Ligue de défense de la race nègre
[1] That same year, Tovalou traveled to the United States and attended a convention of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), where he went on to speak at Carnegie Hall.
[2] The simultaneous publication in Les Continents of a sharp text by Maran against the first African member of the French parliament, Blaise Diagne, led to a libel suit.
[5] Particularly through the efforts of Senghor, who traveled through French port cities and gave speeches to workers, offshoots of the CDRN were founded there as in West Africa.
The assimilationist part of the committee was concerned with the decidedly anti-colonial as well as more working-class and consequently communist orientation of the faction around Senghor and its willingness to openly criticize the French government, which could be interpreted as anti-French.
[7] Now without restrictions from the moderate and assimilationist members, the League formulated anti-colonialist positions such as the demand for independence of the colonies and linked them with communist ideas.
Although independence of any kind for the colonies was an undisputed common goal, the group also fought for improvements in the everyday status quo of French Africans.
[11] In April 1931, two different issues of La Race Nègre appeared, one by Kouyaté, the other by Émile Faure, the lawyer André Béton of Guadeloupe,[12] and Ludovic Lacombe.
[9] La Race Nègre was published sporadically until it ceased in 1936, representing "the core of a full-blown doctrine of nationalism, cultural and political, the first breakthrough of this kind among French Negroes".
With this step, they opposed worsening economic difficulties and racial prejudice in Germany and wanted to establish an organisation for political work and some mutual moral and financial support.
[13] The founding of the German section of the LDRN was supported by Willi Münzenberg, founder of the League Against Imperialism (LgI), who had already been bringing together important people from the African community in Berlin for anti-colonialist motives since 1926.
The president was Victor Bell, other board members were actor Louis Brody, Thomasul Kuo Ngambi, Richard Ekamby Menzel and, as secretary general and central figure, the pan-Africanist and communist Joseph Bilé [Wikidata], who was increasingly active in international politics with the help of his mentors Kouyaté and the influential and renowned panafrican activist George Padmore.
[15] In its statutes, the LzVN declared as its purpose to achieve the "liberation of the Negroes" internationally and to fight nationally for a large, independent African state.
[16] The group smuggled political writings such as the statutes of the LzVN, among others, to Cameroon and maintained contact with activists there; most likely, they were also involved in anti-colonial protests in Douala.
[8] Also in 1930, Bilé attended the First International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg as a delegate of the LzVN, which enhanced his status within the anti-colonial movement, as did subsequent discussions about him in the LgI and the Comintern, which earmarked him for training in Moscow and deployment as an agitator in Africa.
In 1933, the KPD and the German section of the LgI struggled under the new rule, Padmore and Münzenberg had left the country, and Kouyaté was on his own after being expelled by the Ligue, its successor and the French Communist Party alike.
