Chapter 11: CYRIL BRIGGS, THE CRUSADER, AND THE AFRICAN BLOOD BROTHERHOOD
While Marcus Garvey was building the UNIA and the Negro World, and Randolph and Owen were leading the Friends of Negro Freedom (FNF) and editing the Messenger, Cyril Briggs had founded the Crusader and, in June 1921, declared it the organ of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). Briggs's publication and organization combined, in uneasy tension, a race and class analysis. His program and ideology initially resembled that of the UNIA and, to a lesser extent, the FNF. Briggs emphasized "race first," racial pride and self-development, a strong and independent African homeland, and militant self-defense against white terrorism. But over time he became more and more convinced that an alliance of convenience (or even of principled self-interest) between peoples of color and the white working class was feasible. Briggs's interest first focused on the Socialist party; by August 1921, impressed by Soviet anti-colonialist rhetoric and practice, he had affiliated his recently formed African Blood Brotherhood with the Workers (Communist) Party.
Like so many black radicals, Briggs was an immigrant from the West Indies, arriving in New York in 1905. He joined the staff of the mainstream black New York paper the Amsterdam News shortly after its founding in 1911, and soon became its de facto editor. He left in 1915 and founded his short-lived Colored American Review, a booster of Afro-American business, for which Harrison also wrote. After it folded he returned to the Amsterdam News in June 1916. In a two-part article in September 1917, Briggs demanded an autonomous Afro-American state on American soil. Briggs foresaw that Afro-Americans, facing increased white numerical supremacy, would suffer intensified oppression, and therefore required "a separate political existence, with a government that will represent, consider, and advance" black interests. Because Afro-Americans had helped build American prosperity through centuries of "unrequited toil," they could justly demand "one-tenth of the territory of the continental United States." Briggs's preferred location for this Afro-American homeland was the sparsely settled far West, rather than the deep South.[1]
In January 1918, shortly after Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, Briggs (writing in a white newspaper, the New York Globe) propounded the slogan "Africa for the Africans." Like Randolph, Du Bois, and Garvey, Briggs would allow temporary "international or American guidance" of the newly-liberated countries; however, he denied that the mere cessation of "enslavement and selfish and cruel exploitation" constituted "complete justice or full reparation to the Negro." His Crusader and Amsterdam News editorial denunciations of Afro-American support for World War I (which he called an imperialist war), his demands for African national freedom, and his insistence that African Americans receive the same protections that Wilson promised Poland and Serbia, aroused the antagonism of the secret police. When the authorities threatened the Amsterdam News with suppression, Briggs resigned (summer 1919) rather than accept censorship.[2]
Meanwhile, in September 1918, with some help from Harrison, Briggs had launched the Crusader, "the organ of the Hamitic League of the World," an Afrocentric organization founded by Children of the Sun author George Wells Parker. The Hamitic League included journalist and scholar John Bruce (writing under the pen name Bruce Grit), renowned savant Arthur Schomburg, and Briggs among its leaders. The Crusader's motto, "Onward for Democracy; Upward with the Race," symbolized its pretense of belief in Wilson's noble pronouncements and its use of Wilsonian slogans for profoundly anti-Wilsonian goals. The Hamitic League itself synthesized disparate rhetorics: "Negroes of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a continent to gain!"[3]
The Crusader began publication at the outset of the upsurge in black radicalism, when the Messenger had published only three issues and the UNIA was not yet a mass movement. Briggs and his magazine doubtless influenced both the UNIA and the Messenger greatly, and were in turn influenced by them. Indeed, in the effervescent atmosphere of Harlem radicalism during and after the Great War, speeches, pamphlets, editorials, and manifestos proliferated so abundantly and circulated so widely that ascertaining the originator of any particular idea is impossible. Many philosophies, including Du Bois's liberalism and Garvey's black nationalism, had antecedents going back to the 1850s or earlier.
The first issues of the Crusader set its distinctive tone. Briggs insisted that "the civilization of Africa by machine guns and bad gin will cease.... The Crusader intends to save the African people before they are exterminated." He demanded "a free Africa, and that without any frills of international control. The African people managed to get along before the white man came with his slave hunts to break up the splendid civilizations of the Sudan and other parts of Africa. The race that gave the world an Egypt and an Ethiopia and the groundwork and basic principles of civilization and the sciences can be trusted to govern themselves."[4]
The Crusader also vowed "to eradicate the evils of Alien Education--which exalts the white man and debases the Negro--by authoritative articles dealing with the ancient cultures of the African races as well as with their more recent achievements and present capabilities." Alien education was "far more injurious than lynching to the progress and vitality of the Race." It undermined self-confidence and produced a race of slaves. "Teach a child or nation that it springs from an inferior race and that it can never hope to overcome that inferiority, and you have made an obedient servant and a community of slaves.... [The Crusader] will bring back to our hearts our lost race pride, to our minds our forgotten race glory and to our souls our sleeping passions."[5]
"The Negro race is of all races the most favored by the Muses of Music, Poetry, and Art," claimed the Crusader, which vowed to publicize "the annals of our glorious deeds and the facts of the noble origin, splendid achievements and ancient cultures of the Negro Race" and help "Race industries in preference to all others." George Wells Parker contributed many articles claiming African origins for Egyptian, Judaic, Greek, and Roman civilizations, while lambasting the white corruption of those Negroid cultures. Parker asserted that "the ancient Grecians.... belonged to the African race!" White Aryans, on the contrary, "have ever been a race of destroyers instead of a race of creators and the vandals turned loose upon Europe today are the same vandals turned loose upon the Rome of yesterday."[6]
In a pathbreaking article analyzing the origins of racism, Briggs asserted that "hatred of the unlike.... probably existed before the dawn of history, that it certainly has been a factor in all times and countries of which there are any records, that never before have the two races lived together on terms of peace, justice, and equality." Briggs conceded that white racism was exacerbated by "the partial decadence and almost complete submergence of Negro culture" for many centuries, by the history of racialized chattel slavery in the United States, by the conscious miseducation of both races, and by white terrorism. He asserted, however, that "the dream of an ultimate equitable solution of the Negro problem in an alien civilization... can never be achieved." Racial antipathy preceded the human race, and generated savage wars even within "sub-species of the caucasian race."[7] Negroes had enslaved whites just as whites enslaved blacks. In the first issue, Briggs exclaimed that
This is the age of organized force.... Force is the only language modern nations understand. The adaptation of her national ideals to the gospel of Force was what saved Japan and gained for her the recognition and respect of the world. The lack of organized Force invited the partition of Africa and at present menaces the independent existence of China. Force is the great destroyer, but Force is also the great savior and regenerator. It can be possessed by all who are willing to pay the price in Sacrifice and Service.... The existence of a strong Japan guarantees to Asia's teeming but unorganized millions the eventual fruition of Asia for the Asiatics. The existence of a strong Liberia would do as much for Africa and the African races.[8]
Briggs reiterated these Garveyite sentiments in his second issue:
Recognizing that organized force is the only language intelligible to all the world (the only language that Europeans understand when dealing with Colored races) and the foundation upon which all white civilization is in reality based.... The Crusader dedicates itself to the doctrine of self-government for the Negro and Africa for the Africans.[9]
Negroes, Briggs asserted, required an "independent, separate existence."[10]
Briggs demanded a strong African homeland for reasons resembling Garvey's. One of these was prestige. A powerful Africa would benefit Negroes wherever they lived because "the status of one section of the race surely affects the status of all other sections, no matter what ocean rolls between. In a world of fast transportation and rapid thought communication we cannot be slaves in one part and expect to be recognized as free men in another part." Blacks must demonstrate their capacity for self-government, an impossibility in a white-majority nation. Africans had long ago displayed such ability, but their ancient empires had disappeared and had left few records. "Until that fitness is proven to the satisfaction of ourselves and the white man, the latter will have much to support him in the claim that we are an inferior race." Africans wanted only what every other people claimed as their right in an age where "national self-determination" was everyone's watchword. "The Irish, the Jew, the Pole--all races are looking towards national existence in a country of their own under government of their own, as the logical solution to their problems. Why should not the Negro also seek such ends? It is the only solution!" Even if blacks attained equality in the United States, "without the creation and existence of an independent African nation the word FAILURE will be inscribed for all time against the African name."[11]
A strong, independent Africa, then, would protect Africans abroad. The Jews, often cited as exemplars of the peaceful resolution of racial conflicts, actually demonstrated the vacuity of such remedies. Jews had a high culture, proud traditions, and "the almost illimitable power which immense wealth carries with it," yet were subject to ghettoization, pogroms, and discrimination. Their status revealed "the futility and impotence of even great wealth when there is no national existence to protect life and property. Riches, of themselves, protect neither individuals nor races." Demonstrating a profound ignorance of Japanese life in the United States, Briggs asserted that although there were more millionaires in the scattered Jewish race than in all Japan, "the Japanese may travel all over the world unruffled by the fear of pogroms and lynchings. Prejudice against the Japanese there is, to be sure. But that prejudice is held in rein by FEAR. The Japanese, with a powerful modern navy and a crack military machine, are not to be trifled with as all the big and little cowards of the caucasian race are fully aware." Money talked "most effectively when it can talk through big guns and from the decks of modern battleships." Such armaments required money, but even more "a country of our own."[12]
Of the two roads by which races could seek security--possession of property and education, or of armaments and military training--the first had never worked, while the second achieved power and recognition. Nations that lost military power forfeited all else; the cultural superiority of Greece and Rome availed little when they lost military superiority to surrounding peoples. Briggs again compared the Jews and the Japanese: whites "may hate the Japanese, but they fear and respect them as well. The Japanese, then, have attained in less than half a century all and more than the Jew has won in centuries of effort along the wrong road." The amassing of Negro wealth and property in a white supremacist America, or pulling up stakes and founding a black nation in Africa, both required arduous effort. "On the first road our sacrifices have been and will ever be for a democracy which we ourselves are never allowed to participate in.... On the other road the sacrifices will be for ourselves, for our children, for our fatherland and glorious race. The pulling of stakes will be so that we may the more securely plant them in a country of our own.... Africa presents the best opportunities for state building. But how long will those opportunities last if we continue to neglect them?"[13] A government of, by, and for the Negro was the only alternative to the government of the Negro by and for the white man.
Jews, Briggs continued, had finally recognized this truth and "are even now engrossed in the Zionist movement and literally moving heaven and earth in the interests of a free Palestine.... But a free Palestine, while representing opportunities for Jewish emigrants, will also tend to make Jewish migration thither largely unnecessary--providing Palestine ever becomes strong enough to demand and secure respect for the Jewish race throughout the world." A powerful, independent Africa--far richer and vaster than Palestine--would achieve the same for Africans worldwide. Instead of whining about white oppression, blacks must create an empire that could include far more than Africa. "Our fathers conquered. Our fathers ruled mighty domains and many races.... Has slavery completely robbed us of the manhood fires? All races have suffered slavery and most of them have risen again."[14]
The Crusader discussed various possibilities for an African homeland, especially extolling Liberia and its riches. It warned, however, that Liberia could not yet accommodate an unlimited number of immigrants, especially those lacking skills. "What Liberia needs most of all just now is enterprising, energetic immigrants to reap the wealth of her vast forests, her rich mines and her numerous streams," Briggs said. "Given even but a million of such immigrants it would be only a matter of a short time when Liberia would occupy in Africa a position similar to that which Japan occupies in Asia; and would thus win world-wide respect for the Negro race as well as laying the foundations for the complete redemption of the Fatherland."[15] Anticipating Garvey, Briggs even fantasized that the United States government would help pay passage for blacks who voluntarily departed for their ancestral home.
On another occasion the Crusader, contemplating Europe's stranglehold on Africa and the seas approaching it, mentioned Brazil as a promising site for a powerful Negro nation. Africa was preferable "on the basis of both sentimental attachment and strategic requirements and vastness of resources," but Brazil, inhabited overwhelmingly by darker races and egalitarian in its racial policies, presently "offers us the best field for the purposes of state-building."[16] A powerful Negro state in South America would galvanize native Africa, offer it material aid, and ensure eventual Negro domination of two rich and powerful continents.
Briggs, like Garvey, envisioned a lively and mutually enriching trade between the Africans of the world. Citing U.S. policies that fostered international trade, the Crusader said in June 1919 that "the American Negro has a most entrancing opportunity just now to establish commercial relations with his kilth and kin across the seas and to make millions of dollars trading with them and for them." Briggs's magazine ran frequent advertisements for the Inter-Colonial Steamship Company, the owner of which helped finance the Crusader. One such advertisement, a full page entitled "To West Africa," enticingly promised "Liberty and Fortune Before You! Persecution and Prejudice Behind!"[17] Unsurprisingly, Briggs took an early interest in the Black Star Line.
The Crusader's campaign for African racial consciousness included self-defense against white terrorism, black cultural autonomy, and international consciousness. "The nation-wide mobilization... of cracker America into the Ku Klux Klan is as plainly an act of war as was the German mobilization in 1914," it said. The white government would not protect blacks, while "so-called white friends" would remain apathetic; Southern whites moving North would exacerbate racial tension. "With the murderer clutching at our throats we cannot afford to choose our weapons, but must defend ourselves with what lies nearest, whether that be poison, fire or what."[18] McKay's "If We Must Die" followed.
The Crusader exclaimed that "a race that depends on another race for art, beauty and literature will necessarily get only what that race puts out," which "is always in the interest of" that alien race. Briggs said that "even a bad play dealing with Negro history and psychology" carried "a stronger appeal to Negro audiences than the best play framed for white psychology and consumption, and catering to white ideals and prejudices." African Americans must establish Negro history classes in their churches.[19]
Cyril's brother William Briggs, a frequent Crusader writer, echoed the quaint sentiments of some Messenger writers in his claim that good art and music uplifted individuals and the race. Blacks, he began, neglected the arts.
