectacularly for Briggs on the home front during the First World War, when thirteen black soldiers who had fought for the United States were executed for insubordination against abusive white officers at Fort Logan in Houston, Texas.7 As Robinson identified, Briggs’ politics transitioned from a primarily race-centered view in the early days of The Crusader to a more explicitly communist orientation in his later writing. His disaffection with Wilsonian liberalism at the end of the First World War can be seen as the major turning point in this process. “[We] are not aware that [Wilson] has issued any footnotes…to the effect that the principles he has declared are not applicable to all branches of the human family,” Briggs wrote in 1918, referring to Wilson’s Fourteen Points.9 The combination of racial and class politics that Briggs later adopts, however, drops the notion that those in power can be lobbied in favor of anti-imperialism, instead turning towards a more radical approach. Episodes like the execution of the Camp Logan mutineers played major roles in this turn. For Briggs, the United States at the height of the Jim Crow era promising equality among nations meant little more than hypocrisy on a world scale.

The ABB in the Harlem Milieu

The Crusader formed the smallest of the four pillars of Harlem’s New Negro Movement of the 1920s. The other three pillars were Hubert Harrison’s Voice, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s The Messenger, and Marcus Garvey’s Negro World. The Crusader emerged from the alternative culture of Harlem, containing not only political injunctions but also columns such as prominent Harlem-based journalist and philosopher Romeo L. Dougherty’s long-running serialized memoir, or the various short stories written by Briggs himself.10 The idea of an alternative culture was not particular to Harlem’s black community, as classical German Social Democracy, of which the Socialist Party of America (SPA) was an extension, had a similar ecosystem. Vernon Litdke’s The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany provides us with a framework for understanding the role played by bottom-up social movements like both those of German workers and black radicals in the United States.11 When placed in the context of collective struggle, autonomous forms begin to emerge from the bottom up in the shape of an entire, self-contained society as an alternative to individual struggle and likely ruin. Thus, the vast amount of cultural production occurring in Harlem, Tulsa, Atlanta, Richmond’s Jackson Ward, and many other cities emerged precisely from this process. Socialism and Robinson’s description of black radicalism share this common feature, providing an explanation for why the ABB was able to emerge from and draw together both phenomena into the communist movement. Achieving this synthesis would require an articulation of the universal communist politics through the particular needs of black radicals of the period.

Being a political organization, the ABB required an enumerated program just as much as a declaration of purpose, which Briggs printed: 

(1) the economic structure of the Struggle (not wholly economic, but nearly so); (2) that it is essential to know from whom our oppression comes… and to make common cause with all forces and movements working against our enemies; (3) that it is not necessary for Negroes to be able to endorse the program of these other movements before they can make common cause with them against the common enemy; (4) that the important thing about Soviet Russia… is… the outstanding fact that [it] is opposing the imperialist robbers who have partitioned our motherland and subjugated our kindred, and… is feared by those imperialist nations.12 

Earlier documents by the ABB also called for political enfranchisement and political representation throughout municipalities where black people made up the majority of the population in the south. This was a classically republican iteration of the Black Belt thesis of the Communist Party USA decades later.13 The program encapsulated the ABB and Briggs’s political views by interlinking the call for universal liberation with the particular experience of the black liberation struggle.

The popularity of the ABB and its newspaper throughout the rest of the US is difficult to fully ascertain. However the thesis that this small organization cast a large shadow holds steady. According to Communist Voice, The Crusader newspaper acquired 37,000 subscriptions and had spread its membership in “New York to Baltimore, Chicago, Tulsa, Detroit, and Omaha.”14 It is difficult to confirm the veracity of these claims, however, since it is entirely based on the memories of those involved with the communist movement rather than something such as a mailing or subscription list. There were, however, rumblings of their activism that span down to 1924, often purported to be their last year by most historians. In Richmond, Virginia, they protested alongside black workers for entrance into the Brotherhood of Railroad Trainmen that had barred them from doing so on account of their race.15 Thus, this does point to chapters being spread throughout these areas. As we will come to see throughout this essay, however, its name recognition would become even more important. 

