Cyril V. Briggs

Activist and writer

• Born: May 28, 1888
• Birthplace: Chester's Park, Nevis, British West Indies
• Died: October 18, 1966
• Place of death: Los Angeles, California

Briggs was one of the most important African Americans in the communist and socialist movements of the early twentieth century. Born in the Caribbean, Briggs founded Harlem’s African Blood Brotherhood, which fused Black Nationalist and socialist politics. He might be best known as editor of The Crusader, but he also wrote for other Harlem publications, including The New York Amsterdam News and the Communist Party’s Daily Worker.

Early Life

Cyril Valentine Briggs (SIH-ruhl VA-lehn-tin brihgz) was born on Nevis, an island in the Caribbean, in 1888. His father was a white overseer on an estate. Briggs himself had very fair skin and blond hair and could have “passed” for white by some reckonings. However, he did not choose to pass, later earning the nickname “Angry Blond Negro.” He was educated on Nevis in schools founded by the colonial government. When Briggs was seventeen years old, he immigrated to were chosen, arriving on July 4, 1905, in the vibrant and growing West Indian community in Harlem.

Life’s Work

In 1912, Briggs began writing for The New York Amsterdam News, Harlem’s premier African American-owned newspaper. His writings resonated with the “New Negro” spirit of the times, exhibiting race pride and calling for the end of Jim Crow, lynching, and other forms of racial oppression. Briggs also showed great interest in international struggles against colonialism and racism and often compared the fight for black civil rights to the rebellions of the Irish against Great Britain and Africans against European domination. He also exhibited an affinity for Marxist analyses of imperialism and racism.

Growing up in the Caribbean, Briggs had firsthand experience with stark racial caste and class boundaries, boundaries not so clearly drawn in the United States. Historians of the African diaspora have noted that many early black communists hailed from the Caribbean. Indeed, they suggest that the visible class boundaries of the region made communist ideology more understandable and appealing than it was for U.S.-born African Americans.

Briggs’s interest in socialism and philosophies of black self-determination grew. In 1918, he began The Crusader, a publication dedicated to a “renaissance of Negro power and culture throughout the world.” The Crusader advocated for direct, immediate action against lynching. It became affiliated with the Hamitic League, an Afrocentric organization founded by George W. Parker, a black businessman from Nebraska. However, by 1920, the paper was no longer publicizing the connection and had apparently abandoned many of the league’s philosophies.

Briggs emerged in Harlem as a strong voice advocating class and race solidarity. Like A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen’s The Messenger, Briggs’s paper presented Marxist approaches to oppression as important tools for understanding the African American dilemma in the United States, as well as African diaspora struggles worldwide. Briggs and fellow writers argued that capitalist regimes were not capable of solving “the race problem” and that community and socialist labor organizations were better vehicles for African American political and economic gain than the two-party system or organizations like the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Unlike Randolph and Owen, Briggs believed that separate black organizations and campaigns for African freedom were crucial. This belief led him to found the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) in 1919.

Briggs’s fierce critiques of capitalism and imperialism eventually led him to sever ties with The New York Amsterdam News. After the paper published his blistering editorial titled “League of Thieves,” U.S. postal authorities launched an investigation. Journalism historian Patrick Washburn has chronicled the ways in which the federal government put legal and economic pressures on black newspapers during World War I and World War II, generating a chilling effect and, in some cases, shutting down papers. Briggs ended his time at the Amsterdam News and turned his full attention to The Crusader and the ABB.

At the end of 1920, Briggs was deeply involved with communist organizations and openly advocated for revolution. While the ABB was often depicted as an appendage of the American Communist Party, the ABB and Briggs were more independent than that. Briggs’s group was devoted to keeping racial issues at the forefront, while white communists often were ambivalent or opposed to addressing race. However, the Communist Party favored the ABB over W. E. B. Du Bois’s NAACP because of the latter’s dependence on white capitalist support and lack of clear socialist views.

As some wings of the Communist Party fought to make racial justice part of its platform, Briggs and other members of the ABB played a crucial role in clarifying and supporting such efforts. Briggs attended the founding convention of the Workers Party of America in 1921 and remained a public voice for black communists for decades. Importantly, he attended the Sixth World Congress of the Communist International in Moscow in 1928. There, he shepherded an initiative to include a declaration against Jim Crow. He also attended international meetings in Europe and the Caribbean and eventually edited The Harlem Liberator, a periodical aimed at increasing black support for communism.

The 1920’s and 1930’s were a time of major agitation and fierce debates over the best direction for black political struggle. While Briggs rose in prominence in communist circles, he and the ABB were targets of criticism from the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), the NAACP, and other major organizations. Not only did these institutions have ideological differences with the ABB; they also were competing for supporters. Briggs also was vilified by some communist colleagues for insisting on injecting race into all conversations about workers’ rights and anti-imperial struggles. Briggs was ousted as editor of The Harlem Liberator in 1933 after a series of arguments over leadership and finances with other black members of the Communist Party. He was reassigned as a staff writer for The Daily Worker and continued to write individual pieces for The Liberator.

Briggs died in 1966 in Los Angeles. He was seventy-eight.

Significance

Briggs’s influence extended beyond the printed page. He spent his life struggling against the intertwined injustices of racism and classism. The ABB, alone and in conjunction with other African American and communist organizations, played a crucial role in fights against lynching, unfair housing practices, segregated labor unions, and censorship of socialist thought. Briggs’s experiences also highlight the international orientation and ideological diversity of black freedom struggles. The nationalist and self-defense strategies of 1960’s figures such as Malcolm X and the Black Panthers have precedents in the 1920’s and 1930’s activities of the ABB. Briggs’s experiences provide a lens through which to view the robust legacies of self-determination and attention to economic justice that shaped the Civil Rights movement.

Bibliography

Johanningsmeier, Edward. “Communists and Black Freedom Movements in South Africa and the United States, 1919-1950.” Journal of Southern African Studies 30, no. 1 (March, 2004): 155-180. Compares the experiences of black communists in South Africa and the United States.

Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Provides a detailed history of the emergence and organizations of African American communists and their comradeship and conflicts with white communists. Briggs is a key figure, and there are exhaustive details of tensions between him and other leading black communists.

Vincent, Theodore G., ed. Voices of a Black Nation: Political Journalism in the Harlem Renaissance. Reprint. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1990. Vincent has gathered a trove of articles published in the leading periodicals of the Harlem Renaissance, including Briggs’s Crusader. The book has helpful introductions to each section, arranged by themes.