As [a] people [we] work too hard, relax too little, are too much concerned with our material welfare, and too little with things of the spirit. We need more song in our hearts, more rhythm in our thoughts, more harmony in our lives. We need to be lifted out of the common place of our hum-drum-work-a-day concerns and duties, at frequent intervals by the concord of sweet music.... We have had enough of music for the musicians, Art for Art's sake--but not enough ART for Humanity's sake..... If in your daily life, you wish to be regarded as a lady or gentleman, you are obliged to be careful of the company you keep. It is the same of musical life. If you associate with noble thoughts that constitute Good--or, as you call it classical music, you will be counted with a higher class in the world of music.[20]
William believed that ragtime was useful only as a frolic, "though even such a mood may vent itself in better taste.... Why share the musical food of those who are by breeding or circumstances, debarred from anything better? The vulgar impulse which generated rag-time cannot arouse a noble impulse in response any more than the dime novels or questionable literature can awaken the instincts of gentlemanness or ladyship."[21]
The Crusader also fervently denounced patriotism directed toward oppressive white governments, advocating instead an African internationalism. Briggs unstintingly denounced British and American atrocities perpetrated against peoples of color, especially the mass murder of helpless civilians by airplanes. He equally condemned the silent acquiescence of blacks in these atrocities. "Are we not faithful dogs and servile slaves, licking and fawning over the land that strikes us?" Deploring the lack of African-American protest against American murder, rape, and torture in Haiti, the Crusader lamented that the Negro's "pathetic impotence has been as complete in the international relations of what he chooses to call his country as in its domestic relations. And yet the rape of Haiti should interest him; if not from the standpoint of identity of race with the Haitians then because of the schooling white men are having in the idea of the non-sanctity of Negro life. Those white men are from America and will come back to America with less respect than ever for the lives and rights of black men."[22]
In a similar vein, the Crusader warned that "the plutes are plotting war against Mexico--Mexico the colored republic to the South. Mexico that does not jim-crow Negroes nor lynch them....." African Americans, disfranchised, lynched, and segregated, would certainly be used in battle against "the only country in North America that shows an attitude of friendship toward us. We will be called upon to fight against colored people in the white plutes' war of aggression on Mexican soil, oil and national rights." The Mexicans "live together without engaging in race wars, mob violence and the fiendish torture of human beings.... [which are] the salient and identifying features of the much-vaunted American civilization." However, "Mexico is rich in oil minerals. And it is inhabited by a colored race." If American capitalists want war with Mexico, the Crusader optimistically warned, they will have to fight it themselves. "As far as the American masses are concerned there will be no war with Mexico."[23]
Briggs carried his philosophy (similar to the UNIA's 1920 Declaration of Rights) to its logical conclusion in "The Gathering War Clouds," a December 1920 editorial. "Having raped Negro Haiti and Mulatto Santo Domingo, the United States shows a disposition to give further vent to its hatred of the darker races by insulting the proud Japanese through the adoption of discriminatory legislation." Marquis Okuma, the former Japanese premier, warned that if appeals to morality failed, only force remained. Harding, however, threatened to rob those Japanese already in California of their hard-won lands, just as Negroes were robbed of the fruits of their labor. The United States also coveted Mexico. In a racist war of aggression against Mexico or Japan, "the American Negro will without a doubt be called upon to shoulder his share of the white man's burden of keeping colored races in their place!" However, in such a case the duty of the race-conscious Negro was
NOT TO FIGHT AGAINST JAPAN OR MEXICO, BUT RATHER TO FILL THE PRISONS AND DUNGEONS OF THE WHITE MAN (OR TO FACE HIS FIRING SQUADS) THAN TO SHOULDER ARMS AGAINST OTHER MEMBERS OF THE DARKER RACES. The Negro who fights against either Japan or Mexico is fighting for the white man against the darker races and for the perpetuation of white domination of the colored races, with its vicious practices of lynching, jim-crowism, segregation and other forms of oppression in opposition to the principle advocated by Japan of Race Equality, and these are things that, we are convinced, no loyal Negro will do.[24]
Briggs wrote that while African Americans were in theory U.S. citizens, in fact the Negro in America "is and always will be a NEGRO BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE and will continue to be so until Negro 'American citizens' are not only American citizens in theory, but in practice as well." Such a choice was "not voluntary. It is forced upon us and upon every other Negro of spirit.... The place of birth is accidental, but the race into which one is born is not an accidental matter."[25]
Although the Crusader focused strongly on race, Briggs also struggled with the imperatives of class and their seeming conflict with those of race. The first issues of the Crusader featured articles emphasizing class consciousness. Briggs praised the Socialist party for nominating three Negro candidates (Randolph, Owen, and Miller) for high office. The Crusader supported any party which "gives the Negro a square deal.... Every Negro who is pro-Negro before he is anything else will vote for these three Colored men. And, as one good turn deserves another, we advocate the support by the Race of the entire Socialist ticket." When critics complained that a SP vote was a wasted vote, Briggs urged that blacks "throw [your vote] away. Is it not better to throw it away on a Party who recognizes you and on candidates of your own than to throw it away on an ungrateful Party and on white candidates who never represent you?" As far as African Americans were concerned, the two mainstream parties were virtually identical. "Negroes must choose between party subserviency and race-allegiance" and "put our race before our party." Briggs advocated both voting for the SP--"the party whose candidates will promote [the] Negro's interests"--and "renouncing party subserviency and voting for the Negro candidates." When major parties nominated black candidates, however (especially their typical race traitors and capitalist lackeys) these imperatives would conflict. Briggs's avid support of the SP, however couched in "race first" terms, implied that a class-based rapprochement between the races was possible.[26]
When the United States forcibly returned blacks from Coatsville, Pennsylvania, to the South (1919), Briggs equated this with Palmer's deportation of alien radicals. The capitalists who lured Negroes North during the war, and now returned them to peonage and lynchdom in the South, were "the same capitalists" who deported "all workers who dare to talk against the system.... To capitalism it made no difference whether it was a colored or a white worker" who it "exploited and then deported. Yet in both cases it found the Negro uninterested in what was being done to the whites and the whites ignoring the blow struck at the colored. Thus labor suffers by its race prejudice! Capitalism, on the other hand, knows neither prejudice nor nationality save the brands it seeks to foster, for its own benefit, among the workers."[27]
Addressing a theme discussed by Domingo and other Messenger writers, the Crusader warned that the capitalists feared white working-class insurgencies and were therefore "turning to the Negro for protection of their ill-gotten loot in case of a conflict between capitalism and labor." The servile Negro press was "giving its support--as usual--to the white capitalists' schemes to hoodwink and use the Negro." But the plutocrats and their hirelings forgot "that the Negro race in America is almost wholly of the proletariat and that Negroes more than any others have reason to be dissatisfied with the present system by which the white capitalists exploit the black and white masses and spread imperialism throughout the world.... Let those who have looted the millions protect them." Briggs said that "the Negro is essentially a worker.... The interest of the whites is then the interest of Negroes and vice versa and the sooner that is recognized by black and white the better for Labor." If white workers behaved justly, "there is no power on earth that can keep permanently apart these two important sections of the world proletariat."[28]
The brutal mass murder of striking black Arkansas sharecroppers and the lynch-law trial and conviction of the survivors (1919), evoked a major policy statement from the Crusader. These atrocities constituted "brutal notice" that whites would deny blacks "democracy or even simple justice." However, Briggs next advocated that blacks form "alliances with the liberal and radical forces of the country--of the world! Their fight against reaction, capitalist exploitation and bourbonism must be our fight. Our fight against bourbonism, reaction and capitalist exploitation (with its corollary of imperialism) must be their fight. This is already so to a great extent today." Radicals worldwide increasingly recognized "that economic exploitation at home is based upon and supported by economic exploitation abroad. British labor cannot compete with the cheap labor of India and Egypt, and is therefore interested in lifting up this 'foreign' labor from its present helpless position to a status more on a level with its own."[29]
Briggs said that "hopelessly outnumbered" blacks could not realistically fight alone. "The slave has a right to fight for freedom with any weapon within reach. And, in fact, his oppressors will use all and any weapons against him, as witness the bombing of Indian, Egyptian, and Afghan towns by the unspeakable Briton." Indeed, Africans in the West Indies and in Africa faced "an oppressive capitalist-imperialist regime that is unmatched for bare barbarism and wanton cruelty anywhere else in the world." Socialists opposed the chief enemy of blacks; therefore, "arraying ourselves with the Socialist party will be the most effective and fearsome answer we can give to the brutal challenge of the courts of Arkansas. The Crusader cited the anti-imperialist rhetoric and practice of the Soviet Union, and the deaths of two white Louisiana workers in defense of their black fellow unionists, as evidence that "radical labor has made our cause its own."[30]
Six months later (June 1920), Briggs continued his ruminations on the possibility of an interracial class alliance. The Afro-American "is not oppressed merely because he is a Negro," Briggs wrote, "but because he is weak. If there were no Negroes in America there would still be oppressed and oppressor. In all epochs of history the story is the same.... There is no Negro problem in Ireland, Poland and other lands of Europe, but there is, nevertheless, the problem of the strong and the weak, of the oppressor and the oppressed...." This was probably the result of human nature, "and questions of Socialism and Christianity enter very little into the problem. True Socialism, like true Christianity, is a promise of the distant future, rather than an achievement of the present. The ethics of Jesus Christ, the first and greatest of known Socialists, preached and disseminated around the world for nearly 2,000 years, have changed human nature very little, but have been greatly changed, camouflaged or diverted into strange channels by this perverse human nature."[31]
Socialist education would require hundreds or even thousands of years. And blacks would not wait for the rights that "should be ours without begging," especially when "Socialism at the end of that period may be as degraded as Christianity is" now. Declaring that he, as any intelligent and informed Negro, was a Socialist, Briggs said that he nevertheless viewed "political Socialism more as a stepping stone... than as a 'cure-all' for the ills of the world. White racism and imperialism "could as easily flourish under a perverted form of Socialism as it now does under a perverted form of Christianity. And there are even now signs of perversion of the Socialist doctrines, both at home and abroad."[32] Briggs then again conflated racism, capitalism, and the universal dominion of the stronger as reasons for black exploitation:
We have already seen that the chief factor in race problems is the existence side by side of widely differentiated racial groups and the resultant clash of ideals and interests. In the Negro's case the problem is only accentuated, not created, by reason of the great differences in the color of black and white peoples... But white capitalists would as soon use (and have as often used) white scabs as they would use Negro scabs. They would as soon (and do) exploit the weak bodies of little white children as the weak bodies of little black children, and vice versa with the black capitalists should these ever attain full development....
While other factors enter into the problem, they are all of satellite relation to the chief factor: the existence side by side of widely differentiated racial groups and the very human instinct which [incites] the stronger group to tyrannize it over the weaker group.[33]
The Crusader rejected as "highly improbable" a "peaceful, just and honorable solution between the white and Negro peoples in residence side by side in America." Such a fantasy presupposed not only the acquisition of property and education but also "alliance with white labor." But, turning a common argument on its head, the Crusader argued that Socialism, far from abolishing racism, might well exacerbate it. "When it is considered that white labor has only latterly and that most reluctantly, begun to admit Negroes to their unions, and that this reluctant recognition of Negro labor on the part of white labor was caused solely by the extremities to which white labor had been forced by the use of Negroes as scabs by the capitalists, what Negro in his senses can expect a continuance of the 'alliance' when there is no capitalist system to menace white labor and consequently no necessity to fear the Negro as a club in the hands of the capitalist group?"[34]
Agitation for suffrage in the South was, Briggs continued, simultaneously necessary and ruinous. The franchise was worthwhile and imperative not only in its own right, but as an essential defense of all other Negro advances. However, the vote, hard work, education, and the accumulation of property would only exacerbate tensions because "the educated and propertied Negro invites the envy, hate, spite and persecution of the whites. It is a recognized fact that the 'white South' would rather have illiterate, self-debasing and ne'er do well Negroes than educated, ambitious and prosperous Negroes whose self-respect will force them to demand the rights of men." At any rate, blacks could not succeed under the enormous handicaps imposed on them. Yet the franchise itself would inevitably generate backlash by whites fearful of Negro progress; intimidation, gerrymandering, and disfranchisement were possible reactions. "We know that the white man would not hesitate to use any means within his power to maintain the unchallenged supremacy of the stronger, usually referred to in this country as 'white supremacy.' Therefore, the reaction against the determined use of the ballot by the Negro may well be the use of the bullet by the white man, or some attempt at scientific, but quite as murderous, annihilation." Briggs, therefore, reiterated his demand for a powerful, autonomous Negro republic.[35]
Despite this pessimistic conclusion, Briggs urged that African Americans support the Socialist party at the polls. The two capitalist parties were identical as far as blacks were concerned, but the SP stood "staunchly against discrimination at home and imperialism abroad." Eugene Debs, the SP's presidential candidate, "has always spoken out for the Negro" and refused to address segregated audiences. The SP denounced Jim Crow, disfranchisement, and other forms of racial oppression while favoring self-rule for black nations. Debs would not win in 1920, Briggs conceded (he was in federal prison, from which he campaigned in 1920) but voting for him was worthwhile. "Just as by joining the IWW in large numbers, Negroes forced the American Federation of Labor to put down the bar, so in voting the Socialist ticket can Negroes force the Republican party to make concessions" and not take blacks for granted. "The Negro has lost under Republican administration many of the rights won by emancipation.... Better a Democratic vote in 1920 than a vote for the treacherous Republican party." In 1920 the SP once again nominated sterling Negro candidates--Randolph, Owen, Grace Campbell, Frank Poiree, and William Williams. The Crusader concluded "The Socialist party appeals for the vote of the Negro on the two grounds of class and race....On the grounds of race, the Socialist party is alone among American parties in its unequivocal stand for equality of opportunity and rights for the Negro" in the United States and abroad. "A vote of protest is never a vote lost."[36]
In April 1921, at about the time Briggs joined the Workers (Communist) Party, he again professed doubts, but also a guarded optimism, about the possibilities of Socialism. He repeated his usual position: history revealed that it was highly improbable that whites and blacks could live together in equality and peace. He added a significant caveat, however: while the two races could not coexist under capitalism, in a Socialist society "they might live together in peace and equality." Oppression and exploitation were necessary and inevitable under capitalism, while the slightest attempt at oppression under Socialism would dissolve socialism and reintroduce capitalism. Just as imperialism undermined democracy, so under socialism "freedom from exploitation would be lost for all the moment it were lost for one. It is clear then that it is possible to achieve the Negro's salvation through the destruction of the present system and the substitution for it of the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth." Briggs claimed that the Bolshevik revolution had rendered this a probability; the Bolsheviks had freed the Jews, freedom for whom would last only as long as Communism.