In Harlem, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA were advocating national self-determination based on African separatism. Garvey and his UNIA had developed out of a criticism of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) which, they argued, never had a clear political direction beyond integration.16 The UNIA was especially known at the time for its street marches and demonstrations, inviting Harlem’s African diasporic community into the streets to celebrate their heritage. While street marches and demonstrations endeared Garvey and his organization to Harlem’s population, Negro World spread the message of African self-improvement and determination to the wider public. Even more, Negro World brought together and cultivated a number of black radical thinkers, one of whom was Wilfred Adolphus (W.A.) Domingo, an open socialist.

The ABB would emerge as a major rival to the UNIA by drawing membership away from Garvey while regularly leveling criticisms at his organization. During the First Red Scare of 1919, W.A. Domingo was fired by Garvey after a police raid on the Rand School, a socialist educational institution, where one of Domingo’s pro-socialist pamphlets had been found.17 Shortly after, Domingo founded The Messenger alongside fellow members of the ABB, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. In the meantime, Garvey would become a long-time object of Briggs’s criticism, as the particularism of the Garvey movement continuously led it towards ceding the American continent enslaved Africans had cultivated to white supremacy in the form of Garvey’s resuscitation of the Back-to-Africa platform while Briggs became progressively communist in his politics. 

The ABB’s rejection of Garveyism was not without major attempts to build solidarity with the UNIA. From its founding, the ABB would regularly involve itself with Garvey’s movement, attending its marches and conferences. An early edition of The Crusader even spoke glowingly of Garvey alongside A. Philip Randolph and Hubert Harrison, the brilliant Internationalist thinker behind the New Negro moment.18 19 One major criticism levied by Briggs against Garvey in April of 1920 was that he had failed to invite “ALL negro bodies and communities throughout the world” to the Second International Convention of the Negro Peoples of the World being prepared for that summer.20 If the plan was to hold a convention to decide the leadership of a pan-African empire, it seemed absurd to members of the ABB that it should be only the UNIA to carry out the task, and by May of 1920 Garvey would capitulate to The Crusader, issuing invitations to outside organizations.21 However, when the actual convention was held, the ABB’s membership had continued to push its luck and Garvey’s patience, inviting a white socialist, Rose Pastor Stokes, to speak, continuing to be openly pro-Bolshevik, and publishing their own convention bulletin that hid the ABB’s criticisms of Garvey beneath the veneer of reporting.22 With the bulletin being published in the anti-Garvey Chicago Defender and the possible repetition of the left inviting further scrutiny from a state in the throes of the First Red Scare, Garvey was done dealing with the ABB and had them expelled from the convention.

After this, Briggs’ criticisms in The Crusader went from being the gentle ribbings of a critical but solidaristic organization to public denunciations. Garvey then accused Briggs of being white and subsequently asserted that the entire communist movement was the project of white men. Ironic, considering that Garvey had based his leadership style on Otto von Bismark, purported unifier of the “teutonic race” in Germany.23 Briggs sued Garvey for saying he was white, and in turn Garvey counter-sued Briggs for accusing him of “raping a girl in London, of deserting his wife, and living in adultery with another woman,” for which he was held in New York’s 12 District Magistrate’s Court for a $500 bond.24 Although many in the UNIA defected to the ABB, Richard B. Moore refused to join in Brigg’s assaults on Garvey, viewing it as joining in with “the oppressors your own people.”25

Moore was speaking of the oppressors of black people more broadly, but in the context of Briggs and Garvey, he may just as well have been speaking of the Bureau of Investigation (BOI), which kept tabs on both them and their affiliated organizations. Discussed below is the BOI’s surveillance of the ABB, but considering that its primary focus between the two organizations was the UNIA, it might be noted that it was likely instrumental in either driving a wedge between the two organizations or at least inflaming pre-existing resentments. Grant notes that Garvey’s “enemies had an uncanny knack for finding each other,” possibly the result of a BOI agent known as “800” who had infiltrated both organizations and then circulated documents from the UNIA among those who had grown increasingly disillusioned with it.26 

