Publisher: Oxford University Press Print Publication Date: 2009 Print ISBN-13: 9780195167795 Published online: 2009 Current Online Version: 2009 eISBN: 9780195397680 Encyclopedia of African American History 1896 to the Present Edited by: Paul Finkelman African Blood Brotherhood. The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) was a Marxist communist and black nationalist organization that emerged in response to the violent race riots of the Red Summer of 1919. Founded in 1919 in Harlem by Cyril V. Briggs, a West Indian immigrant, the organization was structured as a secret fraternal society for men and women of African descent; it espoused armed self defense. Its objectives were racial equality, a liberated and unified black race, the cultivation of racial self-respect, organized opposition to the Ku Klux Klan, industrial development, education of the black masses, higher wages and improved working conditions for African American workers, and cooperation with other “dark” races and class-conscious white workers. Because the organization and the actions of its members were to be kept secret, much of the ABB's early activities are not documented. The ABB gained publicity only when it became associated with Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and when the ABB became involved with the race riot in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in May 1921. At its peak the ABB's membership included as many as fifty thousand people, and the group counted one hundred and fifty branches throughout the United States and the West Indies. Complete with its own rituals, passwords, signs, oaths, and initiation ceremony, the ABB allegedly drew its name from a symbolic blood-sharing ceremony executed by a number of African ethnic groups; however, members of the organization chose to emphasize the significance of their name as being rooted in their purpose. Inspired by the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a nationalist organization that emerged out of and influenced the Fenian movement, the ABB's Supreme Council formed an antiimperialist group made up of individuals of African blood for the purpose of liberating Africa and people of African descent from white oppression. The governing structure gave the council the power to determine all policy, and the members were ordered into degrees that represented their level within the organization. Briggs served as the executive head of the ABB and of the council. Many of the council members were also West Indian immigrants. Richard B. Moore of Barbados served as the educational director; W. A. Domingo of Jamaica served as the director of publicity and propaganda; Otto Huiswood of Suriname served as the national organizer; Grace Campbell, who had Jamaican roots, served as the director of consumers' cooperatives; William H. Jones served as the physical director; Theo Burrell served as the secretary; and Ben Burrell served as the director of historical research. The Harlem Renaissance writer Claude McKay and the political activists Harry Haywood and Lovett Fort-Whiteman also played significant roles in the ABB's development. Briggs entered the United States in 1905 and worked as a journalist for numerous publications and newspapers, including the Colored American Review , the mouthpiece of the black business community in Harlem, and the Amsterdam News . In 1919, after being fired from his editorship of the Amsterdam News for his radical views regarding a separate black nation within the United States, Briggs turned his full attention to the Crusader , which he had already launched in September 1918. Initially the Crusader served as the organ of the Hamitic League of the World, a nationalist group founded by George Wells Parker that also advocated race consciousness, but soon the Crusader began to function as the official organ of the ABB. In addition to publishing political editorials, the Crusader reported on business ventures, theater, and sports and literary events. Briggs ceased its publication in 1922, though he continued to maintain the Crusader News Agency. During this period, Briggs's political shift to the Left led to his adoption of communism by 1920. The black Left, already focused on anticolonial struggles in Africa and recognizing the limits of the League of Nations, was naturally attracted to the anticolonial stance of the Soviet Union. Disillusioned with American socialists and their lack of racial consciousness, Briggs showed his support for the Russian Bolsheviks in the October 1919 issue of the Crusader . It was also in that issue that the first reference to the ABB was made. At the very end of this issue Briggs announced the organization and invited blacks willing to go the limit to inquire about the group. Membership was to be by enlistment only, and there were no membership fees. It was not until February 1920 that readers of the Crusader were allowed some insight into the organization; the paper printed a full-page recruitment advertisement for the ABB, though still it conveyed scant information. Briggs did reveal that the council expected its instructions to be perceived as law and its suggestions to be thoughtfully considered by members. The advertisement included a list of sixteen suggestions. The ABB's involvement in the Tulsa riot in 1921 brought the organization further public attention. A race riot ensued following the arrest and