That the Negro can possibly--even probably--achieve his salvation through the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth, does not mean, however, that he can achieve it only through that means. Other groups have saved themselves in the past without engaging in a death struggle with Capitalism. World-wide substitution of the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth for the vicious Capitalist System is only one way whereby oppressed races may save themselves from the oppression engendered by the functioning of imperialist capitalism. Of course, it has the virtue of offering [the Negro] the most complete salvation since saving [him] not only from alien political oppression but from capitalistic exploitation by members of its own group as well. It has the advantage for the Negro race of being along the lines of our own race genius as evidenced by the existence of Communist States in Central Africa and our leaning towards Communism wherever the race genius has had free play.[37]
Socialism would obviate the need for a general exodus of blacks from white nations; but the establishment of a strong Negro state would also have this effect. Humanity would benefit most by Socialism, which would liberate all races.
But the Negro has been treated so brutally in the past by the rest of humanity that he may be pardoned for now looking at the matter more from the viewpoint of the Negro than from that of a humanity that is not humane. And again, he may prefer that his rights and immunity from oppression be based upon his own power rather than upon the problematical continued existence of the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth. To the writer it is inconceivable that the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth once established would ever be abolished, but then the oppressive Capitalist System was also inconceivable to our Communist African forefathers, as was also the European dictum latterly flung in the face of Asiatics and Africans that "might makes right."[38]
Briggs therefore advocated a combination of the two most realistic strategies: "salvation for all Negroes through the establishment of a strong, stable, independent Negro State (along lines of our own race genius) in Africa or elsewhere; and salvation for all Negroes (as well as other oppressed peoples) through the establishment of a Universal Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth. To us it seems that one working for the first proposition would also be working for the second proposition. We invite discussion, and offer the free use of our columns for the purpose."[39]
Briggs did not explain, much less defend, his assertion that Socialist oppression of any portion of the proletariat would signify the destruction of Socialism. Indeed, his one example--that imperialism undermined democracy--might have warned him of the fallacy of his prediction. Most white workers, in the United States and in European colonial powers, were avid imperialists who believed that their economic prosperity and superior status were bolstered by their governments' depredations abroad. Du Bois had warned that white capitalists bought off a section of the working class with the profits of imperialism (a phenomenon that Lenin called "super-profits"), while Domingo, McKay, and Briggs himself had mentioned the immediate, tangible benefits derived by blacks from collaboration with white capitalists against white workers. Indeed, in the same issue as the above editorial, Briggs asserted that the use of African troops in Europe repaid the European working class for its own racism and collaboration in capitalist imperialism. African troops, today used by France against Germany, would tomorrow gun down French and British strikers at the behest of their capitalist masters. White workers opposed capitalist aggression against the (largely white) Soviet Union, yet still "acquiesced in the destruction of many an African Communist state." In helping the capitalists enslave Africa, "the proletariat has blindly helped to establish the means for the prolongation (at the least) of its own slavery."[40]
Briggs announced the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood in October 1919. Aside from his cryptic comment that "those only need apply who are willing to go the limit," he provided few details of the organization. Advertisements, brief notices, and testimonials from new members sporadically appeared in subsequent months. In June 1920 the Crusader announced that the ABB was "probably the first Negro secret organization" in the Western world "having as its sole purpose the liberation of Africa and the redemption of the Negro race." It had "a ritual of its own, with degrees, passwords" and "a formal initiation ceremony when a solemn oath is taken."[41] The supreme leadership consisted of a five-man War College, the selection process of which was not explained. The ABB suggested that its members
Affiliate yourself with the liberal, radical and labor movements. Don't mind being called "Bolsheviki" by the same people who call you "nigger." Such affiliation in itself will not solve our problems, but it will help immensely.
Encourage the Universal Negro Improvement Association as the biggest thing so far effected in surface movements.
Reject all allegiance that carries no corresponding rights and privileges, and remember that such rights and privileges should always precede allegiance and patriotism.
Make the cause of other oppressed peoples your cause, that they may respond in kind, and to make possible effective co-ordination in one big blow against tyranny.
Find possibilities for the study of modern warfare, aeronautics and the artillery branch in particular.
Learn a trade. Get into the essential industries where possible....
Adopt a policy of race first, without, however, ignoring useful alliances with other groups....
Invest in race enterprises, but follow your money with your active, personal interest.
Kill the caste idea. Stop dividing the race into light and dark. Stop harping about West Indians, Southerners, Northerners, and so forth. Let the line of cleavage fall between true Negroes and false Negroes....
Wage war against the alien education that is being taught our children in the white man's schools. Demand the true facts concerning the grand achievements of the Negro race....
Don't leave everything to your officers and leaders. Get into the fight yourself. Do your bit financially, orally and in every possible way.[42]
In June 1921 the Crusader declared itself the organ of the ABB. The announcement appeared inconspicuously, in small type near the table of contents. The cover, as usual, featured an attractive African-American woman, while two other pages contained pictures of "prize winners in the New York News beauty and popularity contest." Although the provisional Constitution of the ABB was an organizational document mostly devoid of philosophy, it rejected the Crusader's traditional support of honest Negro businesses. The ABB was instead a class-conscious organization that would fight capitalists of both races and organize "Negro manhood and womanhood toward meeting intelligently and fearlessly our problems." It would conquer "the enemies of the Negro race wherever they are found, whether among the white capitalist-imperialist robbers of Europe, the capitalist-cracker murderbund of the Southern United States, the cunning Northern exploiters of Negro Labor... or the traitorous opportunists, petty bourgeoisie and would-be capitalists of the Negro race who in the past have sold the Negro worker body and soul to the enemy of the race: the white capitalist...."[43]
The June issue also contained two editorials of a rhetorical style usually absent from previous issues. Filled with exhortations and explanation points, they referred to African Americans as "you," rather than the "us" Briggs usually used. The Crusader now unambiguously asserted that the abrupt cessation of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Soviet Union proved that capitalism alone generated racism. In August the Crusader repudiated another old ally, the Socialist party. At its Detroit convention, the SP had rejected the Third International, espoused American patriotism, and "betrayed Revolutionary Socialism and the cause of the workers for the glitter and safeness of Parliamentarism and the selfish interests of its opportunist leaders."[44]
The Crusader now proclaimed that the idea of intractable race antipathy ignored the fact "that self interest plays a greater part in the world than does race and that consequently the Negro must have many friends among those groups whose interests are identical with his own and whose aims are unattainable without the aid and cooperation of the Negro. Already the most radical white labor organizations have thrown themselves open to the Negro.... There are schisms in the white race which, by encouraging, we can ultimately benefit ourselves." African Americans should encourage divisions among whites while "discouraging any division in our own race except such as are absolutely necessary for progress as, for example, the class division which is rapidly taking form among the Negroes of America."[45] Briggs, apparently, had decided that class ultimately trumped race.
The African Blood Brotherhood attained nationwide notoriety when it was accused of inciting the Tulsa race riot in the early summer of 1921. Briggs emphatically denied that the ABB instigated violence, saying that "we do not have to foment unrest among Negroes when unrest already exists among them.... Negroes do not have to be told that lynchings and mob murders are barbarous acts of injustice." The ABB, Briggs implied, may have helped organize black self-defense: "As to whether the Tulsa Post of the ABB had any part in organizing and directing Negro defense once the riot had started--that is another matter, and something that the Oklahoma authorities can find out for themselves.... The ABB is organized not for aggression, but for the protection of otherwise defenseless Negroes." Briggs said that all ABB posts "were galvanized into renewed activity" by the publicity afforded by the Tulsa riot; in what was surely wild hyperbole, he claimed an ABB membership of 50,000, organized into 150 branches. However, Briggs almost certainly capitalized on white hysteria to publicize the ABB, which probably had no branch anywhere near Tulsa.[46]
Briggs now urged more unreservedly than ever before the necessity of African-American alliances with other forces, of whatever race, seeking similar ends--in this case, freedom from white colonial governments. Briggs mentioned three possible allies in the fight for a free Africa: other movements of national self-determination; the Soviet Union; and the Islamic religion. Although ultimate success depended upon Negro determination and sacrifice, blacks must ally
with the Indian Nationalists, the Turkish Nationalists, the Persians, the Arabs and all other peoples participating in the common struggle for liberty, and especially with those peoples whose struggle is against the great enslaver of the darker races--England.... We must seek cooperation with all other forces consciously working with the same end in view, and intelligently encourage and stimulate such forces as are working unconsciously to the same purpose. Since it is under the capitalist-imperialist system that Negroes suffer, we must boldly seek the destruction of that system, and to that end seek cooperation with such other forces--Socialism, Bolshevism, or what not--that are engaged in a war to the death with Capitalism.
Negroes must also work for "the isolation and eventual degradation of the anglo-saxon race."[47]
The Crusader also saw Islam as an ally. It had previously asserted that "Mohammedanism is the black man's religion" and that "Islam maintains and practices the equality of all believers." Briggs remarked approvingly that "A white Mohammedan would just as quickly give his daughter's hand in marriage to a black believer as he would refuse it in the case of a white non-believer or infidel." Although Christianity encouraged "a servile state of mind and slavish acquiescence in white tutelage on the part of the Negro convert," Islam "inspires self-respect and love of liberty." The Crusader now contrasted the two religions, "one the religion of the white imperial peoples and one the religion of millions upon millions of black, brown and yellow peoples in Africa and Asia; one the religion of Negro inferiority, the other the religion of the equality of all believers." In an implicit slap at Garvey, the Crusader observed "it is only by intelligently utilizing all the forces opposed to those who have Africa and the Africans in subjugation that we can hope to achieve the liberation of Africa and the redemption of her races the world over."[48]
The program of the ABB, "Offered for the Guidance of the Negro Race in the Great Liberation Struggle," appeared in the Crusader's October 1921 issue, after the ABB had irrevocably split with the UNIA. This program echoed Messenger ideas and also the vanguardism explicit in both Du Bois's "talented tenth" and the Leninist party. The Program asserted that the Negro's struggle was mostly economic in nature and demanded that Negroes ally themselves "with all forces and movements that are working against our enemies." It asserted that Negroes need not "endorse the program of these other movements before they can make common cause with them against the common enemy."
The important thing about Soviet Russia, for example, is not the merits or demerits of the Soviet form of government, but the outstanding fact that Soviet Russia is opposing the imperialist robbers who have partitioned our motherland and subjugated our kindred, and that Soviet Russia is feared by those imperialist nations and by all of the capitalist plunder-bunds of the earth from whose covetousness and murderous inhumanity we at present suffer in many lands.[49]
The African Motherland was occupied and "the free life of the African peoples have been broken up and the natives deprived of their lands in order to force them to work, at starvation wages, on the lands of these white capitalists.... By the white man's religion our people's militant spirit was drugged; with his whiskey they were debauched. The white man's treachery, the white man's religion and whiskey had as great a part in bringing about our enslavement as the white man's guns." The thorough exploitation of Africa, however, required modern industry, technology, and warfare. "With the introduction of industrial equipment the African has learned to wield the white man's machines, his guns, his methods, and with the possession of this knowledge has grown a new hope and determination to achieve his freedom and become the master of his own motherland."[50] A world-wide Negro Federation, allied with similar anti-colonial movements of other peoples, was essential.
"Labor organizations should be formed in the industrial sections in order to protect and improve the conditions of the Negro workers," the ABB insisted. Negroes must educate native soldiers, build an indigenous revolutionary army on Sinn Fein lines, send modern arms to Africa, and form a "pan-African army, whose very existence would drive respect and terror into the hearts of the white capitalist-planters.... Remember: MIGHT MAKES RIGHT--ALWAYS DID AND ALWAYS WILL."[51]
The ABB considered "the comparative freedom of the North [as] propitious for great organizations and cultural activities, and it is here that the vanguard and general staff of the Negro race must be developed." The ABB called for a united front of all Negro organizations that could operate openly in the North and secretly in the South. "Within this Federation a secret protective organization should be developed--the real Power--to the membership of which should be admitted only the best and most courageous of the race. The protective organization would have to function under strict military discipline, ready to act at a moment's notice whenever defence and protection are necessary."[52]
The power of a people, the ABB claimed, depended largely upon its standard of living. Because blacks organized into labor unions had everywhere improved their lives, "all worth-while Negro organizations and all New Negroes must therefore interest themselves in the organizing of Negro workers into labor unions for the betterment of their economic conditions and to act in close cooperation with the class-conscious white workers for the benefit of both." This body of white workers "is led and represented by the Third International," with its "millions of followers in all countries of the world." Confronting racist white workers, Negroes must "awaken their class-consciousness toward the end of obtaining their cooperation in our struggle." In a stab at accommodationist blacks (who now included Garvey as well as Du Bois), the ABB declared that "to pledge loyalty to the flags of our murderers and oppressors" is "the blackest treason to the Negro race and our sacred cause of liberation."[53]
The ABB's program concluded with the exhortation that "the Negroes resident in America" were "destined to assume the leadership of our people in a powerful world movement for Negro liberation. The American Negro by virtue of being a part of the population of a great empire has acquired certain knowledge in the waging of modern warfare, the operation of industries, etc.... It is in this country, especially, that the Negro must be strong. It is from here that most of the leaders and pioneers who will carry the message across the world will go forth."[54]
After his break with Garvey in August 1921, Briggs, directly competing with the UNIA, emphasized the mystical, ceremonial, and ritual element of the ABB. In October 1921 the Crusader announced that "a feature of the African Blood Brotherhood, little stressed heretofore, is that the organization easily has the grandest lineage of any of the fraternal orders now in existence, dating as it does from Ancient Egypt and continuing uninterrupted through the various parts of Africa and today existing in Central Africa in the splendid ceremony of the Blood Brotherhood for centuries practiced in that part of Africa." ABB leader Theodore Burrell explained the antiquity and mysteries of the blood exchange ceremony. Mimicking the fraternal orders common to both whites and blacks, the ABB established a hierarchy of seven degrees, "as per the ancient Egyptian rule." The first degree was conferred upon all new members; as of November 1921, no one had attained the third rank. On a more mundane level, Briggs also envisioned a sickness and death benefit fund.[55]
Shortly before the U.S. indictment of Garvey for mail fraud and the folding of the Crusader, Briggs printed a "condensed and tentative constitution" for the ABB that borrowed features from both the UNIA and the FNF. The goals of the ABB were
Sec. 1. To cement into one great universal Brotherhood all persons possessing in any degree the glorious heritage of African Blood.
