African Blood Brotherhood

African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), American black liberation group active in the post-World War I period that advocated the position that socialist revolution was possible within the context of race politics and working-class unity. The African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) was based on the ideas of both socialism and an embryonic form of black nationalism.

(Read George Bernard Shaw’s 1926 Britannica essay on socialism.)

The group was founded in 1919 by black leftist Cyril Briggs. Based in Harlem, the ABB had a large West Indian following that included many Caribbean-born political radicals. Briggs had hoped to offer an alternative to the populism of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), but the ABB’s membership never approached the numbers of that group. At the start, the ABB was clearly independent of the communist movement, but its leadership evolved to pro-communism after it gained notoriety for its association with the armed resistance of blacks against whites.

The ABB supported armed defense against lynching, the right to organize unions, equal rights for blacks, and the abolition of Jim Crow laws. In the group’s newspaper, The Crusader, Briggs attacked U.S. Pres. Woodrow Wilson for not supporting African nationalism. During the so-called Red Summer race riots in 1919, Briggs argued for black separation and self-government, particularly in the South. Blending a strong sense of African identity and national culture with communist ideology, Briggs formulated arguments to combine a struggle for an independent black-governed state that could be located in Africa or elsewhere.

Briggs viewed the liberation of black Americans and the struggle for international socialism as an alliance, but one in which a distinct black agenda remained a central ingredient. The ABB’s policies and program were meant to provide a clear alternative to the politics of middle-class reform organizations. Although the ABB was a bold experiment in black Marxist organization, it was short-lived, destroyed by its own internal logic. By the mid-1920s, its leadership had opted for a more class-centred interracial proletarian party and allied itself with the Communist Party of the United States of America.