Crusader

CRUSADER. The monthly magazine the Crusader was one of a group of black radical Harlem periodicals that gave voice to the militant New Negro movement while also propagating Socialist causes. Founded by Cyril Briggs (1887–1966), who edited it throughout its three-and-a-half-year run (1918–22), it was first the organ of the nationalistic Hamitic League of the World, then of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a black affiliate of the Communist Party. The magazine reflects the important influence of West Indian immigrants on black radicalism in America, the intersection of a class analysis with Negro nationalism, and the organization of a black radical opposition to the policies of Marcus Garvey.

Briggs emigrated from the West Indies in 1905 and was a reporter and editor for the New York Amsterdam News before beginning the Crusader. He made the Crusader both a political organ and a journal of black culture, featuring African history essays intermixed with radical editorials and coverage of Harlem dramatic, musical, literary, artistic, sports, and business affairs. The magazine also carried original and reprinted fiction and poetry, as well as a short-lived women’s department edited by Bertha De Basco. Featured writers included T. Thomas Fortune, Andrae Razafkeriefo, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Claude McKay, John E. Bruce, Eugene Debs, Agnes Smedley, Richard Harding Davis, Maxim Gorky, W. A. Domingo, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman. Gertrude Hall and Ben and Theo. Burrell were among the regular members of the editorial staff.

The proclaimed goals of the magazine, as stated in the November 1918 issue, were the “renaissance of Negro power and culture throughout the world,” and propagation of “the doctrine of self-government for the Negro and Africa for the Africans.” Briggs offered his readers both Pan-African and Socialist means to achieve these goals. From December 1918 to December 1920 the Crusader was identified as the official organ of the Hamitic League of the World, an Ethiopianist organization founded by George Wells Parker. It carried regular articles by Parker and advertisements for his Children of the Sun, which chronicled Africa as the ancient source of civilization. While celebrating African heritage, Briggs also urged class consciousness and support for Socialist candidates, including the 1918 New York races of A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and George Frazier Miller, and the 1920 presidential bid of Eugene Debs. Briggs told his readers that the Socialist Party platform represented equal opportunities for laborers of both races as well as an end to the special forms of oppression—lynching, segregation, disfranchisement—faced by blacks. Importantly, it also advocated self-government among blacks in Africa and areas of the Caribbean.

Briggs’s central themes of class alliance and nationalistic self-determination were underscored by news coverage of the Sinn Fein and other nationalist liberation movements, as well as of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union. By 1921 Briggs was advocating a dual strategy of embracing Communism at home, while also backing the establishment of an independent black state (to be located in Africa, Latin America, or, as he had suggested earlier in his career, within the territory of the United States). His 1921 editorials further praised Bolshevism for its anti-imperialist stance and urged alliance between the Soviet Union and African nations seeking liberation from colonial rule.

The increasingly militant tenor of the magazine coincided with the announcement in June 1921 that the Crusader had become the organ of the ABB, soon followed by Briggs’s open rejection of the American Socialist Party, his call for support of the Third International, and his participation in the founding of the Workers Party. Briggs had begun advertising the ABB in the magazine in October 1919, urging a policy of active self-defense in reaction to racial violence. The ABB was primarily a propaganda organization, but it also functioned as a radical underground society open to the participation of both men and women of the Negro race, organized internationally in local posts with a New York-based administration. Estimates of the size of the secret fraternity at its peak range widely, from one thousand to fifty thousand members.

While the platforms of the Hamitic League and the ABB characterize the first two phases of the publication of the Crusader, the final phase was devoted to attacks upon Marcus Garvey. Crusader coverage of the Garvey movement had originally been positive. In December 1919 Briggs described Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the ABB as two “parts of one movement.” By 1921, however, this support had shifted to open animosity. Briggs attacked Garvey’s reliance on capitalistic enterprise as a means of African liberation, and the UNIA leader’s autocratic refusal to participate in black coalition politics—a line of criticism exacerbated by Garvey’s expulsion of ABB and Workers Party members from the 1921 UNIA convention. The last four issues of the Crusader were devoted to exposés of the fraudulent administration of the UNIA, including articles by prominent ex-Garveyites who had moved to the ranks of the ABB. The propaganda war was carried on between the Crusader and the Negro World until February 1922, when Garvey was indicted on the fraud charges that would eventually lead to his deportation, and the Crusader ceased publication because of this.

In the early 1920s Briggs continued to operate the radical Crusader News Service. The ABB slowly dissolved as a separate organization, its members merging with the Workers Party and later the American Negro Labor Congress. Briggs edited the organ of the American Negro Labor Congress and in 1936 became a contributor to the Negro Worker, the organ of the International Trade Union Committee of Negro Workers. He was expelled from the Communist Party in 1939 for his continued support of black nationalist policies. He rejoined the Party in the late 1940s and worked as a functionary in the Los Angeles area during the McCarthy era.

Briggs, Cyril, ed. The Crusader. Reprint of original vols. 1-6, 1918-1922, with introduction by R. A. Hill. New York: Garland, 1987.

Foner, Philip, and James Allen, eds. American Communism and Black Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987.

Makalani, Minkah. In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London, 1917-1939. Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

Solomon, Mark. The Cry Was Unity: Communists and African Americans, 1917-1936. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 1998.

Stevens, Margaret. Red International and Black Caribbean. London: Pluto Press, 2017.

Theodore Kornweibel Research Papers, 1910-2001. Newberry Library, Chicago. https://mms.newberry.org/xml/xml_files/Kornweibel.xml