Sec. 2. To work for a Free Africa and the immediate protection and ultimate liberation of Negroes everywhere.
Sec. 3. To secure absolute race equality--political, economic, and social; and to see that there is an equal application of the laws wherever Negroes have to live and work.
Sec. 4. To seek to develop commercial enterprises among Negroes in various parts of the world.
Sec. 5. To gain for Negro Labor the full reward of its toil, and to prevent Capitalist exploitation and oppression of the workers of the race
Sec. 6. To disseminate a knowledge of Negro history in order to foster race pride and stimulate race effort.
Sec. 7. To establish a true rapprochement and fellowship within the darker races.
The ABB would also encourage racial educational and religious institutions headed by blacks, and "strive for a federation of all Negro organizations of whatever character in order to present a united front for self-defense, and to co-ordinate our efforts at liberation."[56]
Briggs declared the Crusader the monthly magazine of the ABB and also envisioned a newspaper, tentatively called The Liberator. The ABB's leader was titled "Paramount Chief." Each ABB post would, like the UNIA, have a chaplain in charge of education and religious instruction, and a physical director, "preferably a person of some military training and experience" who would instruct ABB members in "physical training and the code of discipline" and direct "all uniformed bodies." The Director of Economics would mediate conflicts between black workers and capitalists, help establish cooperative enterprises, organize blacks into unions, and work for an alliance "between the workers of all races" for improved wages and working conditions. Briggs announced a "constitutional congress" for July 16, 1922, that would "revise, amend, amplify and ratify this Tentative and Condensed Constitution."[57]
Briggs, the ABB, and the Crusader propounded a coherent and wide-ranging ideology that cogently united Garvey's "race first" and Randolph's "class first" philosophies. It also embodied one of three distinct efforts to inject class consciousness and Socialist ideas into Garvey's mass movement. Some Harlem radicals (Harrison, McKay, and Domingo) worked within the UNIA and hoped to persuade its members of the necessity of Socialism; they followed the SP strategy of "boring from within" mainstream movements and institutions. Others, particularly Randolph and Owen (and, after his forced departure from the UNIA, Domingo) criticized the UNIA from outside. The ABB represented a third approach: a parallel, "dual" organization seeking enough recruits, publicity, and power to negotiate with the UNIA on equal terms, thus securing a hearing for a philosophy and strategy that combined race and class. In 1921, all of these efforts shipwrecked.
Notes:
[1] CB, "'Security of Life' for Poles and Serbs--Why Not for Colored Americans?," Amsterdam News, September 5 and 17, 1917, quoted in Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York, 1986), 323. For a somewhat different account (which dates the two-part article differently) see Kornweibel, Surveillance, 105-108.
[2] Robert Hill, Biographical Sketch of Briggs, MGP I, 521-57; Robert Hill, "Racial and Radical: Cyril V. Briggs, THE CRUSADER Magazine, and the African Blood Brotherhood, 1918-1922," xiii-xiv, xxii-xxiv. This is the introduction to Hill's reprint of the Crusader. Hill's claim that Briggs's separation from the Amsterdam News was motivated by censorship must be treated with caution because Hill accepts Briggs's much later explanation for this severance rather than his contemporary account. Briggs's brief, noncommittal contemporary statement, which claimed that he quit the Amsterdam News so he could devote all his energies to the Crusader, was obviously meant to avoid offending the editor of the Amsterdam News, who remained Briggs's friend and supporter. Hill documents previous federal threats of suppression directed against the Amsterdam News which did not intimidate either that publication's editor or Briggs; he says that the Red Scare made such threats seem more ominous in 1919, thereby generating a crisis at the newspaper. However, federal suppression of dissident newspapers was ferocious in 1917-1918; the Red Scare continued rather than initiating vigorous repression.
[3] TCR, December 1918 and September 1918; Advertisement for the Hamitic League, TCR, December 1918.
[4] "Africa for the Africans," TCR September 1918; "Negroes of the World Unite in Demanding a Free Africa," TCR, December 1918.
[5] "Aims of The Crusader," TCR, September 1918; "Alien Education," TCR, September 1918; George Wells Parker, "The Greater Work," TCR, December 1918.
[6] "Race Catechism," TCR, September 1918; Parker, "The Children of the Sun," TCR, November 1918.
[7] Briggs conceded that modern Brazil was an exception. He argued, however, that the racial equality there was between Indians, Negroes, and Latins, and insisted that no Nordic race had ever lived on terms of equality with Negroes. Furthermore, "in Brazil the darker races enjoy equal opportunities and complete equality only because they greatly outnumber the white races in that country." CB, "The American Race Problem. No. 1. What is It," TCR, September 1918; "The Great Illusion," TCR, November 1918.
[8] CB, "The Great Illusion," TCR, November 1918.
[9] "Aims of The Crusader," TCR, November 1918.
[10] "The Race Problem. N. 3--The Negro's Solution," TCR, November 1918.
[11] "Would Freedom Make Us 'Village Cut-Ups,'" TCR, February 1919; "The American Negro's Duty to the Negro Race," TCR, November 1919; "Government of the Negro," TCR, August 1919; "Where Glory Calls," TCR, April 1919.
[12] "The Jewish Massacres and Their Lesson," TCR, July 1919.
[13] "On the Wrong Road," TCR, March 1920. The article was signed "C. Valentine," apparently a pseudonym used by Briggs.
[14] "Our Lone Monopoly," TCR, October 1920; "A Race of Cry-Babies," TCR, December 1920. Briggs was fond of quoting Cicero's characterization of British slaves as "the stupidest and ugliest" of the lot. (The first time he cited this was in "Roll of Honor," TCR, September 1918.) And of course, the horrible fates of the Japanese, the Jews, and the Palestinians in the decades after Briggs penned these lines offer a melancholy commentary on the advantages, and disadvantages, of a people having or lacking their own state.
[15] C. Valentine, "Liberia, the Open Door to Liberty and Power," TCR, November 1919.
[16] CB, "At the Crossroads, II," TCR, July 1920.
[17] "The Call for Unity," TCR, June 1919; Advertisement, TCR, November 1919.
[18] CB, "The Ku Klux Klan," TCR, January 1921.
[19] J. Griffith, "The Negro and His Institutions," TCR, September 1919; CB, "Our Stage Favorites," TCR, May 1920. J. Griffith owned the Art Publishing Company, which frequently advertised in the TCR.
[20] William Briggs, "The Power and the Influence of Music," TCR, April 1919.
[21] ibid.
[22] "England," TCR, June 1919; "Overseas Correspondence," TCR, August 1920.
[23] "Making Enemies for Us," TCR, September 1919; "Intervention," TCR, November 1919; "Mexico," TCR, January 1920.
[24] "The Gathering War Clouds," TCR, December 1920. Briggs might more appropriately have advocated forcible Negro resistance to conscription and war, rather than the meek acceptance of imprisonment or execution.
[25] "Negro First!," TCR, October 1919. Presumably Briggs meant that while a person's race was essential, intrinsic, and unalterable, people could move from their place of birth, changing nationality in the process.
[26] "The Negro Candidates," TCR, September 1918; "Party Subserviency," TCR, November 1918.
[27] "Deporting Aliens and Negroes," TCR, April 1919.
[28] "Out for Negro Tools," TCR, May 1919; "The Negro's Place is with Labor," TCR, June 1919.
[29] "The Arkansas Challenge," TCR, January 1920.
[30] ibid. Europeans began the terror bombing of indigenous populations in 1911; early British targets included Afghanistan, Iraq, Dafur, Iran, and Transjordan. See Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York, 2001).
[31] CB, "At the Crossroads," TCR, June 1920.
[32] ibid.
[33] ibid.
[34] ibid.
[35] ibid.
[36] "The Political Situation," TCR, August 1920; "A Double Appeal," TCR, November 1920.
[37] "The Salvation of the Negro," TCR, April 1921.
[38] ibid.
[39] ibid.
[40] "Africa and the White Proletariat," TCR, April 1921.
[41] "Cyril Briggs Announces the Formation of the African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, October 1919; "The African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, June 1920. Hill, "Racial and Radical," xxix, quotes the initial oath as demanding "absolute and unquestioning loyalty and obedience to all orders and decrees"; members would fight "to THE DEATH IF NECESSARY" against "the oppression and exploitation of the alien."
[42] "The African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, June 1920. Hill, "Racial and Radical," lxvii-lxx, prints what is allegedly a 1920 ABB programmatic document, and compares it to a 1922 version. The 1920 document, which was never printed in the Crusader, contains a sharp, if implicit, attack on Garvey and the UNIA's economic enterprises which seems inconsistent with Briggs's, and the ABB's, stance in 1920. In that year, Briggs and the ABB urged all blacks to join the UNIA, and offered guarded approval of the BSL and the ACL and especially of the principles upon which they were based. The ABB's criticisms of the BSL were of practical operational details. The 1920 document printed by Hill, however, demands "industrial development along genuine cooperative lines whereby the benefits will be equally distributed among the masses participating, and not appropriated by a few big stockholders and dishonest and inefficient officials drawing exorbitant salaries. The ABB is sternly opposed to the foisting of individual and corporation enterprises upon mass movements" because such enterprises "should benefit the many rather than the few" and "the ABB does not consider any commercial enterprise good enough to base the sacred Liberation Movement upon the mere chances of its success or failure. No movement so based can long survive the collapse of its commercial enterprises."
These objections to the BSL and other UNIA economic enterprises were characteristic of Briggs and the ABB after their split with Garvey and the UNIA; they would have been egregiously out of place at a time when both Briggs and the ABB were energetically wooing Garvey and the UNIA. Hill's source for this alleged 1920 program is Arthur Preuss, A Dictionary of Secret and Other Societies, published in 1924. I believe that this dictionary accepted a later ABB program as a 1920 document.
[43] "Constitution of the African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, June 1921.
[44] "The Socialist Surrender," TCR, August 1921. The Crusader's support of the SP through 1920 seriously undermines Robert Hill's 1987 claim ("Racial and Radical," xxvii) that the ABB was "a black auxiliary of the nascent Communist party from its inception, the first in a succession of such auxiliaries spawned over the years." Indeed, the previous year, Hill ("The Comintern and American Blacks, 1919-1943," Appendix III, MGP, V, 845) said that Briggs "helped bring the ABB into the Workers party" in early 1923. Hill says that Otto Hall, a prominent ABB member and early Communist, actually urged blacks not to join the Workers party until that organization "took action against the party's internal racism." Attending the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow in 1922, Workers party delegate Otto Huiswoud (a West Indian) said only that the Workers party maintained "close contact" (Hill's words) with the ABB (Hill, "Comintern," 842-843). Surely Huiswoud would not have misled the Comintern about the nature of the ABB, even if he realized that any statements he made there would be publicized in the United States.
In Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago, 1978), 120-126, Harry Haywood states that Otto Hall and other black Workers party members in Chicago advised that other blacks resist joining the Party until it had taken action against its own racism. Haywood offers sincere but confused information on the much-debated topic of ABB/Workers party relations. As but one example, Haywood says that Briggs helped found the ABB in 1919, but that the ABB supported SP candidates in the elections of 1918! Haywood, however, did not join the ABB until 1922, and did not meet Briggs until 1930. He therefore lacked first-hand information on the early days of the ABB.
All authorities agree that Briggs's later recollections to the WPA in the 1930s, and to Theodore Draper in the 1950s, are filled with numerous and important errors. Hill himself points out many serious errors. Considering the secrecy and duplicity of the Workers party, and the vast unreliability of Briggs's autobiographical statements, a perfectly accurate determination of the exact relationship between the ABB and the Workers party is probably impossible.
The Crusader, however, is almost certainly an accurate account of the evolution of Briggs's own ideas on the relationships between racial and class oppressions, and the relative importance of each.
[45] "The Acid Test of White Friendship," TCR, July 1921.
[46] "The Tulsa Riot," TCR, July 1921; "The Tulsa Outrage," TCR, July 1921; "The Tulsa Riot and the African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, July 1921; "The African Blood Brotherhood Accused of Fomenting the Tulsa Riot," TCR, July 1921; "African Blood Brotherhood Activities," TCR, July 1921. Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge, 1982) scarcely mentions the ABB. James S. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (Boston, 2002), 262, quotes Robert Hill's statement that "The ABB did not spread beyond the East Coast."
[47] "Liberating Africa," TCR, August 1921.
[48] "A Revealed Secret of the Hamitic Race, V," TCR, August 1920; "Thinking White," TCR, May 1921; C. Valentine, "Two Religions in Practice," TCR August 1921; "Liberating Africa," TCR, August 1921.
[49] "Program of the African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, October 1921.
[50] ibid.
[51] ibid.
[52] ibid.
[53] ibid.
[54] ibid.
