Cyril Briggs

Cyril Valentine Briggs (May 28, 1888, Nevis – October 18, 1966, Los Angeles, California) was an African Caribbean and African-American writer and communist political activist born in the West Indies. He was influenced by political ideas which emerged during and after the First World War.

Briggs was born in 1888 in Nevis, a Caribbean island of the West Indies. Cyril's father was an overseer on a plantation. Briggs hoped to start his writing career and moved to Harlem in 1905.

Briggs' first writing job was at the Amsterdam News in 1912. In 1917, shortly after Hubert Harrison founded the Liberty League and The Voice, Briggs founded the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), one of the seminal groups of African-American associations. His goal was to stop lynching and racial discrimination, and ensure voting and civil rights for African Americans in the South. He also called for black self-determination. The group initially opposed American involvement in the First World War.

In 1918, the ABB started a magazine called The Crusader which supported the Socialist Party of America's platform and helped expose lynchings in the South and discrimination in the North. Briggs hoped that President Woodrow Wilson would support voting rights for African Americans in the South after the service of veterans in the war. Southern Democratic congressmen opposed any changes. Disillusioned by Socialist and progressive efforts, Briggs joined the Communist Party USA in 1921, his leadership of the ABB gained Marxist influences. He called for control by African American workers of the means of production which employed them, whether in industry or in agriculture.

Briggs became a leading exponent of racial separatism. Briggs saw American White-Black racism as a form of “hatred of the unlike” which draws “its virulence from the firm conviction in the white man’s mind of the inequality of races—the belief that there are superior and inferior races and that the former are marked with a white skin and the latter with dark skin and that only the former are capable and virtuous and therefore alone fit to vote, rule and inherit the earth.” Briggs reminded his readers that racial antipathy is a two-way street and that “the Negro dislikes the white man almost as much as the latter dislikes the Negro.” Briggs proposed a “new solution” then emerging, in which the African-American had come to the realization that “the salvation of his race and an honorable solution of the American Race Problem call for action and decision in preference to the twaddling, dreaming, and indecision of ‘leaders.’” Instead, “nothing more or less than independent, separate existence” was called for — “Government of the (Negro) people, for the (Negro) people and by the (Negro) people.”

Briggs’s Marxist views as applied to a separatist government caused a rift with Marcus Garvey, the founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). While opposed to Garvey's nationalist movement, the Marxists of the ABB did not view "Africa for the Africans" as an invitation to capitalist development. Briggs wrote, "Socialism and Communism [were] in practical application in Africa for centuries before they were even advanced as theories in the European world."^[1]

Garvey believed that Briggs was trying to destroy the government and filed a series of lawsuits against him. The ABB began to die out in the mid-1920s, after the Communist Party shifted its support to the American Negro Labor Congress. Briggs died in 1966 in Los Angeles.

Resources

• A new book on blacks and the CPUSA http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/race/solomon.htm
• Black and Red http://www.tcnj.edu/~fisherc/black_and_red.html
• Louis J. Parascandola, "Cyril Briggs and the African Blood Brotherhood: a radical counterpoint to progressivism", Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, Jan. 2006

Footnotes

1. ^ Barry Sheppard's "The Sixties: a political memoir"

Persondata
Name	Briggs, Cyril
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	May 28, 1888
Place of birth
Date of death	October 18, 1966
Place of death