The ABB, the SPA, & the International Communist Movement

Because of the working-class orientation of the ABB, Briggs did see the possibility for solidarity in the Socialist Party of America (SPA), the largest working-class mass party in the early 20th century United States. According to Briggs, the basic reality was that the vast majority of black Americans were part of the working class, which meant that cross-racial working-class solidarity through socialism ought to have been a worthy path to liberation.27 The Socialist Party had been home to figures like George Washington Woodbey and Hubert Harrison, both of whom made the same arguments as Briggs. W.E.B. du Bois had long been a supporter of the SPA as well. However, despite the sense that socialism provided the best channel for black self-determination in the abstract, the reality was disappointing.

The SPA had long maintained the line that race was only a mechanism to divide the working class, which in actual practice meant ignoring racial issues and alienating its black members. Particular among them was Hubert Harrison, who lambasted the SPA for its race blind approach and its having refused to criticize the racism of the south, as they believed it would hurt them electorally.28 Race blindness and a generally muddled position on imperialism had long been a common feature in socialist politics, especially after the death of Friedrich Engels. Eduard Bernstein, who had himself been tutored by Engels and was a leader in the German Social Democratic Party, wrote in 1896 “Races who are hostile to or incapable of civilisation cannot claim our sympathy when they revolt against civilisation.”29 Although Donald Parkinson is right to say that this was by no means the hegemonic position in classical socialist politics, as Marx, Engels, Karl Kautsky, and Belfort Bax had long argued against support for colonialism and imperialism, it was nonetheless the case that working-class unity, even with the most reactionary tendencies, often trumped anti-imperialism in the long run.30 For Afro-American socialists like Hubert Harrison, of whom James points out as being far more consistent with classical socialists, the ABB and the emerging communist movement presented an opportunity for breaking from this compromise with racism.31

Meanwhile, by 1920, Soviet Russia had emerged from the Russian Civil War victorious. Having acquired some breathing room to begin organizing, its leaders fully dedicated themselves to building the new Communist International (ComIntern), an international body of the new communist parties aimed at succeeding the old Socialist International. One of the central tenets distinguishing the ComIntern from its predecessor was its opposition to imperialism. Taking direction from the Bolshevik philosopher and economist, Nikolai Bukharin, the fourth congress of the ComIntern explicitly aimed to build international solidarity through alliances with oppressed nationalities seeking self-determination throughout the colonized world, stating in its resolution that their task “on the national and colonial question must be based primarily on bringing together the proletariat and working classes of all nations and countries for the common revolutionary struggle.”32 These resolutions, which would be further expanded in subsequent congresses and resolutions of the ComIntern, would build bridges for the communist movement where the old socialist parties had failed. The ABB would play a major role in shaping the ComIntern’s colonial policy.

Briggs’s developing relationship to the international communist movement came early in the history of the ABB. In 1919, Briggs would defend the fledgling Soviet government by criticizing the forces it was directly fighting in the Russian Civil War and the generally anti-Bolshevik stances throughout the world.33 To defend the Bolshevik party was not simply a declaration of support but also defense against other black “editors and cartoonists” who mobilized propaganda about the party’s supposed evils.34 After all, Briggs had grown up and developed intellectually in the two shadows of sugar plantation slavery in the Caribbean and the brutality of Jim Crow America. The culture built off of the back of his people’s suffering condemning a socialist regime fighting for freedom was absurd to him. Those rank-and-file of the ABB saw the situation in similar terms, thus joining those engaged in other, related political projects. 

Members of the ABB in New York itself witnessed the forging of international solidarity through the communist project. Japanese radical Sen Katayama, for example, had founded the Japanese Communist Group (JCG), of whom W.A. Domingo and others had known through the SPA.35 As Makalani points out in an article on the ABB and its relationship to Asian radicals, the ComIntern was not simply a vortex within which anti-colonial movements were drawn but a center through which such movements collaborated and found solidarity despite their varied differences. 

