Everything about African Blood Brotherhood totally explained
The
African Blood Brotherhood (
ABB) was a radical
U.S. black liberation organization of the early 20th century that developed ties to the
Communist Party. The group was a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret fraternity, organized in "posts" with a centralized national organization based in
New York City. The group's size has been variously estimated between 1,000 and 50,000 members at its peak.
"The Crusader"
Journalist
Cyril Briggs left the
Amsterdam News to start the monthly magazine
The Crusader in 1918. The first issue, published by the
Hamitic League of the World, espoused African
nationalist politics, but within a
Progressive context. Editorials endorsed independent African economic development within the free market. Further, they called for the extension of national independence, as noted among the articles in President
Wilson's
Fourteen Points proposal, to be applied to African colonies. The same issue of
The Crusader endorsed
A. Philip Randolph's campaign for New York State Assembly on the
Socialist Party ticket.
The magazine also asserted the right of African Americans to defend themselves against
lynching and
racist attacks. Racially motivated violence against African-Americans was endemic in the
Jim Crow era. Large-scale attacks by white
vigilantes against African-American neighborhoods were common. Historian
Charles Crowe found that between 1898 and 1908, there were 40 major
race riots in the South. In addition, large-scale attacks occurred in
Atlanta in 1906;
Springfield, Illinois in 1908;
East St. Louis in 1917;
Chicago,
Phillips County, Arkansas and
Omaha in 1919; and
Tulsa in 1921.
The African Blood Brotherhood
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 of 1919,
The Crusader announced the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood, to serve as a self-defense organization for Blacks threatened by race riots and lynchings. The ABB also organized inside the
UNIA-ACL and advocated a policy of critical support for
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 of 1921,
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.
Conflicts with Garvey and the FBI
Although the disputes with Garvey were real, the conflict was worsened by secret interference by police and government intelligence 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, the government's campaign continued under the direction of Attorney General
Palmer in what is called the
First Red Scare. Prefiguring
COINTELPRO by fifty years, government agents were secretly planted in the UNIA, ABB and
The Messenger. These agents provided intelligence to the incipient
FBI while spreading misunderstandings, 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 the CPUSA
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. Before this intervention by the Comintern, the party had largely ignored blacks, and thus wasn't particularly attractive to black radicals like Briggs. Instead, it was the
Bolshevik Revolution that attraced their attention.
Poet and ABB member Claude McKay 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. wasn't reducible to economic oppression, but was unique. He argued against the color blindness that the Communists had inherited from the Socialist Party. McKay made significant contributions to the debate on
national self-determination in support of national independence for oppressed peoples, if the peoples themselves desire it. 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
Black Belt of the American South. The policy was neglected after the
Popular Front period began in 1935, but wasn't formally replaced until 1959.
As the Communist Party developed, it regularized its structure along the lines called for by the Communist International. Semi-independent organizations such as the African Blood Brotherhood were no longer supported. Sometime during the early 1920s the African Black Brotherhood was dissolved, with its members merged into the
Workers Party of America and later into the
National Negro Labor Congress. Many early ABB members, however, went on to be key CP cadres for decades.
ABB Publications
Further Information
Get more info on 'African Blood Brotherhood'.
|
External Link Exchanges
Do you know how hard it is to get a link from a large encyclopaedia? Well we're different and will prove it. To get a link from us just add the following HTML to your site on a relevant page:
<a href="http://african_blood_brotherhood.totallyexplained.com">African Blood Brotherhood Totally Explained</a>
Then simply click through this link from your web page. Our crawlers will verify your link, extract the title of your web page and instantly add a link back to it. If you like you can remove the words Totally Explained and embed the link in article text.
As long as your link remains in place, we'll keep our link to you right here. Please play fair - our crawlers are watching. Your site must be closely related to this one's topic. Any kind of spamming, dubious practises or removing the link will result in your link from us being dropped and, potentially, your whole site being banned. |