[55] "African Blood Brotherhood Activities," TCR, October 1921; Theo. Burrell, "African Blood," TCR, November 1921; "African Blood Brotherhood Activities," TCR, November 1921.
[56] "Condensed and Tentative Constitution," TCR, December 1921.
[57] ibid.
Like so many black radicals, Briggs was an immigrant from the West Indies, arriving in New York in 1905. He joined the staff of the mainstream black New York paper the Amsterdam News shortly after its founding in 1911, and soon became its de facto editor. He left in 1915 and founded his short-lived Colored American Review, a booster of Afro-American business, for which Harrison also wrote. After it folded he returned to the Amsterdam News in June 1916. In a two-part article in September 1917, Briggs demanded an autonomous Afro-American state on American soil. Briggs foresaw that Afro-Americans, facing increased white numerical supremacy, would suffer intensified oppression, and therefore required "a separate political existence, with a government that will represent, consider, and advance" black interests. Because Afro-Americans had helped build American prosperity through centuries of "unrequited toil," they could justly demand "one-tenth of the territory of the continental United States." Briggs's preferred location for this Afro-American homeland was the sparsely settled far West, rather than the deep South.[1]
In January 1918, shortly after Woodrow Wilson announced his Fourteen Points, Briggs (writing in a white newspaper, the New York Globe) propounded the slogan "Africa for the Africans." Like Randolph, Du Bois, and Garvey, Briggs would allow temporary "international or American guidance" of the newly-liberated countries; however, he denied that the mere cessation of "enslavement and selfish and cruel exploitation" constituted "complete justice or full reparation to the Negro." His Crusader and Amsterdam News editorial denunciations of Afro-American support for World War I (which he called an imperialist war), his demands for African national freedom, and his insistence that African Americans receive the same protections that Wilson promised Poland and Serbia, aroused the antagonism of the secret police. When the authorities threatened the Amsterdam News with suppression, Briggs resigned (summer 1919) rather than accept censorship.[2]
Meanwhile, in September 1918, with some help from Harrison, Briggs had launched the Crusader, "the organ of the Hamitic League of the World," an Afrocentric organization founded by Children of the Sun author George Wells Parker. The Hamitic League included journalist and scholar John Bruce (writing under the pen name Bruce Grit), renowned savant Arthur Schomburg, and Briggs among its leaders. The Crusader's motto, "Onward for Democracy; Upward with the Race," symbolized its pretense of belief in Wilson's noble pronouncements and its use of Wilsonian slogans for profoundly anti-Wilsonian goals. The Hamitic League itself synthesized disparate rhetorics: "Negroes of the world unite! You have nothing to lose but your chains; you have a continent to gain!"[3]
The Crusader began publication at the outset of the upsurge in black radicalism, when the Messenger had published only three issues and the UNIA was not yet a mass movement. Briggs and his magazine doubtless influenced both the UNIA and the Messenger greatly, and were in turn influenced by them. Indeed, in the effervescent atmosphere of Harlem radicalism during and after the Great War, speeches, pamphlets, editorials, and manifestos proliferated so abundantly and circulated so widely that ascertaining the originator of any particular idea is impossible. Many philosophies, including Du Bois's liberalism and Garvey's black nationalism, had antecedents going back to the 1850s or earlier.
The first issues of the Crusader set its distinctive tone. Briggs insisted that "the civilization of Africa by machine guns and bad gin will cease.... The Crusader intends to save the African people before they are exterminated." He demanded "a free Africa, and that without any frills of international control. The African people managed to get along before the white man came with his slave hunts to break up the splendid civilizations of the Sudan and other parts of Africa. The race that gave the world an Egypt and an Ethiopia and the groundwork and basic principles of civilization and the sciences can be trusted to govern themselves."[4]
The Crusader also vowed "to eradicate the evils of Alien Education--which exalts the white man and debases the Negro--by authoritative articles dealing with the ancient cultures of the African races as well as with their more recent achievements and present capabilities." Alien education was "far more injurious than lynching to the progress and vitality of the Race." It undermined self-confidence and produced a race of slaves. "Teach a child or nation that it springs from an inferior race and that it can never hope to overcome that inferiority, and you have made an obedient servant and a community of slaves.... [The Crusader] will bring back to our hearts our lost race pride, to our minds our forgotten race glory and to our souls our sleeping passions."[5]
"The Negro race is of all races the most favored by the Muses of Music, Poetry, and Art," claimed the Crusader, which vowed to publicize "the annals of our glorious deeds and the facts of the noble origin, splendid achievements and ancient cultures of the Negro Race" and help "Race industries in preference to all others." George Wells Parker contributed many articles claiming African origins for Egyptian, Judaic, Greek, and Roman civilizations, while lambasting the white corruption of those Negroid cultures. Parker asserted that "the ancient Grecians.... belonged to the African race!" White Aryans, on the contrary, "have ever been a race of destroyers instead of a race of creators and the vandals turned loose upon Europe today are the same vandals turned loose upon the Rome of yesterday."[6]
In a pathbreaking article analyzing the origins of racism, Briggs asserted that "hatred of the unlike.... probably existed before the dawn of history, that it certainly has been a factor in all times and countries of which there are any records, that never before have the two races lived together on terms of peace, justice, and equality." Briggs conceded that white racism was exacerbated by "the partial decadence and almost complete submergence of Negro culture" for many centuries, by the history of racialized chattel slavery in the United States, by the conscious miseducation of both races, and by white terrorism. He asserted, however, that "the dream of an ultimate equitable solution of the Negro problem in an alien civilization... can never be achieved." Racial antipathy preceded the human race, and generated savage wars even within "sub-species of the caucasian race."[7] Negroes had enslaved whites just as whites enslaved blacks. In the first issue, Briggs exclaimed that
This is the age of organized force.... Force is the only language modern nations understand. The adaptation of her national ideals to the gospel of Force was what saved Japan and gained for her the recognition and respect of the world. The lack of organized Force invited the partition of Africa and at present menaces the independent existence of China. Force is the great destroyer, but Force is also the great savior and regenerator. It can be possessed by all who are willing to pay the price in Sacrifice and Service.... The existence of a strong Japan guarantees to Asia's teeming but unorganized millions the eventual fruition of Asia for the Asiatics. The existence of a strong Liberia would do as much for Africa and the African races.[8]
Briggs reiterated these Garveyite sentiments in his second issue:
Recognizing that organized force is the only language intelligible to all the world (the only language that Europeans understand when dealing with Colored races) and the foundation upon which all white civilization is in reality based.... The Crusader dedicates itself to the doctrine of self-government for the Negro and Africa for the Africans.[9]
Negroes, Briggs asserted, required an "independent, separate existence."[10]
Briggs demanded a strong African homeland for reasons resembling Garvey's. One of these was prestige. A powerful Africa would benefit Negroes wherever they lived because "the status of one section of the race surely affects the status of all other sections, no matter what ocean rolls between. In a world of fast transportation and rapid thought communication we cannot be slaves in one part and expect to be recognized as free men in another part." Blacks must demonstrate their capacity for self-government, an impossibility in a white-majority nation. Africans had long ago displayed such ability, but their ancient empires had disappeared and had left few records. "Until that fitness is proven to the satisfaction of ourselves and the white man, the latter will have much to support him in the claim that we are an inferior race." Africans wanted only what every other people claimed as their right in an age where "national self-determination" was everyone's watchword. "The Irish, the Jew, the Pole--all races are looking towards national existence in a country of their own under government of their own, as the logical solution to their problems. Why should not the Negro also seek such ends? It is the only solution!" Even if blacks attained equality in the United States, "without the creation and existence of an independent African nation the word FAILURE will be inscribed for all time against the African name."[11]
A strong, independent Africa, then, would protect Africans abroad. The Jews, often cited as exemplars of the peaceful resolution of racial conflicts, actually demonstrated the vacuity of such remedies. Jews had a high culture, proud traditions, and "the almost illimitable power which immense wealth carries with it," yet were subject to ghettoization, pogroms, and discrimination. Their status revealed "the futility and impotence of even great wealth when there is no national existence to protect life and property. Riches, of themselves, protect neither individuals nor races." Demonstrating a profound ignorance of Japanese life in the United States, Briggs asserted that although there were more millionaires in the scattered Jewish race than in all Japan, "the Japanese may travel all over the world unruffled by the fear of pogroms and lynchings. Prejudice against the Japanese there is, to be sure. But that prejudice is held in rein by FEAR. The Japanese, with a powerful modern navy and a crack military machine, are not to be trifled with as all the big and little cowards of the caucasian race are fully aware." Money talked "most effectively when it can talk through big guns and from the decks of modern battleships." Such armaments required money, but even more "a country of our own."[12]
Of the two roads by which races could seek security--possession of property and education, or of armaments and military training--the first had never worked, while the second achieved power and recognition. Nations that lost military power forfeited all else; the cultural superiority of Greece and Rome availed little when they lost military superiority to surrounding peoples. Briggs again compared the Jews and the Japanese: whites "may hate the Japanese, but they fear and respect them as well. The Japanese, then, have attained in less than half a century all and more than the Jew has won in centuries of effort along the wrong road." The amassing of Negro wealth and property in a white supremacist America, or pulling up stakes and founding a black nation in Africa, both required arduous effort. "On the first road our sacrifices have been and will ever be for a democracy which we ourselves are never allowed to participate in.... On the other road the sacrifices will be for ourselves, for our children, for our fatherland and glorious race. The pulling of stakes will be so that we may the more securely plant them in a country of our own.... Africa presents the best opportunities for state building. But how long will those opportunities last if we continue to neglect them?"[13] A government of, by, and for the Negro was the only alternative to the government of the Negro by and for the white man.
Jews, Briggs continued, had finally recognized this truth and "are even now engrossed in the Zionist movement and literally moving heaven and earth in the interests of a free Palestine.... But a free Palestine, while representing opportunities for Jewish emigrants, will also tend to make Jewish migration thither largely unnecessary--providing Palestine ever becomes strong enough to demand and secure respect for the Jewish race throughout the world." A powerful, independent Africa--far richer and vaster than Palestine--would achieve the same for Africans worldwide. Instead of whining about white oppression, blacks must create an empire that could include far more than Africa. "Our fathers conquered. Our fathers ruled mighty domains and many races.... Has slavery completely robbed us of the manhood fires? All races have suffered slavery and most of them have risen again."[14]
The Crusader discussed various possibilities for an African homeland, especially extolling Liberia and its riches. It warned, however, that Liberia could not yet accommodate an unlimited number of immigrants, especially those lacking skills. "What Liberia needs most of all just now is enterprising, energetic immigrants to reap the wealth of her vast forests, her rich mines and her numerous streams," Briggs said. "Given even but a million of such immigrants it would be only a matter of a short time when Liberia would occupy in Africa a position similar to that which Japan occupies in Asia; and would thus win world-wide respect for the Negro race as well as laying the foundations for the complete redemption of the Fatherland."[15] Anticipating Garvey, Briggs even fantasized that the United States government would help pay passage for blacks who voluntarily departed for their ancestral home.
On another occasion the Crusader, contemplating Europe's stranglehold on Africa and the seas approaching it, mentioned Brazil as a promising site for a powerful Negro nation. Africa was preferable "on the basis of both sentimental attachment and strategic requirements and vastness of resources," but Brazil, inhabited overwhelmingly by darker races and egalitarian in its racial policies, presently "offers us the best field for the purposes of state-building."[16] A powerful Negro state in South America would galvanize native Africa, offer it material aid, and ensure eventual Negro domination of two rich and powerful continents.
Briggs, like Garvey, envisioned a lively and mutually enriching trade between the Africans of the world. Citing U.S. policies that fostered international trade, the Crusader said in June 1919 that "the American Negro has a most entrancing opportunity just now to establish commercial relations with his kilth and kin across the seas and to make millions of dollars trading with them and for them." Briggs's magazine ran frequent advertisements for the Inter-Colonial Steamship Company, the owner of which helped finance the Crusader. One such advertisement, a full page entitled "To West Africa," enticingly promised "Liberty and Fortune Before You! Persecution and Prejudice Behind!"[17] Unsurprisingly, Briggs took an early interest in the Black Star Line.
The Crusader's campaign for African racial consciousness included self-defense against white terrorism, black cultural autonomy, and international consciousness. "The nation-wide mobilization... of cracker America into the Ku Klux Klan is as plainly an act of war as was the German mobilization in 1914," it said. The white government would not protect blacks, while "so-called white friends" would remain apathetic; Southern whites moving North would exacerbate racial tension. "With the murderer clutching at our throats we cannot afford to choose our weapons, but must defend ourselves with what lies nearest, whether that be poison, fire or what."[18] McKay's "If We Must Die" followed.
The Crusader exclaimed that "a race that depends on another race for art, beauty and literature will necessarily get only what that race puts out," which "is always in the interest of" that alien race. Briggs said that "even a bad play dealing with Negro history and psychology" carried "a stronger appeal to Negro audiences than the best play framed for white psychology and consumption, and catering to white ideals and prejudices." African Americans must establish Negro history classes in their churches.[19]
Cyril's brother William Briggs, a frequent Crusader writer, echoed the quaint sentiments of some Messenger writers in his claim that good art and music uplifted individuals and the race. Blacks, he began, neglected the arts.