An Inside View of the ABB & the BOI’s Racial Fantasy

ABB meeting places varied. Members would often come together at Briggs’ apartment. But it was also common for them to meet at the home of one of Harlem’s most active organizers, Grace Campbell. The BOI provides rich detail about these meetings thanks to reports provided to them by an informant inside the ABB, although it is not clear that the informant in the cited document was the aforementioned agent “800.”36 During this particular informant’s involvement with the Brotherhood, “Billings,” Otto Huiswoud’s pseudonym, would lead the meetings in Briggs’s apartment on what is now called Adam Clayton Powell Boulevard in the center of Harlem.37 Later on, meetings were held at Campell’s home on West 133rd Street, also in Harlem, where the informant, Earl Titus, would document them deciding on resolutions such as what labor unions to increase their involvement in.38 Unfortunately, the reports do not provide information on which unions were involved with the ABB, but it does reveal parallels with the Bolshevik model of providing a hub for the most dedicated organizers in the worker’s movement, especially after its break with Garvey. In addition, we do know that Campbell was one such organizer as well as becoming the host of the ABB’s later meetings.

The role given to Campbell within the ABB is important for elucidating how the organization fell short compared to later socialist and communist organizations, though it treated women no differently than any other during the period. Campbell was a notable actor in the contemporary socialist movement. She was a social worker, court attendant, and even a prison officer at one point, and thus had far more life experience than many of the men in the organization. She knew everyone there was to know in Harlem as a result of her extensive involvement in the socialist movement long before she met Briggs.39 Thus, as McDuffie points out, the ABB suffered from the sexism that was particularly endemic to American socialism during this period, granting only a secretary position to one of the organization’s primary recruiters and organizers, despite her being easily an equal to any of the men in the organization.40 The “Supreme Council” of the ABB would have likely not have had a safe place to meet if Campbell had not provided her living room.

The nature of the BOI’s investigation of the ABB changes from its early to later documents on the organization, a result of a change in the BOI’s primary informant. Titus, the informant who attended meetings in Briggs’s home, mostly did so as an extension of the Bureau’s investigations of Garvey. Things changed with Agent Joseph Tucker’s documentation of the ABB, which focused more heavily on the organization’s union work. In contrast to the dry documentation of Titus, Tucker’s discussion is more fixated on the ABB spreading “anti-white propaganda” by the organization among union members.41 The program of the ABB, itself easily available to anyone interested in their views, in no way pointed towards an anti-white political orientation. Here we can see in Tucker how the BOI’s ideological commitment to preserving the status quo was automatically equated to the preservation of white supremacy, otherwise a call for black freedom would have posed no threat. Whether Tucker was aware of it or not, he served the role of guard dog protecting the psychic health of white America.

While the ABB was growing in New York, black workers were being subjected to the most systematic pogroms committed against them since the height of the post-reconstruction Redeemer movement, nicknamed the “Red Summer,” which was at its height in 1919 but continued long into the 1920s. Moore, in particular, wrote extensively about the violence in Bogalusa, Louisiana, where the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners (UBCJ), International Union of Timber Workers (IUTW), and the American Federation of Labor (AFL) had organized across racial boundaries throughout the city.42 They were subsequently attacked by the Self-Preservation and Loyalty League (SPLL), an organization modeled on the KKK. The SPLL targeted the head of the newly formed black sawmill workers’ union, Sol Dacus, but were met with resistance by his shotgun-carrying, Euro-American comrades, Stanley O’Rourke and J.P. Bouchillon, both of whom died in the ensuing gunfight alongside the president of the Central Trades and Labor Council (CTLC), Lem Williams, and UBCJ carpenter, Thomas Gaines. The willingness to sacrifice their lives in defense of a black comrade was praised by Moore in an article in The Messenger, entitled simply “Bogalusa,” wherein he assigns labor as the terrain of common cross-racial struggle, “not for white labor, not for black labor…, nor yet for any race or nation, did they make the supreme sacrifice, but for Labor, that great university of fraternity and striving.”43