attempted lynching of the nineteen-year-old Dick Rowland, an African American man in Tulsa accused of assaulting a white woman. The riot ended with the deaths of hundreds of African Americans. The inability to get antilynching legislation passed in the Senate indicated to the ABB's council that the use of armed force was necessary to defend black communities against the violence perpetrated by whites. The Tulsa authorities publicly blamed the ABB for inciting the riot, but Briggs responded in a formal statement printed in the New York Times that neither the ABB nor its Tulsa branch could claim to be aggressors in the riot, and that the blacks who gathered to prevent a lynching were in fact the ones who were acting in defense of law and order. He advertised that the ABB was interested in assisting blacks in organizing for self defense, and he went on to invite blacks to a mass meeting to discuss a plan of action. In the riot's aftermath the ABB experienced a surge in membership and at the same time attracted the attention of the Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), which then kept the group under surveillance. The ABB's ideological differences with Marcus Garvey and the UNIA also brought the group a measure of publicity. At first Briggs endorsed the UNIA, but Garvey saw racial solidarity as the only means for progress, and Briggs's focus on aligning people of African descent with the communist movement antagonized Garvey. Like A. Philip Randolph and his group of Messenger writers, the ABB saw racism as an offshoot of capitalism and viewed Marxism as the solution to the race problem. Still, Garvey and Briggs became bitter rivals; Garvey arrogantly dismissed Briggs, and Briggs responded in kind. From late 1921 to 1922, Briggs in his editorials publicly accused Garvey of fraud, questioned his loyalties, and suggested his involvement with the Ku Klux Klan. The ABB also attempted to create a cooperative economic arrangement, and a council member was assigned to the consumers' cooperative project. Briggs imagined a conglomerate of twenty-five cooperative stores built in cities with significant black populations; the shares for the stores would be sold only to members of the organization. Moore headed the cooperative project in 1921, but by 1923 his title had shifted to that of educational director. No evidence shows the ABB to have succeeded with the cooperative project, though there was much talk about the ABB owning a wholesale store. By 1923 the ABB, in addition to its revolutionary politics, also functioned as a mutual aid society, providing its members with a sickness and death benefit. The success of this venture is questionable because the organization disbanded within the year. By the end of 1923 the ABB had ceased to function as an independent political organization, and it merged with the Workers' Party of America. The party offered to finance the ABB on the condition that the party control the activities of the ABB. The council agreed to the merger for a number of reasons. Most members of the council were also members of the Workers' Party, attracted as they were to the Bolshevik Revolution and what it represented: an anti-imperialist socialist stance without racism or colonial influence. The group was also struggling with financial difficulties brought on by the recession of the early 1920s and worsened by the ABB's small membership and by the demise of the Crusader . In addition the vendetta against Garvey, publicized in the Crusader , alienated many members and supporters of the organization. Despite its brief existence the ABB left a profound legacy of black radicalism, activism, political efficacy, and agency. The organization's ideology and program merged black nationalism with black Bolshevism and Marxism, and this unique ideology greatly influenced the African American social and political thought of its period. The council managed to join the Comintern, the international arm of Russia's Communist Party, an organization that appeared to take the socalled Negro question seriously. Lenin himself drafted his “Theses on the National and Colonial Questions,” which clearly positioned Russia's Communist Party and the Comintern as anti-imperialists, anticolonial, and anti–bourgeois democracy. With help in drafting from members of the ABB, the party also produced a resolution on the Negro question. Members of the council helped form the American Negro Labor Congress. Finally, the ABB must be viewed as a precursor of the radical nationalist groups that emerged from the radical political climate of the 1960s and 1970s. Bibliography Cruse, Harold. The Crisis of the Negro Intellectual . New York: William Morrow, 1967. Find this resource: Dawson, Michael C. Black Visions: The Roots of Contemporary AfricanAmerican Political Ideologies . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001. Find this resource: James, Winston. Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early TwentiethCentury America . New York: Verso, 1998. Find this resource: Moore, Richard B. Richard B. Moore, Caribbean Militant in Harlem: Collected Writings 1920–1972 . Edited by Joyce Moore Turner and W. Burghardt Turner. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. Find this resource: Vincent, Theodore G. Black Power and the Garvey Movement (1970) . Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 2006. Find this resource: —R I