This article focuses on the impact of the Bolshevik revolution and Irish national liberation struggles on the black radical tradition in the US. Between 1919 and 1922, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB) published a monthly journal, The Crusader, which attempted to forge a very specific race/class politics in the US. The Crusader shaped its powerfully articulated vision of black liberation through its trumpeting of the Russian revolution and the Irish anti-colonial struggle. If reparative history is a history which stresses the dialectical nature of ‘race’ and colonialism and the importance of recognising the agency of black subjects in transforming the politics of resistance, then the ABB is key to understanding the complex formations around race and class in the US in the early twentieth century.
HalliburtonR.Jr., ‘The Tulsa race war of 1921’, Journal of Black Studies (Vol. 2, no. 3, March1972), p. 335.
2.
Scott Ellsworth, Death in a Promised Land: the Tulsa race riot of 1921 (Baton Rouge, LSU Press, 1982), p. 46.
3.
Ibid., p. 52.
4.
Halliburton, op. cit., pp. 337−39.
5.
Ellsworth, op. cit., p. 61.
6.
See Addendum in JohnsonHannibal B., Black Wall Street: from riot to renaissance in Tulsa’s historic Greenwood district (Fort Worth, TX, Eakin Press, 1998) and Tulsa Race Riot: A Report by the Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921 (28February2001), available at: http://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf.
7.
New York Times (4June1921).
8.
Ibid.
9.
In addition to the seminal work done in revising this narrative by scholars such as Robin Kelley, Mark Solomon, Martha Biondi and Mark Naison, there has been much recent scholarship which has built on this earlier work. See for example WeissHolger, Framing a Radical African Atlantic (Leiden, Brill, 2013); Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom: radical Black internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917–1939 (Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2011); StephensMichelle, The Black Empire: the masculine global imaginary of Caribbean intellectuals in the United States 1914–1962 (Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2005).
10.
Eric Arnesen, ‘No “graver danger”: black anticommunism, the Communist Party, and the race question’, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas (Vol. 3, no. 4, 2006), pp. 13–52.
11.
ZumoffJacob has recently provided a rich account of the ABB’s emergence in ‘The African Blood Brotherhood: from Caribbean nationalism to Communism’, The Journal of Caribbean History (Vol. 41, no. 1, 2007) and Robert A. Hill’s introduction to The Crusader presents an engaging portrait of Cyril Briggs’s politics in relation to the ABB − ‘Racial and radical: Cyril V. Briggs, The Crusader magazine, and the African Blood Brotherhood, 1918–1922’, Introductory Essay to The Crusader (New York, Garland Publishing, 1987).
12.
See OgletreeCharles J., ‘Tulsa reparations: the survivors’ story’. Boston College Third World Law Journal (Vol. 13, 2004), pp. 13–30.
13.
SolomonMark, The Cry Was Unity (Jackson, University Press of Mississippi, 1998) pp. 38–52.
14.
For a study of the black Communist newspaper The Liberator, see BerginCathy ‘Race/class politics: the Liberator, 1929–1934’, Race & Class (April2006), pp. 86–104.
15.
VoogdJan, Race Riots and Resistance: the Red summer of 1919 (New York, Peter Lang Publishing, 2008), p. 2; Barbara Foley, Spectres of 1919: class and nation in the making of the New Negro (Urbana & Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 13.
16.
Summary of the Program and Aims of the African Blood Brotherhood, cited in Hill, op. cit., p. xxviii.
17.
ZumoffJacob, The Communist International and US Communism, 1919–1929 (Leiden, Brill, 2014), p. 299; Hill op. cit., p. xlvi; Minkah Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, op. cit., p. 50.
18.
Ibid. Circulation numbers are not necessarily indicative of readership in relation to the radical press of the period, in terms of both literacy challenges and high levels of ‘pass-along’ rate.
19.
Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, op. cit., pp. 50–51.
20.
See Winston James’s magisterial account of Caribbean radicalism in the US, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean radicalism in early twentieth century America (London & New York, Verso, 1998), and more recently, Joyce Moore Turner’s Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana & Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2005).
21.
Hill, op. cit., pp. v−xlviii.
22.
LeninV. I., The Right of Nations to Self Determination, in KatzerJulius, ed., V. I. Lenin Collected WorksVol. 20 (Moscow, Progress Press, 1964), pp. 424–25.
23.
Hill, op. cit., p. xxvi.
24.
McKayClaude, Negro World (20September1919) quoted in SchwarzBill, ed., West Indian Intellectuals in Britain (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2003), p. 73.
25.
DegrasJane, ed., The Communist International 1919–1943, DocumentsVol. 1 (London, Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 170.
26.
Winston James, op. cit., p. 167.
27.
Editorial, Crusader (October1919), p. 9.
28.
Editorial, Crusader (June1920).
29.
NelsonBruce, Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race (Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 206.
30.
Ibid., pp. 201–06.
31.
McKayClaude, ‘How Black sees Green and Red’, Liberator (4June1921), pp. 17–21.
32.
Cited in Zumoff, ‘African Blood Brotherhood’, op. cit., p. 203.
33.
Ireland’s was not the only anti-colonial struggle which informed the anti-colonialism of The Crusader. For a detailed account of the internationalist vision of the ABB, see Minkah Makalani, ‘Internationalizing the Third International: the African Blood Brotherhood, Asian radicals, and race, 1919–1922’, Journal of African American History (Vol. 96, no. 2, Spring2011).
34.
Editorial, ‘The Irish boycott on British goods’, The Crusader (March1921), p. 9.
35.
Letter from Briggs to Theodore Draper, March1958, available at: http://www.marxisthistory.org/history/usa/groups/abb/1958/0317-briggs-todraper.pdf. The reluctance of American Communists in the early 1920s to address ‘race’ was instrumental in the very particular relationship black radicals forged with the Comintern. See Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, op. cit., p. 100.
36.
BriggsCyril, ‘Heroic Ireland’, The Crusader (February1921), p. 1.
37.
Ibid.
38.
See Bergin, op. cit.
39.
It’s beyond the scope of this article to detail the ABB’s ambiguous and often fraught relationship with Garveyism. See Hill, op. cit., pp. xl−xlvi.
40.
BriggsCyril, ‘Lessons in tactics’, The Crusader (November1921), p. 15.
41.
Editorial, ‘The acid test of white friendship’, The Crusader (July1921), p. 9.
42.
Hill, op. cit., p. lxviii.
43.
BriggsCyril, ‘Americans?’, The Crusader (June1919), p. 5.
44.
BriggsCyril, ‘The Ku Klux Klan’, The Crusader (January1921), p. 154.
45.
‘Aims of The Crusader’, The Crusader (October1918), p. 1.
46.
Makalani, ‘Internationalizing The Third International’, op. cit., p. 154.
47.
Cyril Briggs, ‘The Tulsa riot and the African Blood Brotherhood’, The Crusader (July1921), p. 10.
48.
Commander, Tulsa Post African Blood Brotherhood, (name deleted) ‘The Tulsa riot’, The Crusader (July1921), p. 6.
49.
BriggsCyril, ‘The Tulsa riot’, op. cit., p. 10.
50.
Makalani, In the Cause of Freedom, op. cit., p. 75.