As the name of the ABB spread, it became the proverbial enemy of society onto which falsehoods could be projected, which is exactly what occurred during the anti-black Tulsa pogrom of 1921. Tulsa, Oklahoma was home in 1921 to the wealthiest black community in the United States, to which jealous Euro-Americans responded by destroying their businesses and killing an estimated 200 people, according to Walter F. White, the president of the NAACP at the time.44 A strange thing happened, however, likely due the presence of a copy of The Crusader or some other ABB-associated paraphernalia: in the aftermath of the racial violence, white leaders blamed the ABB. This was not a rumor that was simply spread among dedicated white supremacists. Rather, it was front page news, and as a result the accusation against the ABB eventually made it onto the pages of the New York Times.45 Briggs was coy about responding to the fantastic allegations of being responsible for stirring riots in Tulsa printed in the NYT, within which he was even accused of having spread guns among the city’s black community. His response was ultimately to let white society think what it wanted; if the anxiety and fear stirred by racial fantasies led them to scream the name of the ABB, then all the better for the organization. In other words, Briggs believed that all press was good press.  

There is a question of why the ABB triggered a response in which these narratives could circulate from local to national leaders, to which Sigmund Freud’s theory of a return of the repressed provides explanatory power. In Moses and Monotheism, Freud explains how sudden memories returning to the surface are not perceived by a subject in a way that is neutral, but rather as a threat.46 The ABB therefore gave its name to the threat presumed by a white America at the height of Jim Crow fervor, regardless of whether or not they really were. Outside of the United States, however, the ABB was not seen in the same negative light. 

The ABB & the ComIntern

The ABB’s claim to international fame was their members’ sojourn into the Soviet Union for the second congress of the ComIntern in 1920. Claude McKay and Otto Huiswood would be the two attendees, invited by the American communist, journalist, and witness to the October Revolution, John Reed.47 The Soviet Union, during the brief period between the end of the Civil War in 1919 and the death of its premier, Vladimir Illyich Lenin, in 1924 was, despite the difficulty of its existence, a place of intense optimism not only for communists but for anyone seeking national liberation and self-determination. Lenin was especially optimistic about the revolutionary potential of black Americans, viewing their experience as highly similar to the experience of Russian serfs, which had been a major revolutionary force in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917.48 Alongside Lenin, the president of the ComIntern, Grigorii Zinoviev, had criticized the Second International for both its lack of political commitment toward the non-western world and its lack of an adamant rejection of racism, stating that the “Third International does not classify people according to the colour of their skin.”49

The journey to the Soviet Union for both Claude McKay and Otto Huiswood was fraught with contradictions brought from the United States, but ultimately cemented the struggle for black liberation as a major plank of the U.S. communist movement. Sen Katayama would make another appearance in the story of the ABB, having become an advocate for McKay and Huiswood after members of the American delegation from the Worker’s Party of America (WPA), who were white, had gone out of their way to exclude them.50 McKay, having made his way to the congress alone and on his own dime, found himself celebrated in the Soviet Union, even claiming in the NAACP’s newspaper, The Crisis, that he had been “tossed up into the air and passed around by dozens of stalwart youths.”51 Some of the most famous pictures from this trip are of him sitting with the leaders of the Bolshevik party, such as Nikolai Bukharin, Grigorii Zinoviev, and the German communist Clara Zetkin, an old guard of the socialist movement who had been an active organizer for longer than most at the second congress had been alive. However, it was arguably Huiswood’s role that would shape the policies of the Communist movement on the question of race.

Unlike McKay, who was prominent as a poet, Huiswood was first-and-foremost an organizer, and therefore a figure who has received less recognition than deserved from historians. However, his presence was absolutely necessary during this sojourn to the Soviet Union. In 1922, it was Huiswood who recruited a young Harry Haywood, writer of the classic memoir, Black Bolshevik, into the ABB and early Communist Party.52 The experience Huiswood would draw from his involvement with the ComIntern was that, despite being typically portrayed as a highly Russian organization by Americans, “it’s as much our party as it is their’s,” referring both to American black communists and the rest of the world’s communist parties.7 It would be Huiswood that sat down with his Russian comrades to work out policy on the question of race.53 This would likely be the largest disparity between a historical actor and his shadow, as here a tiny organization, through one of its lesser known members, would influence ComIntern policy for decades, especially in the form of the Communist Party of the USA’s push to organize the American south’s “Black Belt” from the 1930’s through the 1950’s. Even more, this sojourn forged bonds between black radicals and the international communist movement that would go on to inform the sense that communists could be depended upon by black American radicals to back them up. For example, look no further than Robert F. Williams and the Black Panther Party.

