Briggs, Cyril Valentine

Source:

 African American National Biography

Briggs, Cyril Valentine

(28 May 1888–18 Oct. 1966),

journalist and activist, was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, the son of Marian M. Huggins, a woman of color, a plantation worker and Louis E. Briggs, a white native of Trinidad and plantation overseer. From childhood Briggs had a stutter that made verbal communication difficult, but he more than compensated through the power of his pen. Butting heads with colonial school administrators, he was dismissed from two primary schools before settling at Ebenezer Wesleyan on the island of St. Kitts; he graduated from this school in 1904. In his autobiographical writings Briggs indicated that despite its challenges, colonial education shaped his later career by introducing him to radical thinkers like the freethinking agnostic Robert Green Ingersoll. After his graduation Briggs embarked on his lifelong career in journalism by becoming a reporter for the St. Kitts Daily Express and the St. Christopher Advertiser.

Briggs immigrated to the United States on 4 July 1905 and joined a growing West Indian activist community in Harlem. Little is known about his first years in the United States except that he became engaged to Bertha Florence Johnson in Norfolk, Virginia. Johnson moved to New York in 1912, and the couple married on 7 January 1914. In 1912 Briggs became a society reporter for the New York Amsterdam News, an African American newspaper founded in 1909. He rose through the ranks at the Amsterdam News as sporting editor and editorial writer for three years before he resigned to join the staff of the Colored American Review, a black business magazine. He returned to the Amsterdam News almost immediately, but his work with the Colored American Review launched his career as a radical nationalist journalist. From 1915 to 1919 Briggs published hard-hitting editorials urging African Americans to have race pride and to seek self-determination, notably through the creation of a separate black state. When President Woodrow Wilson argued that post–World War I peace in Europe should rest not on governments but on the rights of European peoples, Briggs published an editorial calling for a separate state within the geographical borders of the United States where the rights of African Americans would be respected.

When the United States entered World War I, Briggs registered for military service, joining the many African Americans who believed that wartime service could counteract white racism. His hopes were dashed with the 2 July 1917 antiblack race riot in East St. Louis, and he became an outspoken opponent of U.S. participation in the war. Southern mobs lynched at least sixteen African American World War I veterans between 1918 and 1920, and summertime race riots were so violent in 1919 that James Weldon Johnson, writer and later executive secretary of the NAACP, termed it “Red Summer.” Briggs is perhaps best known for organizing the African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) in response to this turmoil. The nationalist fraternity recruited men willing to arm themselves against racial violence, fostered pride in African ancestry, and promoted African American participation in a global anticapitalist struggle.

Briggs launched his own paper, the Crusader, in September 1918. The mission of the Crusader was to advance a movement to “help make the world safe for the Negro” (Crusader, Sept. 1918). In choosing these words, Briggs noted the irony of President Wilson calling World War I a war to make the world “safe for democracy” while African Americans still faced oppression on the home front. In early issues Briggs advocated self-pride and armed resistance, and after Red Summer he expressed increasingly anticapitalist and anti-imperialist opinions. His radical views led to a break with the Amsterdam News in 1919. From 1919 until the Tulsa race riot of 1921 the Crusader acted as the official organ of the Hamitic League of the World, a nationalist organization of which Briggs was a member. In the June 1921 issue he praised black residents who fought back against the white mobs, declared the Crusader the official organ of the ABB, and introduced the latter as an above-ground organization.

Dissatisfied with the platforms of mainstream politics, Briggs allied with the Communist Party. He saw communism as a means of ending racial oppression and in an October 1919 editorial wrote, “If to fight for one's rights is to be Bolshevist, then we are Bolshevists and let them make the most of it!” (“Bolshevist!!!” Crusader, Oct. 1919). Briggs's allegiance to racial nationalism and class-based communist revolution put him at odds with both African American and Communist Party leaders. His relationship with Marcus Garvey, founder of the United Negro Improvement Association, was particularly problematic. Briggs originally sought an alliance with Garvey as a fellow West Indian immigrant in favor of racial self-determination, but a conflict over Garvey's strict anticommunism and a feud over adherents left the men estranged.

The Crusader folded due to decreased funding and government anticommunist pressure in 1922, and the ABB disbanded in 1925. Undeterred, Briggs was at the forefront of African American and communist cooperation in the 1920s and helped spur increasing black membership in the Communist Party into the late 1930s. Nevertheless, he maintained his black nationalist views and in 1942 was expelled from the party for holding this line. Briggs is also significant as one of a cadre of West Indian immigrants who took leading roles in an era of post–World War I radicalism and were sometimes referred to as the New Negro movement. Perhaps due to his own international experience, he was a global thinker who garnered inspiration from such disparate sources as his Caribbean upbringing, African history, the Irish independence movement, and Soviet Communism.

Briggs migrated to California and worked as editor of the California Eagle from 1945 to 1949. He remained an outspoken radical and in 1958 was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he angered representatives by refusing to offer any information about communism. Instead, he took the opportunity to criticize the slow pace of school desegregation efforts in the South. Briggs died in Los Angeles.

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