As [a] people [we] work too hard, relax too little, are too much concerned with our material welfare, and too little with things of the spirit. We need more song in our hearts, more rhythm in our thoughts, more harmony in our lives. We need to be lifted out of the common place of our hum-drum-work-a-day concerns and duties, at frequent intervals by the concord of sweet music.... We have had enough of music for the musicians, Art for Art's sake--but not enough ART for Humanity's sake..... If in your daily life, you wish to be regarded as a lady or gentleman, you are obliged to be careful of the company you keep. It is the same of musical life. If you associate with noble thoughts that constitute Good--or, as you call it classical music, you will be counted with a higher class in the world of music.[20]
William believed that ragtime was useful only as a frolic, "though even such a mood may vent itself in better taste.... Why share the musical food of those who are by breeding or circumstances, debarred from anything better? The vulgar impulse which generated rag-time cannot arouse a noble impulse in response any more than the dime novels or questionable literature can awaken the instincts of gentlemanness or ladyship."[21]
The Crusader also fervently denounced patriotism directed toward oppressive white governments, advocating instead an African internationalism. Briggs unstintingly denounced British and American atrocities perpetrated against peoples of color, especially the mass murder of helpless civilians by airplanes. He equally condemned the silent acquiescence of blacks in these atrocities. "Are we not faithful dogs and servile slaves, licking and fawning over the land that strikes us?" Deploring the lack of African-American protest against American murder, rape, and torture in Haiti, the Crusader lamented that the Negro's "pathetic impotence has been as complete in the international relations of what he chooses to call his country as in its domestic relations. And yet the rape of Haiti should interest him; if not from the standpoint of identity of race with the Haitians then because of the schooling white men are having in the idea of the non-sanctity of Negro life. Those white men are from America and will come back to America with less respect than ever for the lives and rights of black men."[22]
In a similar vein, the Crusader warned that "the plutes are plotting war against Mexico--Mexico the colored republic to the South. Mexico that does not jim-crow Negroes nor lynch them....." African Americans, disfranchised, lynched, and segregated, would certainly be used in battle against "the only country in North America that shows an attitude of friendship toward us. We will be called upon to fight against colored people in the white plutes' war of aggression on Mexican soil, oil and national rights." The Mexicans "live together without engaging in race wars, mob violence and the fiendish torture of human beings.... [which are] the salient and identifying features of the much-vaunted American civilization." However, "Mexico is rich in oil minerals. And it is inhabited by a colored race." If American capitalists want war with Mexico, the Crusader optimistically warned, they will have to fight it themselves. "As far as the American masses are concerned there will be no war with Mexico."[23]
Briggs carried his philosophy (similar to the UNIA's 1920 Declaration of Rights) to its logical conclusion in "The Gathering War Clouds," a December 1920 editorial. "Having raped Negro Haiti and Mulatto Santo Domingo, the United States shows a disposition to give further vent to its hatred of the darker races by insulting the proud Japanese through the adoption of discriminatory legislation." Marquis Okuma, the former Japanese premier, warned that if appeals to morality failed, only force remained. Harding, however, threatened to rob those Japanese already in California of their hard-won lands, just as Negroes were robbed of the fruits of their labor. The United States also coveted Mexico. In a racist war of aggression against Mexico or Japan, "the American Negro will without a doubt be called upon to shoulder his share of the white man's burden of keeping colored races in their place!" However, in such a case the duty of the race-conscious Negro was
NOT TO FIGHT AGAINST JAPAN OR MEXICO, BUT RATHER TO FILL THE PRISONS AND DUNGEONS OF THE WHITE MAN (OR TO FACE HIS FIRING SQUADS) THAN TO SHOULDER ARMS AGAINST OTHER MEMBERS OF THE DARKER RACES. The Negro who fights against either Japan or Mexico is fighting for the white man against the darker races and for the perpetuation of white domination of the colored races, with its vicious practices of lynching, jim-crowism, segregation and other forms of oppression in opposition to the principle advocated by Japan of Race Equality, and these are things that, we are convinced, no loyal Negro will do.[24]
Briggs wrote that while African Americans were in theory U.S. citizens, in fact the Negro in America "is and always will be a NEGRO BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE and will continue to be so until Negro 'American citizens' are not only American citizens in theory, but in practice as well." Such a choice was "not voluntary. It is forced upon us and upon every other Negro of spirit.... The place of birth is accidental, but the race into which one is born is not an accidental matter."[25]
Although the Crusader focused strongly on race, Briggs also struggled with the imperatives of class and their seeming conflict with those of race. The first issues of the Crusader featured articles emphasizing class consciousness. Briggs praised the Socialist party for nominating three Negro candidates (Randolph, Owen, and Miller) for high office. The Crusader supported any party which "gives the Negro a square deal.... Every Negro who is pro-Negro before he is anything else will vote for these three Colored men. And, as one good turn deserves another, we advocate the support by the Race of the entire Socialist ticket." When critics complained that a SP vote was a wasted vote, Briggs urged that blacks "throw [your vote] away. Is it not better to throw it away on a Party who recognizes you and on candidates of your own than to throw it away on an ungrateful Party and on white candidates who never represent you?" As far as African Americans were concerned, the two mainstream parties were virtually identical. "Negroes must choose between party subserviency and race-allegiance" and "put our race before our party." Briggs advocated both voting for the SP--"the party whose candidates will promote [the] Negro's interests"--and "renouncing party subserviency and voting for the Negro candidates." When major parties nominated black candidates, however (especially their typical race traitors and capitalist lackeys) these imperatives would conflict. Briggs's avid support of the SP, however couched in "race first" terms, implied that a class-based rapprochement between the races was possible.[26]
When the United States forcibly returned blacks from Coatsville, Pennsylvania, to the South (1919), Briggs equated this with Palmer's deportation of alien radicals. The capitalists who lured Negroes North during the war, and now returned them to peonage and lynchdom in the South, were "the same capitalists" who deported "all workers who dare to talk against the system.... To capitalism it made no difference whether it was a colored or a white worker" who it "exploited and then deported. Yet in both cases it found the Negro uninterested in what was being done to the whites and the whites ignoring the blow struck at the colored. Thus labor suffers by its race prejudice! Capitalism, on the other hand, knows neither prejudice nor nationality save the brands it seeks to foster, for its own benefit, among the workers."[27]
Addressing a theme discussed by Domingo and other Messenger writers, the Crusader warned that the capitalists feared white working-class insurgencies and were therefore "turning to the Negro for protection of their ill-gotten loot in case of a conflict between capitalism and labor." The servile Negro press was "giving its support--as usual--to the white capitalists' schemes to hoodwink and use the Negro." But the plutocrats and their hirelings forgot "that the Negro race in America is almost wholly of the proletariat and that Negroes more than any others have reason to be dissatisfied with the present system by which the white capitalists exploit the black and white masses and spread imperialism throughout the world.... Let those who have looted the millions protect them." Briggs said that "the Negro is essentially a worker.... The interest of the whites is then the interest of Negroes and vice versa and the sooner that is recognized by black and white the better for Labor." If white workers behaved justly, "there is no power on earth that can keep permanently apart these two important sections of the world proletariat."[28]
The brutal mass murder of striking black Arkansas sharecroppers and the lynch-law trial and conviction of the survivors (1919), evoked a major policy statement from the Crusader. These atrocities constituted "brutal notice" that whites would deny blacks "democracy or even simple justice." However, Briggs next advocated that blacks form "alliances with the liberal and radical forces of the country--of the world! Their fight against reaction, capitalist exploitation and bourbonism must be our fight. Our fight against bourbonism, reaction and capitalist exploitation (with its corollary of imperialism) must be their fight. This is already so to a great extent today." Radicals worldwide increasingly recognized "that economic exploitation at home is based upon and supported by economic exploitation abroad. British labor cannot compete with the cheap labor of India and Egypt, and is therefore interested in lifting up this 'foreign' labor from its present helpless position to a status more on a level with its own."[29]
Briggs said that "hopelessly outnumbered" blacks could not realistically fight alone. "The slave has a right to fight for freedom with any weapon within reach. And, in fact, his oppressors will use all and any weapons against him, as witness the bombing of Indian, Egyptian, and Afghan towns by the unspeakable Briton." Indeed, Africans in the West Indies and in Africa faced "an oppressive capitalist-imperialist regime that is unmatched for bare barbarism and wanton cruelty anywhere else in the world." Socialists opposed the chief enemy of blacks; therefore, "arraying ourselves with the Socialist party will be the most effective and fearsome answer we can give to the brutal challenge of the courts of Arkansas. The Crusader cited the anti-imperialist rhetoric and practice of the Soviet Union, and the deaths of two white Louisiana workers in defense of their black fellow unionists, as evidence that "radical labor has made our cause its own."[30]
Six months later (June 1920), Briggs continued his ruminations on the possibility of an interracial class alliance. The Afro-American "is not oppressed merely because he is a Negro," Briggs wrote, "but because he is weak. If there were no Negroes in America there would still be oppressed and oppressor. In all epochs of history the story is the same.... There is no Negro problem in Ireland, Poland and other lands of Europe, but there is, nevertheless, the problem of the strong and the weak, of the oppressor and the oppressed...." This was probably the result of human nature, "and questions of Socialism and Christianity enter very little into the problem. True Socialism, like true Christianity, is a promise of the distant future, rather than an achievement of the present. The ethics of Jesus Christ, the first and greatest of known Socialists, preached and disseminated around the world for nearly 2,000 years, have changed human nature very little, but have been greatly changed, camouflaged or diverted into strange channels by this perverse human nature."[31]
Socialist education would require hundreds or even thousands of years. And blacks would not wait for the rights that "should be ours without begging," especially when "Socialism at the end of that period may be as degraded as Christianity is" now. Declaring that he, as any intelligent and informed Negro, was a Socialist, Briggs said that he nevertheless viewed "political Socialism more as a stepping stone... than as a 'cure-all' for the ills of the world. White racism and imperialism "could as easily flourish under a perverted form of Socialism as it now does under a perverted form of Christianity. And there are even now signs of perversion of the Socialist doctrines, both at home and abroad."[32] Briggs then again conflated racism, capitalism, and the universal dominion of the stronger as reasons for black exploitation:
We have already seen that the chief factor in race problems is the existence side by side of widely differentiated racial groups and the resultant clash of ideals and interests. In the Negro's case the problem is only accentuated, not created, by reason of the great differences in the color of black and white peoples... But white capitalists would as soon use (and have as often used) white scabs as they would use Negro scabs. They would as soon (and do) exploit the weak bodies of little white children as the weak bodies of little black children, and vice versa with the black capitalists should these ever attain full development....
While other factors enter into the problem, they are all of satellite relation to the chief factor: the existence side by side of widely differentiated racial groups and the very human instinct which [incites] the stronger group to tyrannize it over the weaker group.[33]
The Crusader rejected as "highly improbable" a "peaceful, just and honorable solution between the white and Negro peoples in residence side by side in America." Such a fantasy presupposed not only the acquisition of property and education but also "alliance with white labor." But, turning a common argument on its head, the Crusader argued that Socialism, far from abolishing racism, might well exacerbate it. "When it is considered that white labor has only latterly and that most reluctantly, begun to admit Negroes to their unions, and that this reluctant recognition of Negro labor on the part of white labor was caused solely by the extremities to which white labor had been forced by the use of Negroes as scabs by the capitalists, what Negro in his senses can expect a continuance of the 'alliance' when there is no capitalist system to menace white labor and consequently no necessity to fear the Negro as a club in the hands of the capitalist group?"[34]
Agitation for suffrage in the South was, Briggs continued, simultaneously necessary and ruinous. The franchise was worthwhile and imperative not only in its own right, but as an essential defense of all other Negro advances. However, the vote, hard work, education, and the accumulation of property would only exacerbate tensions because "the educated and propertied Negro invites the envy, hate, spite and persecution of the whites. It is a recognized fact that the 'white South' would rather have illiterate, self-debasing and ne'er do well Negroes than educated, ambitious and prosperous Negroes whose self-respect will force them to demand the rights of men." At any rate, blacks could not succeed under the enormous handicaps imposed on them. Yet the franchise itself would inevitably generate backlash by whites fearful of Negro progress; intimidation, gerrymandering, and disfranchisement were possible reactions. "We know that the white man would not hesitate to use any means within his power to maintain the unchallenged supremacy of the stronger, usually referred to in this country as 'white supremacy.' Therefore, the reaction against the determined use of the ballot by the Negro may well be the use of the bullet by the white man, or some attempt at scientific, but quite as murderous, annihilation." Briggs, therefore, reiterated his demand for a powerful, autonomous Negro republic.[35]
Despite this pessimistic conclusion, Briggs urged that African Americans support the Socialist party at the polls. The two capitalist parties were identical as far as blacks were concerned, but the SP stood "staunchly against discrimination at home and imperialism abroad." Eugene Debs, the SP's presidential candidate, "has always spoken out for the Negro" and refused to address segregated audiences. The SP denounced Jim Crow, disfranchisement, and other forms of racial oppression while favoring self-rule for black nations. Debs would not win in 1920, Briggs conceded (he was in federal prison, from which he campaigned in 1920) but voting for him was worthwhile. "Just as by joining the IWW in large numbers, Negroes forced the American Federation of Labor to put down the bar, so in voting the Socialist ticket can Negroes force the Republican party to make concessions" and not take blacks for granted. "The Negro has lost under Republican administration many of the rights won by emancipation.... Better a Democratic vote in 1920 than a vote for the treacherous Republican party." In 1920 the SP once again nominated sterling Negro candidates--Randolph, Owen, Grace Campbell, Frank Poiree, and William Williams. The Crusader concluded "The Socialist party appeals for the vote of the Negro on the two grounds of class and race....On the grounds of race, the Socialist party is alone among American parties in its unequivocal stand for equality of opportunity and rights for the Negro" in the United States and abroad. "A vote of protest is never a vote lost."[36]
In April 1921, at about the time Briggs joined the Workers (Communist) Party, he again professed doubts, but also a guarded optimism, about the possibilities of Socialism. He repeated his usual position: history revealed that it was highly improbable that whites and blacks could live together in equality and peace. He added a significant caveat, however: while the two races could not coexist under capitalism, in a Socialist society "they might live together in peace and equality." Oppression and exploitation were necessary and inevitable under capitalism, while the slightest attempt at oppression under Socialism would dissolve socialism and reintroduce capitalism. Just as imperialism undermined democracy, so under socialism "freedom from exploitation would be lost for all the moment it were lost for one. It is clear then that it is possible to achieve the Negro's salvation through the destruction of the present system and the substitution for it of the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth." Briggs claimed that the Bolshevik revolution had rendered this a probability; the Bolsheviks had freed the Jews, freedom for whom would last only as long as Communism.
