Африканское Братство Крови: Организация за освобождение афроамериканцев.

Radical black liberation organization founded in New York City

The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) was a U. S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society. The group's socialist orientation caught the attention of the fledgling American communist movement and the ABB soon evolved into a propaganda arm of the Communist Party of America. The group was terminated in the early 1920s.

During the second decade of the 20th century, a socialist movement for the liberation of American blacks began to develop in the Harlem section of New York City. The movement included a substantial number of immigrants from the British West Indies and other islands from the Caribbean region, who, having been raised and educated as part of a racial majority population in their homelands, had found themselves thrust into the position of an oppressed racial minority in America. In 1912, Briggs was hired as a journalist by one of the black community's leading newspapers, the New York Amsterdam News. He worked there throughout the years of the First World War. The Crusader was started by George Wells Parker, a black businessman from Omaha, Nebraska, as the official organ of the League of Legends, a pan African nationalist group. In February 1919, Briggs began to change his ideas, and his new thinking was expressed in articles in the Crusader. He began to draw parallels between the plight of black workers in the United States and impoverished working class whites, who were mostly recent immigrants or their descendants from Europe. Over ensuing months, Briggs began to consider the system of capitalism as the villain, and he argued in favor of a common cause and common action by workers of all races.

The summer of 1919 in America was a time of racial rioting and violence, remembered retrospectively by historians as the "Red Summer." Returning soldiers from European battlefields, including blacks with heightened expectations of freedom and equality and whites seeking a return to civilian employment and the status quo ante bellum, and new immigrant black workers from the rural South formed a volatile mixture which erupted in mob violence in Chicago, Omaha, and cities throughout the Midwest and South. In response to these attacks, The Crusader advocated armed self defense. Politically, Briggs drew comparisons between government attacks on white and black radicals. He identified capitalism as the underlying cause of oppression of poor people of all races. While endorsing a Marxist analysis, The Crusader advocated a separate organization of African Americans to defend against racist attacks in the United States, and likened this to Africans' combating colonialism abroad. In September 1919, The Crusader announced the formation of a new organization called the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), to serve as a self defense organization for blacks threatened by race riots and lynchings. This was accompanied by the re publishing of Claude McKay's poem If We Must Die. Not long afterwards, Briggs began to forge connections with pioneer black American Communists such as the Surinam born Otto Huiswoud and Jamaican poet and writer Claude McKay. These in turn connected Briggs and his publication with native born white Communists including Robert Minor and Rose Pastor Stokes, who took a strong interest in the so called "Negro Question." Before this intervention by the Comintern, the party had largely ignored blacks, and thus was not particularly attractive to black radicals like Briggs. Instead, it was the Bolshevik Revolution that attracted their attention. Poet and ABB member Claude McKay had previously been active in the Left Communist Workers Socialist Federation in London and subsequently visited the Soviet Union several times in the mid 1920s, writing about conferences of the Communist International for African American audiences. McKay's book, The Negroes in America (published in Russian in 1924 but not in the U. S. until 1979) argued, against the official Communist position of the time, that the oppression of black people in the U. S. was not reducible to economic oppression, but was unique. He argued against the color blindness that the Communists had inherited from the Socialist Party. McKay argued vociferously for national self determination in support of national independence for oppressed peoples, which to him meant an independent African American government separate and apart from that of the United States. Subsequently, in the aftermath of the Sixth Comintern Congress in 1928, the CPUSA adopted a policy of national self determination for African Americans living in the American South. The policy was neglected after the Popular Front period began in 1935, but was not formally replaced until 1959. As the Communist Party developed, it regularized its structure along the lines called for by the Communist International (Comintern). Semi independent organizations such as the African Blood Brotherhood with its divergent Afro Marxist political theories were anathema to the Comintern and its Soviet leaders, who believed all communist and Marxist–Leninist organizations should be unified in a single communist party and platform in each nation under Moscow's overall direction and control. In the early 1920s the African Blood Brotherhood was dissolved, with its members merged into the Workers Party of America and later into the American Negro Labor Congress. Many early ABB members, however, went on to be key CP cadres for decades.

The ABB had a total membership of fewer than 3,000 members at its peak.

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