The Legacy of the ABB’s Politics

By 1924, the ABB ceased to exist as a formal organization and liquidated into the Workers Party of America (WPA). The WPA would, alongside the United Communist Party (UCP), Communist Labor Party (CLP), and Communist Party of America (CPA) combine into the CPUSA at the ComIntern’s urging.54 Of course, many of its members would continue their work in their myriad ways, especially fighting for a place for black workers in the newly formed communist party through the institution of the American Negro Labor Congress.55 The afterlife of the ABB in the new Communist Party was a complicated one and unfortunately beyond the scope of this essay, but it should be noted that Briggs’ primary work focused on combating white chauvinism in the party.56 The rise of ‘Communism as 20th Century Americanism’ and conflict with its ideological exponent, James W. Ford, however, would eventually lead to Briggs’ exodus in 1933.57 

There was a jarring shift during this period, as the old Harlem radical communists represented a politics more focused on anti-imperialism and black nationalism, whereas the emergence of Ford and Earl Browder represented an Americanization of communist politics (Browderism) that pushed anti-imperialism and black nationalism into the background. I would argue, however, that the ABB’s legacy of innovative political synthesis, as well as its members’ willingness to confront contradictions, has endured well beyond the influence of Browderism. The ABB represents a refutation of cynicism in two senses; neither Browderite capitulation to Americanism nor Garveyite separatism and disinvestment, the ABB instead took a position that refused compromise but sought to find its own place in a world rocked by the revolutions of the early 20th century. 

 

Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at CosmonautMagazine@gmail.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.
Become a patron at Patreon!
  1. Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Mark I. Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998).
  2. Colin Grant, Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
  3. Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: the Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (Chapel Hill: The University of Carolina Press, 2000).
  4. Ibid, 216-217.
  5. Ibid, 215.
  6. “Migration”, The Messenger, Vol. V, No. 1,  (January 1923).
  7. Ibid.
  8. Mark I. Solomon, The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936 (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi), 5.
  9. Robinson, Black Marxism, 215. Briggs, Cyril, “Africa for Africans”, The Crusader, Vol. 1, No. 1, Sept. 1918.
  10. Romeo L. Dougherty, ”’Punta’ Revolutionist,” The Crusader, 1, No. 11. (July 1919): 372; Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, 47.
  11. Vernon L. Lidtke, The Alternative Culture: Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany, (Oxford University Press: Oxford, England, 1985).
  12. Briggs quoted in Heidemann, Class Struggle, 265-266.
  13. Foner and Allen, American Communism, 15-22.
  14. “On the History of the CPUSA and the CI on the Right to Self-Determination” Worker’s Advocate Supplement vol. 1, #9, Nov. 15, Accessed 2 Dec. 2020, (https://www.communistvoice.org/WAS8511CPUSA-BNQ.html: 1985)
  15. “Race Given an Unfair Deal by R.R. Labor Board”, The Richmond Planet, Vol. XLI, No. 20, April 5, 1924, Page 1.
  16. Grant, 324.
  17. Paul M. Heidemann, Class Struggle and the Color Line: American Socialism and the Race Question 1900-1930 (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2018), 199-200.
  18. Briggs, Cyril, “Marcus Garvey”, The Crusader, Vol. I, No. 12, Aug. 1919.
  19. It is worth noting, however, that Briggs’ took a patronizing “headmasterly” tone in his prodding of Garvey, accusing him of having been “too imperialistic and arbitrary” early on. See: Grant, 276.
  20. Briggs, Cyril, “A Letter from Marcus Garvey”, The Crusader, Vol. 2, No. 8, April. 1919, Page 1.
  21. “Editorials”, The Crusader, Vol. 2, No. 11, July 1920, Page 8.
  22. Garvy, Marcus. Quoted in Grant, Negro with a Hat,  310-312.
  23. Garvy, Marcus. Quoted in Grant, Negro with a Hat,  266.
  24. “Garvey in His Turn Now Sues Cyril Briggs”, The Chicago Whip, Dec. 10, 1921, 1.
  25. Moore, Richard B., Turner, W. Burghardt, and Turner, Joyce Moore. Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem : Collected Writings, 1920-1972, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988), Pages 32-39.
  26. Grant, Negro with a Hat.
  27. Heidemann, 203.
  28. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America, (London: Verso, 1998), 127.
  29. Eduard Bernstein, “German Social Democracy and the Turkish Troubles,” in Marxism and Social Democracy: The Revisionist Debate 1896-1898, ed. H. Tudor and J.M. Tudor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 51.
  30. Donald Parkinson, “Colonialism and Anti-Colonialism in the Second International”, Cosmonaut Magazine, (April 4, 2020), https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/04/18/colonialism-and-anti-colonialism-in-the-second-international/.
  31. James, 128.
  32. James Tabrisky Degras and the Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Communist International, 1919-1943; Documents (London: F. Cass, 1971), Page 141.
  33. Heidemann, 206.
  34. Ibid. 207.
  35. Minkah Makalani, “Internationalizing the Third International: The African Blood Brotherhood, Asian Radicals, and Race, 1919-1922,” Journal of African American History 96, no. 2, (2011): 152.
  36. Earl E. Titus, Federal Bureau of Investigations, “Casefile #61 -23: Cyril v. Briggs; African Blood Brotherhood; Claude McKay; Third Communist Party Internationale, Department of Justice-Bureau of Investigation Surveillance of Black Americans, Freedom of Information Act Retrievals”, 60.
  37. Earl E. Titus, FBI, “Casefile #61 -50: African Blood Brotherhood, Department of Justice-Bureau of Investigation Surveillance of Black Americans, Freedom of Information Act Retrievals, 1923,” 3.
  38. Joseph G. Tucker, FBI, “Casefile #61 -23: Special Reports on Negro Activities [in the Greater New York Area], Department of Justice-Bureau of Investigation Surveillance of Black Americans, Freedom of Information Act Retrievals, October 1914-February 1925,” 151-157.
  39. Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2011), 32-34.
  40. McDuffie, 37-38.
  41. Tucker, FBI, “Casefile #61-23,” 153-157.
  42. Stephen H. Norwood, “Bogalusa Burning: The War Against Biracial Unionism in the Deep South, 1919,” Journal of Southern History 63, no. 3, (1997): 591-628.
  43. Moore, Turner, and Turner, Collected Writings, 141.
  44. Walter F. White, “More than 200 Hundred White and Colored Men, Women and Children were Killed in the Bloody and Horrible Race Riots at Tulsa, Okla.,” The Broad Ax, June 18, 1921.
  45. ”Civil Law Restored, One Negro Agitator Under Arrest, Three Others Sought. PLOT BY NEGRO SOCIETY? Wealthy Men of Race Say Hotheads Were Busy Hours Before the First Clash.”, New York Times, June 4th, 1921, Page 1, 18.
  46. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, (Vintage, 1955), 136.
  47. Joy Gleason Carew, Blacks, Reds, and Russians: Sojourners in Search of the Soviet Promise (Piscataway: Rutgers University Press, 2008), 15.
  48. Ibid, 18.
  49. Grigorii Zinoviev, trans. Ben Lewis, Martov and Zinoviev: Head to Head at Halle (London: November Publications, 2011), 137.
  50. Carew, 20.
  51. Ibid, 21.
  52. Harry Haywood, Black Bolshevik (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 121.
  53. Carew, 22.
  54. Carew, 24; Solomon, 17-21.
  55. Solomon, 46.
  56. Ibid, 131.
  57. Ibid, 262-263.