That the Negro can possibly--even probably--achieve his salvation through the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth, does not mean, however, that he can achieve it only through that means. Other groups have saved themselves in the past without engaging in a death struggle with Capitalism. World-wide substitution of the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth for the vicious Capitalist System is only one way whereby oppressed races may save themselves from the oppression engendered by the functioning of imperialist capitalism. Of course, it has the virtue of offering [the Negro] the most complete salvation since saving [him] not only from alien political oppression but from capitalistic exploitation by members of its own group as well. It has the advantage for the Negro race of being along the lines of our own race genius as evidenced by the existence of Communist States in Central Africa and our leaning towards Communism wherever the race genius has had free play.[37]
Socialism would obviate the need for a general exodus of blacks from white nations; but the establishment of a strong Negro state would also have this effect. Humanity would benefit most by Socialism, which would liberate all races.
But the Negro has been treated so brutally in the past by the rest of humanity that he may be pardoned for now looking at the matter more from the viewpoint of the Negro than from that of a humanity that is not humane. And again, he may prefer that his rights and immunity from oppression be based upon his own power rather than upon the problematical continued existence of the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth. To the writer it is inconceivable that the Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth once established would ever be abolished, but then the oppressive Capitalist System was also inconceivable to our Communist African forefathers, as was also the European dictum latterly flung in the face of Asiatics and Africans that "might makes right."[38]
Briggs therefore advocated a combination of the two most realistic strategies: "salvation for all Negroes through the establishment of a strong, stable, independent Negro State (along lines of our own race genius) in Africa or elsewhere; and salvation for all Negroes (as well as other oppressed peoples) through the establishment of a Universal Socialist Cooperative Commonwealth. To us it seems that one working for the first proposition would also be working for the second proposition. We invite discussion, and offer the free use of our columns for the purpose."[39]
Briggs did not explain, much less defend, his assertion that Socialist oppression of any portion of the proletariat would signify the destruction of Socialism. Indeed, his one example--that imperialism undermined democracy--might have warned him of the fallacy of his prediction. Most white workers, in the United States and in European colonial powers, were avid imperialists who believed that their economic prosperity and superior status were bolstered by their governments' depredations abroad. Du Bois had warned that white capitalists bought off a section of the working class with the profits of imperialism (a phenomenon that Lenin called "super-profits"), while Domingo, McKay, and Briggs himself had mentioned the immediate, tangible benefits derived by blacks from collaboration with white capitalists against white workers. Indeed, in the same issue as the above editorial, Briggs asserted that the use of African troops in Europe repaid the European working class for its own racism and collaboration in capitalist imperialism. African troops, today used by France against Germany, would tomorrow gun down French and British strikers at the behest of their capitalist masters. White workers opposed capitalist aggression against the (largely white) Soviet Union, yet still "acquiesced in the destruction of many an African Communist state." In helping the capitalists enslave Africa, "the proletariat has blindly helped to establish the means for the prolongation (at the least) of its own slavery."[40]
Briggs announced the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood in October 1919. Aside from his cryptic comment that "those only need apply who are willing to go the limit," he provided few details of the organization. Advertisements, brief notices, and testimonials from new members sporadically appeared in subsequent months. In June 1920 the Crusader announced that the ABB was "probably the first Negro secret organization" in the Western world "having as its sole purpose the liberation of Africa and the redemption of the Negro race." It had "a ritual of its own, with degrees, passwords" and "a formal initiation ceremony when a solemn oath is taken."[41] The supreme leadership consisted of a five-man War College, the selection process of which was not explained. The ABB suggested that its members
Affiliate yourself with the liberal, radical and labor movements. Don't mind being called "Bolsheviki" by the same people who call you "nigger." Such affiliation in itself will not solve our problems, but it will help immensely.
Encourage the Universal Negro Improvement Association as the biggest thing so far effected in surface movements.
Reject all allegiance that carries no corresponding rights and privileges, and remember that such rights and privileges should always precede allegiance and patriotism.
Make the cause of other oppressed peoples your cause, that they may respond in kind, and to make possible effective co-ordination in one big blow against tyranny.
Find possibilities for the study of modern warfare, aeronautics and the artillery branch in particular.
Learn a trade. Get into the essential industries where possible....
Adopt a policy of race first, without, however, ignoring useful alliances with other groups....
Invest in race enterprises, but follow your money with your active, personal interest.
Kill the caste idea. Stop dividing the race into light and dark. Stop harping about West Indians, Southerners, Northerners, and so forth. Let the line of cleavage fall between true Negroes and false Negroes....
Wage war against the alien education that is being taught our children in the white man's schools. Demand the true facts concerning the grand achievements of the Negro race....
Don't leave everything to your officers and leaders. Get into the fight yourself. Do your bit financially, orally and in every possible way.[42]
In June 1921 the Crusader declared itself the organ of the ABB. The announcement appeared inconspicuously, in small type near the table of contents. The cover, as usual, featured an attractive African-American woman, while two other pages contained pictures of "prize winners in the New York News beauty and popularity contest." Although the provisional Constitution of the ABB was an organizational document mostly devoid of philosophy, it rejected the Crusader's traditional support of honest Negro businesses. The ABB was instead a class-conscious organization that would fight capitalists of both races and organize "Negro manhood and womanhood toward meeting intelligently and fearlessly our problems." It would conquer "the enemies of the Negro race wherever they are found, whether among the white capitalist-imperialist robbers of Europe, the capitalist-cracker murderbund of the Southern United States, the cunning Northern exploiters of Negro Labor... or the traitorous opportunists, petty bourgeoisie and would-be capitalists of the Negro race who in the past have sold the Negro worker body and soul to the enemy of the race: the white capitalist...."[43]
The June issue also contained two editorials of a rhetorical style usually absent from previous issues. Filled with exhortations and explanation points, they referred to African Americans as "you," rather than the "us" Briggs usually used. The Crusader now unambiguously asserted that the abrupt cessation of anti-Jewish pogroms in the Soviet Union proved that capitalism alone generated racism. In August the Crusader repudiated another old ally, the Socialist party. At its Detroit convention, the SP had rejected the Third International, espoused American patriotism, and "betrayed Revolutionary Socialism and the cause of the workers for the glitter and safeness of Parliamentarism and the selfish interests of its opportunist leaders."[44]
The Crusader now proclaimed that the idea of intractable race antipathy ignored the fact "that self interest plays a greater part in the world than does race and that consequently the Negro must have many friends among those groups whose interests are identical with his own and whose aims are unattainable without the aid and cooperation of the Negro. Already the most radical white labor organizations have thrown themselves open to the Negro.... There are schisms in the white race which, by encouraging, we can ultimately benefit ourselves." African Americans should encourage divisions among whites while "discouraging any division in our own race except such as are absolutely necessary for progress as, for example, the class division which is rapidly taking form among the Negroes of America."[45] Briggs, apparently, had decided that class ultimately trumped race.
The African Blood Brotherhood attained nationwide notoriety when it was accused of inciting the Tulsa race riot in the early summer of 1921. Briggs emphatically denied that the ABB instigated violence, saying that "we do not have to foment unrest among Negroes when unrest already exists among them.... Negroes do not have to be told that lynchings and mob murders are barbarous acts of injustice." The ABB, Briggs implied, may have helped organize black self-defense: "As to whether the Tulsa Post of the ABB had any part in organizing and directing Negro defense once the riot had started--that is another matter, and something that the Oklahoma authorities can find out for themselves.... The ABB is organized not for aggression, but for the protection of otherwise defenseless Negroes." Briggs said that all ABB posts "were galvanized into renewed activity" by the publicity afforded by the Tulsa riot; in what was surely wild hyperbole, he claimed an ABB membership of 50,000, organized into 150 branches. However, Briggs almost certainly capitalized on white hysteria to publicize the ABB, which probably had no branch anywhere near Tulsa.[46]
Briggs now urged more unreservedly than ever before the necessity of African-American alliances with other forces, of whatever race, seeking similar ends--in this case, freedom from white colonial governments. Briggs mentioned three possible allies in the fight for a free Africa: other movements of national self-determination; the Soviet Union; and the Islamic religion. Although ultimate success depended upon Negro determination and sacrifice, blacks must ally
with the Indian Nationalists, the Turkish Nationalists, the Persians, the Arabs and all other peoples participating in the common struggle for liberty, and especially with those peoples whose struggle is against the great enslaver of the darker races--England.... We must seek cooperation with all other forces consciously working with the same end in view, and intelligently encourage and stimulate such forces as are working unconsciously to the same purpose. Since it is under the capitalist-imperialist system that Negroes suffer, we must boldly seek the destruction of that system, and to that end seek cooperation with such other forces--Socialism, Bolshevism, or what not--that are engaged in a war to the death with Capitalism.
Negroes must also work for "the isolation and eventual degradation of the anglo-saxon race."[47]
The Crusader also saw Islam as an ally. It had previously asserted that "Mohammedanism is the black man's religion" and that "Islam maintains and practices the equality of all believers." Briggs remarked approvingly that "A white Mohammedan would just as quickly give his daughter's hand in marriage to a black believer as he would refuse it in the case of a white non-believer or infidel." Although Christianity encouraged "a servile state of mind and slavish acquiescence in white tutelage on the part of the Negro convert," Islam "inspires self-respect and love of liberty." The Crusader now contrasted the two religions, "one the religion of the white imperial peoples and one the religion of millions upon millions of black, brown and yellow peoples in Africa and Asia; one the religion of Negro inferiority, the other the religion of the equality of all believers." In an implicit slap at Garvey, the Crusader observed "it is only by intelligently utilizing all the forces opposed to those who have Africa and the Africans in subjugation that we can hope to achieve the liberation of Africa and the redemption of her races the world over."[48]
The program of the ABB, "Offered for the Guidance of the Negro Race in the Great Liberation Struggle," appeared in the Crusader's October 1921 issue, after the ABB had irrevocably split with the UNIA. This program echoed Messenger ideas and also the vanguardism explicit in both Du Bois's "talented tenth" and the Leninist party. The Program asserted that the Negro's struggle was mostly economic in nature and demanded that Negroes ally themselves "with all forces and movements that are working against our enemies." It asserted that Negroes need not "endorse the program of these other movements before they can make common cause with them against the common enemy."
The important thing about Soviet Russia, for example, is not the merits or demerits of the Soviet form of government, but the outstanding fact that Soviet Russia is opposing the imperialist robbers who have partitioned our motherland and subjugated our kindred, and that Soviet Russia is feared by those imperialist nations and by all of the capitalist plunder-bunds of the earth from whose covetousness and murderous inhumanity we at present suffer in many lands.[49]
The African Motherland was occupied and "the free life of the African peoples have been broken up and the natives deprived of their lands in order to force them to work, at starvation wages, on the lands of these white capitalists.... By the white man's religion our people's militant spirit was drugged; with his whiskey they were debauched. The white man's treachery, the white man's religion and whiskey had as great a part in bringing about our enslavement as the white man's guns." The thorough exploitation of Africa, however, required modern industry, technology, and warfare. "With the introduction of industrial equipment the African has learned to wield the white man's machines, his guns, his methods, and with the possession of this knowledge has grown a new hope and determination to achieve his freedom and become the master of his own motherland."[50] A world-wide Negro Federation, allied with similar anti-colonial movements of other peoples, was essential.
"Labor organizations should be formed in the industrial sections in order to protect and improve the conditions of the Negro workers," the ABB insisted. Negroes must educate native soldiers, build an indigenous revolutionary army on Sinn Fein lines, send modern arms to Africa, and form a "pan-African army, whose very existence would drive respect and terror into the hearts of the white capitalist-planters.... Remember: MIGHT MAKES RIGHT--ALWAYS DID AND ALWAYS WILL."[51]
The ABB considered "the comparative freedom of the North [as] propitious for great organizations and cultural activities, and it is here that the vanguard and general staff of the Negro race must be developed." The ABB called for a united front of all Negro organizations that could operate openly in the North and secretly in the South. "Within this Federation a secret protective organization should be developed--the real Power--to the membership of which should be admitted only the best and most courageous of the race. The protective organization would have to function under strict military discipline, ready to act at a moment's notice whenever defence and protection are necessary."[52]
The power of a people, the ABB claimed, depended largely upon its standard of living. Because blacks organized into labor unions had everywhere improved their lives, "all worth-while Negro organizations and all New Negroes must therefore interest themselves in the organizing of Negro workers into labor unions for the betterment of their economic conditions and to act in close cooperation with the class-conscious white workers for the benefit of both." This body of white workers "is led and represented by the Third International," with its "millions of followers in all countries of the world." Confronting racist white workers, Negroes must "awaken their class-consciousness toward the end of obtaining their cooperation in our struggle." In a stab at accommodationist blacks (who now included Garvey as well as Du Bois), the ABB declared that "to pledge loyalty to the flags of our murderers and oppressors" is "the blackest treason to the Negro race and our sacred cause of liberation."[53]
The ABB's program concluded with the exhortation that "the Negroes resident in America" were "destined to assume the leadership of our people in a powerful world movement for Negro liberation. The American Negro by virtue of being a part of the population of a great empire has acquired certain knowledge in the waging of modern warfare, the operation of industries, etc.... It is in this country, especially, that the Negro must be strong. It is from here that most of the leaders and pioneers who will carry the message across the world will go forth."[54]
After his break with Garvey in August 1921, Briggs, directly competing with the UNIA, emphasized the mystical, ceremonial, and ritual element of the ABB. In October 1921 the Crusader announced that "a feature of the African Blood Brotherhood, little stressed heretofore, is that the organization easily has the grandest lineage of any of the fraternal orders now in existence, dating as it does from Ancient Egypt and continuing uninterrupted through the various parts of Africa and today existing in Central Africa in the splendid ceremony of the Blood Brotherhood for centuries practiced in that part of Africa." ABB leader Theodore Burrell explained the antiquity and mysteries of the blood exchange ceremony. Mimicking the fraternal orders common to both whites and blacks, the ABB established a hierarchy of seven degrees, "as per the ancient Egyptian rule." The first degree was conferred upon all new members; as of November 1921, no one had attained the third rank. On a more mundane level, Briggs also envisioned a sickness and death benefit fund.[55]
Shortly before the U.S. indictment of Garvey for mail fraud and the folding of the Crusader, Briggs printed a "condensed and tentative constitution" for the ABB that borrowed features from both the UNIA and the FNF. The goals of the ABB were
Sec. 1. To cement into one great universal Brotherhood all persons possessing in any degree the glorious heritage of African Blood.
