Cyril Briggs: Guns, Bombs, Spooks and Writing the Revolution

In the wake of the Russian Revolution, Cyril Briggs founded the journal Crusader in 1918 and, a year later, the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), an organization closely linked with the Communist Party of America (CPUSA)—often seen as a black ‘wing’ of the party. Galvanized by the Russian Revolution, Briggs devoted himself to both international communism and black liberation. Briggs attempted to sustain a balance between his “black” and “red” activism. While he and fellow ABB members sought to influence Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association and hoped to federate a number of black organizations, they also pushed the Communist International (Comintern) and CPUSA to consider the plight of black people. Briggs’s views concerning black liberation became increasingly militant, peaking around the 1921 Tulsa race riot, earning him the especial attention of the Bureau of Investigation which classified the ABB “entirely radical”. This essay focuses on the 1918-1922 period, the lifespan of the Crusader. This timeline intersects with a variety of world events with black-red historical resonance: the close of the First World War in 1918; the US race riots or “Red Summer” of 1919; the creation of Comintern and the Communist Party of America in 1919; the Russian Civil War; the foundation of the League of Nations in 1920; the 1921 Tulsa race riots. Throughout its publication, the Crusader contained revolutionary and anti-colonial writing on a range of topics including the Mexican Revolution, Irish nationalism, armed self-defence and Caribbean self-rule. The aim here is to examine how the Russian Revolution in conjunction with these momentous world developments inspired Briggs and other contributors to the Crusader. The role played by the 1921 Tulsa race riots and its relation to the prominence of the ABB and state surveillance form a key part of the discussion. The suggestive links between the fiction and non-fiction of Briggs and contributors like Romeo L. Dougherty to the magazine and the documents of US surveillance agents are examined. Specifically, the letters of agent “800”, James Wormley Jones, and Briggs’s short story, “The Ray of Fear” serve as points of comparison. The argument being forwarded is that both the output of the Crusader and that of surveillance agents like Jones contributed to an imaginary of Black power—some forty to fifty years before the slogan became popular.