The African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) was an American black liberation group active in the post-World War I period. It advocated the position that socialist revolution was possible within the context of race politics and working-class unity.
Founded 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. Its 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.
Responding to race riots and lynchings during the Red Summer of 1919, Harlem activist and journalist Cyril V. Briggs founded the African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB), a radical group. ABB not only advocated armed self-defense and self-determination but also coalesced with the Communist Party USA, fusing black nationalism and communism. The African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) was based on the ideas of both socialism and an embryonic form of black nationalism.
Cyril Briggs, founder of the African Blood Brotherhood
The Formation and Ideology of the ABB
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. In 1912, Briggs was hired as a journalist by one of the black community's leading newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News.
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In February 1919, Briggs began to change his ideas, and his new thinking was expressed in articles in the Crusader. 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. 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.
The ABB’s policies and program were meant to provide a clear alternative to the politics of middle-class reform organizations. The ABB supported armed defense against lynching, the right to organize unions, equal rights for blacks, and the abolition of Jim Crow laws. During the so-called Red Summer race riots in 1919, Briggs argued for black separation and self-government, particularly in the South. Briggs viewed the liberation of black Americans and the struggle for international socialism as an alliance, but one in which a distinct black agenda remained a central ingredient.
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. During the First World War in particular, black laborers found work alongside immigrants while many native born white workers were conscripted into the military.
The ABB was first established in 1919 by the founder and editor of The Crusader newspaper, Cyril Valentine Briggs, in Harlem, New York. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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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.
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.
The ABB’s Stated Program Called For:
- the economic structure of the Struggle (not wholly economic, but nearly so);
- 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;
- 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;
- 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.
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.
In Harlem, Marcus Garvey and the UNIA were advocating national self-determination based on African separatism. 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.
The ABB would emerge as a major rival to the UNIA by drawing membership away from Garvey while regularly leveling criticisms at his organization. From its founding, the ABB would regularly involve itself with Garvey’s movement, attending its marches and conferences. 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.
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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. The Socialist Party had been home to figures like George Washington Woodbey and Hubert Harrison, both of whom made the same arguments as Briggs. 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. 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.
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 the project of international socialist revolution.
The term “race riot” as it is used today does not adequately describe the events in Tulsa in early June, 1921. It was a pitched battle between black and white citizens, followed by the sacking and destruction of the Greenwood District, known as both “Black Wall Street” and as “Niggertown.” Maurice Willows of the Red Cross called the events, “A short-lived civil war,” and that is appropriate.
The initial newspaper reports about the Tulsa “riot” mentioned the ABB, but this has been attributed by many historians to press fear-mongering. It is said the ABB was the first black organization in the United States to adopt Marxist principles. Several times such organizers had travelled to Oklahoma and in the months before the 1921 riot an ABB group had formed in Tulsa. Most of its members were WWI veterans.
In the days after the riot a local official told the New York Times, “Organizers of the ‘African Blood Brotherhood’ passed through Oklahoma about sixty days ago and organized a chapter of the secret society in Tulsa.”
Arriving at the courthouse, this group of armed blacks, numbering about seventy-five, was greeted by a white mob numbering in the thousands. Representatives of the black group were allowed to enter the fortified courthouse where Sheriff McCollough assured them no lynching would take place. The white man attempted to disarm the veteran and a shot was fired. A prolonged gun fight broke out as the blacks withdrew toward Greenwood and Archer. Block by block the fighting continued into the wee hours of the morning. At one point the battle raged around the train station, which was held as a fortress by black defenders for an extended period of time. With the bodies of white attackers scattered through the streets, the blacks retreated into Greenwood.
Far from being helpless victims, Tulsa’s black population fought with brutal efficiency against the white invaders. It is not hard to imagine this defense was pre-planned, or at least theorized before the shots began firing. Scattered fighting occurred throughout the night as thousands of white men gathered at several points in the city. They exchanged and distributed ammunition among themselves and the word was passed on: they would attack at dawn.
But on the battle line the story was a different one. There the losses of the white attackers were so great that to cover up the losses they have resorted to burying their dead at night, lest the Negros should know of the extent of the blow inflicted upon the thing called “White prestige.” The whites claim that our losses were greater than their’s. But the truth is that their casualty list - losses suffered in battle - is a longer list than our own. Especially in the attacks on the negro church held by a handful of ex-soldiers.
As dawn broke and a whistle sounded, a mass of white attackers charged across the tracks into Greenwood. While the ABB snipers shot it out with the white mob around the church, Taylor held a defensive position on a hill, six blocks from First Street on the north side. “He shot round after round of bullets for six hours.
In the days after the Tulsa “riot,” the ABB held a mass meeting in New York City with Tulsa members of the organization in attendance.
As to the accusation that the Tulsa Post of the African Blood Brotherhood “fomented and directed” the Tulsa riot, the first part is a lie, and whether we directed Negros in their fight in self-defense is certainly no crime in Negro eyes, and is left for the white Oklahoma authorities to prove. We neither deny it nor affirm it.
As part of the provisions of martial law that reigned over Tulsa in those days, funerals were forbidden. So the exact bodycount will never be determined.
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.
Government Response and the Red Scare
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 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.
The ABB enjoyed a period of notoriety following the Tulsa Riot of 1921. Briggs continued to operate the Crusader News Service, providing news material to affiliated publications of the American black press.
The ABB and the Communist Party
Poet and ABB member Claude McKay had previously been active in the Left Communist Workers 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 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. 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.
Members of the African Blood Brotherhood
With never more than 3,000 members, many of them Caribbean nationals, it boasted a core of intellectuals, including Jamaica-born writer Claude McKay. Until its demise in the 1920s, ABB was a paramilitary organization. Locally based affiliates, known as posts, received orders from and reported to a central command or Supreme Council in New York City.
Although the ABB was a bold experiment in black Marxist organization, it was short-lived, destroyed by its own internal logic. By the mid-1920s, its leadership had opted for a more class-centred interracial proletarian party and allied itself with the Communist Party of the United States of America.
The political strength of the ABB was its ability to look beyond the racist horrors of 1919 America toward a vision of workers power. The ABB understood the Black struggle could give a powerful impetus to the revolutionary workers movement.
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. 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. Thus, this does point to chapters being spread throughout these areas.
Part 12 Herb Boyd's perspective on the 1921 Tulsa Race riot
Here's a table summarizing key aspects of the African Blood Brotherhood:
| Aspect | Description |
|---|---|
| Founded | 1919 |
| Founder | Cyril Briggs |
| Ideology | Black liberation, socialism, communism |
| Key Figures | Claude McKay, W.A. Domingo, Richard B. Moore |
| Key Activities | Advocated armed self-defense, supported unionization, fought against Jim Crow laws |
| Dissolution | Early 1920s |
| Affiliation | Communist Party of America |