Sec. 2. To work for a Free Africa and the immediate protection and ultimate liberation of Negroes everywhere.
Sec. 3. To secure absolute race equality--political, economic, and social; and to see that there is an equal application of the laws wherever Negroes have to live and work.
Sec. 4. To seek to develop commercial enterprises among Negroes in various parts of the world.
Sec. 5. To gain for Negro Labor the full reward of its toil, and to prevent Capitalist exploitation and oppression of the workers of the race
Sec. 6. To disseminate a knowledge of Negro history in order to foster race pride and stimulate race effort.
Sec. 7. To establish a true rapprochement and fellowship within the darker races.
The ABB would also encourage racial educational and religious institutions headed by blacks, and "strive for a federation of all Negro organizations of whatever character in order to present a united front for self-defense, and to co-ordinate our efforts at liberation."[56]
Briggs declared the Crusader the monthly magazine of the ABB and also envisioned a newspaper, tentatively called The Liberator. The ABB's leader was titled "Paramount Chief." Each ABB post would, like the UNIA, have a chaplain in charge of education and religious instruction, and a physical director, "preferably a person of some military training and experience" who would instruct ABB members in "physical training and the code of discipline" and direct "all uniformed bodies." The Director of Economics would mediate conflicts between black workers and capitalists, help establish cooperative enterprises, organize blacks into unions, and work for an alliance "between the workers of all races" for improved wages and working conditions. Briggs announced a "constitutional congress" for July 16, 1922, that would "revise, amend, amplify and ratify this Tentative and Condensed Constitution."[57]
Briggs, the ABB, and the Crusader propounded a coherent and wide-ranging ideology that cogently united Garvey's "race first" and Randolph's "class first" philosophies. It also embodied one of three distinct efforts to inject class consciousness and Socialist ideas into Garvey's mass movement. Some Harlem radicals (Harrison, McKay, and Domingo) worked within the UNIA and hoped to persuade its members of the necessity of Socialism; they followed the SP strategy of "boring from within" mainstream movements and institutions. Others, particularly Randolph and Owen (and, after his forced departure from the UNIA, Domingo) criticized the UNIA from outside. The ABB represented a third approach: a parallel, "dual" organization seeking enough recruits, publicity, and power to negotiate with the UNIA on equal terms, thus securing a hearing for a philosophy and strategy that combined race and class. In 1921, all of these efforts shipwrecked.
Notes:
[1] CB, "'Security of Life' for Poles and Serbs--Why Not for Colored Americans?," Amsterdam News, September 5 and 17, 1917, quoted in Theodore Draper, American Communism and Soviet Russia (New York, 1986), 323. For a somewhat different account (which dates the two-part article differently) see Kornweibel, Surveillance, 105-108.
[2] Robert Hill, Biographical Sketch of Briggs, MGP I, 521-57; Robert Hill, "Racial and Radical: Cyril V. Briggs, THE CRUSADER Magazine, and the African Blood Brotherhood, 1918-1922," xiii-xiv, xxii-xxiv. This is the introduction to Hill's reprint of the Crusader. Hill's claim that Briggs's separation from the Amsterdam News was motivated by censorship must be treated with caution because Hill accepts Briggs's much later explanation for this severance rather than his contemporary account. Briggs's brief, noncommittal contemporary statement, which claimed that he quit the Amsterdam News so he could devote all his energies to the Crusader, was obviously meant to avoid offending the editor of the Amsterdam News, who remained Briggs's friend and supporter. Hill documents previous federal threats of suppression directed against the Amsterdam News which did not intimidate either that publication's editor or Briggs; he says that the Red Scare made such threats seem more ominous in 1919, thereby generating a crisis at the newspaper. However, federal suppression of dissident newspapers was ferocious in 1917-1918; the Red Scare continued rather than initiating vigorous repression.
[3] TCR, December 1918 and September 1918; Advertisement for the Hamitic League, TCR, December 1918.
[4] "Africa for the Africans," TCR September 1918; "Negroes of the World Unite in Demanding a Free Africa," TCR, December 1918.
[5] "Aims of The Crusader," TCR, September 1918; "Alien Education," TCR, September 1918; George Wells Parker, "The Greater Work," TCR, December 1918.
[6] "Race Catechism," TCR, September 1918; Parker, "The Children of the Sun," TCR, November 1918.
[7] Briggs conceded that modern Brazil was an exception. He argued, however, that the racial equality there was between Indians, Negroes, and Latins, and insisted that no Nordic race had ever lived on terms of equality with Negroes. Furthermore, "in Brazil the darker races enjoy equal opportunities and complete equality only because they greatly outnumber the white races in that country." CB, "The American Race Problem. No. 1. What is It," TCR, September 1918; "The Great Illusion," TCR, November 1918.
[8] CB, "The Great Illusion," TCR, November 1918.
[9] "Aims of The Crusader," TCR, November 1918.
[10] "The Race Problem. N. 3--The Negro's Solution," TCR, November 1918.
[11] "Would Freedom Make Us 'Village Cut-Ups,'" TCR, February 1919; "The American Negro's Duty to the Negro Race," TCR, November 1919; "Government of the Negro," TCR, August 1919; "Where Glory Calls," TCR, April 1919.
[12] "The Jewish Massacres and Their Lesson," TCR, July 1919.
[13] "On the Wrong Road," TCR, March 1920. The article was signed "C. Valentine," apparently a pseudonym used by Briggs.
[14] "Our Lone Monopoly," TCR, October 1920; "A Race of Cry-Babies," TCR, December 1920. Briggs was fond of quoting Cicero's characterization of British slaves as "the stupidest and ugliest" of the lot. (The first time he cited this was in "Roll of Honor," TCR, September 1918.) And of course, the horrible fates of the Japanese, the Jews, and the Palestinians in the decades after Briggs penned these lines offer a melancholy commentary on the advantages, and disadvantages, of a people having or lacking their own state.
[15] C. Valentine, "Liberia, the Open Door to Liberty and Power," TCR, November 1919.
[16] CB, "At the Crossroads, II," TCR, July 1920.
[17] "The Call for Unity," TCR, June 1919; Advertisement, TCR, November 1919.
[18] CB, "The Ku Klux Klan," TCR, January 1921.
[19] J. Griffith, "The Negro and His Institutions," TCR, September 1919; CB, "Our Stage Favorites," TCR, May 1920. J. Griffith owned the Art Publishing Company, which frequently advertised in the TCR.
[20] William Briggs, "The Power and the Influence of Music," TCR, April 1919.
[21] ibid.
[22] "England," TCR, June 1919; "Overseas Correspondence," TCR, August 1920.
[23] "Making Enemies for Us," TCR, September 1919; "Intervention," TCR, November 1919; "Mexico," TCR, January 1920.
[24] "The Gathering War Clouds," TCR, December 1920. Briggs might more appropriately have advocated forcible Negro resistance to conscription and war, rather than the meek acceptance of imprisonment or execution.
[25] "Negro First!," TCR, October 1919. Presumably Briggs meant that while a person's race was essential, intrinsic, and unalterable, people could move from their place of birth, changing nationality in the process.
[26] "The Negro Candidates," TCR, September 1918; "Party Subserviency," TCR, November 1918.
[27] "Deporting Aliens and Negroes," TCR, April 1919.
[28] "Out for Negro Tools," TCR, May 1919; "The Negro's Place is with Labor," TCR, June 1919.
[29] "The Arkansas Challenge," TCR, January 1920.
[30] ibid. Europeans began the terror bombing of indigenous populations in 1911; early British targets included Afghanistan, Iraq, Dafur, Iran, and Transjordan. See Sven Lindqvist, A History of Bombing (New York, 2001).
[31] CB, "At the Crossroads," TCR, June 1920.
[32] ibid.
[33] ibid.
[34] ibid.
[35] ibid.
[36] "The Political Situation," TCR, August 1920; "A Double Appeal," TCR, November 1920.
[37] "The Salvation of the Negro," TCR, April 1921.
[38] ibid.
[39] ibid.
[40] "Africa and the White Proletariat," TCR, April 1921.
[41] "Cyril Briggs Announces the Formation of the African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, October 1919; "The African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, June 1920. Hill, "Racial and Radical," xxix, quotes the initial oath as demanding "absolute and unquestioning loyalty and obedience to all orders and decrees"; members would fight "to THE DEATH IF NECESSARY" against "the oppression and exploitation of the alien."
[42] "The African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, June 1920. Hill, "Racial and Radical," lxvii-lxx, prints what is allegedly a 1920 ABB programmatic document, and compares it to a 1922 version. The 1920 document, which was never printed in the Crusader, contains a sharp, if implicit, attack on Garvey and the UNIA's economic enterprises which seems inconsistent with Briggs's, and the ABB's, stance in 1920. In that year, Briggs and the ABB urged all blacks to join the UNIA, and offered guarded approval of the BSL and the ACL and especially of the principles upon which they were based. The ABB's criticisms of the BSL were of practical operational details. The 1920 document printed by Hill, however, demands "industrial development along genuine cooperative lines whereby the benefits will be equally distributed among the masses participating, and not appropriated by a few big stockholders and dishonest and inefficient officials drawing exorbitant salaries. The ABB is sternly opposed to the foisting of individual and corporation enterprises upon mass movements" because such enterprises "should benefit the many rather than the few" and "the ABB does not consider any commercial enterprise good enough to base the sacred Liberation Movement upon the mere chances of its success or failure. No movement so based can long survive the collapse of its commercial enterprises."
These objections to the BSL and other UNIA economic enterprises were characteristic of Briggs and the ABB after their split with Garvey and the UNIA; they would have been egregiously out of place at a time when both Briggs and the ABB were energetically wooing Garvey and the UNIA. Hill's source for this alleged 1920 program is Arthur Preuss, A Dictionary of Secret and Other Societies, published in 1924. I believe that this dictionary accepted a later ABB program as a 1920 document.
[43] "Constitution of the African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, June 1921.
[44] "The Socialist Surrender," TCR, August 1921. The Crusader's support of the SP through 1920 seriously undermines Robert Hill's 1987 claim ("Racial and Radical," xxvii) that the ABB was "a black auxiliary of the nascent Communist party from its inception, the first in a succession of such auxiliaries spawned over the years." Indeed, the previous year, Hill ("The Comintern and American Blacks, 1919-1943," Appendix III, MGP, V, 845) said that Briggs "helped bring the ABB into the Workers party" in early 1923. Hill says that Otto Hall, a prominent ABB member and early Communist, actually urged blacks not to join the Workers party until that organization "took action against the party's internal racism." Attending the Fourth World Congress of the Comintern in Moscow in 1922, Workers party delegate Otto Huiswoud (a West Indian) said only that the Workers party maintained "close contact" (Hill's words) with the ABB (Hill, "Comintern," 842-843). Surely Huiswoud would not have misled the Comintern about the nature of the ABB, even if he realized that any statements he made there would be publicized in the United States.
In Black Bolshevik: Autobiography of an Afro-American Communist (Chicago, 1978), 120-126, Harry Haywood states that Otto Hall and other black Workers party members in Chicago advised that other blacks resist joining the Party until it had taken action against its own racism. Haywood offers sincere but confused information on the much-debated topic of ABB/Workers party relations. As but one example, Haywood says that Briggs helped found the ABB in 1919, but that the ABB supported SP candidates in the elections of 1918! Haywood, however, did not join the ABB until 1922, and did not meet Briggs until 1930. He therefore lacked first-hand information on the early days of the ABB.
All authorities agree that Briggs's later recollections to the WPA in the 1930s, and to Theodore Draper in the 1950s, are filled with numerous and important errors. Hill himself points out many serious errors. Considering the secrecy and duplicity of the Workers party, and the vast unreliability of Briggs's autobiographical statements, a perfectly accurate determination of the exact relationship between the ABB and the Workers party is probably impossible.
The Crusader, however, is almost certainly an accurate account of the evolution of Briggs's own ideas on the relationships between racial and class oppressions, and the relative importance of each.
[45] "The Acid Test of White Friendship," TCR, July 1921.
[46] "The Tulsa Riot," TCR, July 1921; "The Tulsa Outrage," TCR, July 1921; "The Tulsa Riot and the African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, July 1921; "The African Blood Brotherhood Accused of Fomenting the Tulsa Riot," TCR, July 1921; "African Blood Brotherhood Activities," TCR, July 1921. Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: The Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge, 1982) scarcely mentions the ABB. James S. Hirsch, Riot and Remembrance: The Tulsa Race War and Its Legacy (Boston, 2002), 262, quotes Robert Hill's statement that "The ABB did not spread beyond the East Coast."
[47] "Liberating Africa," TCR, August 1921.
[48] "A Revealed Secret of the Hamitic Race, V," TCR, August 1920; "Thinking White," TCR, May 1921; C. Valentine, "Two Religions in Practice," TCR August 1921; "Liberating Africa," TCR, August 1921.
[49] "Program of the African Blood Brotherhood," TCR, October 1921.
[50] ibid.
[51] ibid.
[52] ibid.
[53] ibid.
[54] ibid.
[55] "African Blood Brotherhood Activities," TCR, October 1921; Theo. Burrell, "African Blood," TCR, November 1921; "African Blood Brotherhood Activities," TCR, November 1921.
[56] "Condensed and Tentative Constitution," TCR, December 1921.
[57] ibid.