Cyril Briggs

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Cyril Valentine Briggs (born May 28, 1888; died October 18, 1966, Los Angeles, California) was an African-American writer and communist political activist.

Briggs was born in 1888 in Nevis, a Caribbean island. Cyril's father was an overseer on a plantation. Briggs hoped to start his writing career and moved to Harlem in 1905. His first writing job was at the Amsterdam News in 1912. In 1917, shortly after Hubert Harrison founded the Liberty League and "The Voice," Briggs founded the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB). His goal was to form a group that aimed to stop lynching and racial discrimination, and ensure voting rights for African Americans. The group also opposed American involvement in the First World War.

In 1918, the ABB started a magazine called The Crusader which supported the Socialist Party of America's platform and helped expose lynchings in the south and discrimination in the north. Briggs joined the Communist Party USA 1921, and the ABB gained Marxist influences. Briggs’s Marxist views caused problems with Marcus Garvey, the leader of the Harlem Renaissance. As opposed to Garvey's nationalist movement, the Marxists of the ABB did not view "Africa for the Africans" as an invitation to capitalist development. Briggs wrote, "Socialism and Communism [were] in practical application in Africa for centuries before they were even advanced as theories in the European world."[1]

Garvey believed that Briggs was trying to destroy the government. Briggs eventually helped the government catch Garvey for mail fraud.

The ABB began to die out in the mid-1920s, after the Communist Party shifted its support to the American Negro Labor Congress.

Briggs died in 1966 in Los Angeles.