Cyril Briggs

Briggs founded the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a small but historically important radical organization dedicated to advancing the cause of Pan-Africanism.

[1] While accorded the benefit of a quality colonial education, he was not accepted as a potential member of the island's ruling elite due to their hostility to racial equality.

[2] Recognized for his promise as an aspiring writer, in his later teenaged years Briggs was awarded a scholarship to study journalism at the university level.

Little is known about Briggs' first seven years in America, as he never wrote of the experience in his extremely short autobiographical notes housed in the Marcus Garvey Papers at UCLA.

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.

Disillusioned by Socialist and progressive efforts, Briggs joined the Communist Party of America in 1921,[4] his leadership of the ABB gained Marxist influences.

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.'"

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).

Briggs would ultimately be expelled from the CPUSA at the end of the 1930s, accused of maintaining a "Negro nationalist way of thinking" in defiance of the new integrationist party line.