Cyril Briggs

1888 – 1966

Cyril Valentine Briggs was born on the Caribbean island of Nevis, a part of the West Indies, on May 28, 1888. His mother, Mary M. Huggins, was of African-Caribbean descent while his father, Louis E. Briggs, was a white plantation overseer. Briggs was of extremely light complexion but always identified himself as a Black man.

As a youth Briggs enjoyed the benefit of a quality colonial education and furthered his studies by working as an assistant in the library of a local clergyman. It was here that he was first exposed to political works critical of imperialism. He soon became a writer and journalist himself, securing employment with the St. Kitts Daily Express and the St. Christopher Advertiser. Although awarded a scholarship to study journalism at the university level, in July 1905 Briggs instead chose to emigrate to the United States to join his mother, who had already living there.

Briggs joined the staff of the Amsterdam News, New York City’s oldest Black newspaper in 1912. Inspired by Black nationalist and Pan-African ideals, in September 1918 Briggs launched a monthly publication called The Crusader. Initially, the magazine’s credo was “Africa for the Africans” and a call for a “renaissance of Negro power and culture throughout the world.”

In 1919, Briggs began to move leftward and The Crusader took on a more militant, anti-imperialist orientation, linking colonization and racial oppression to capitalism. In October of that year, The Crusader announced the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB), a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society. The group’s socialist orientation soon led it to Marxism and communism. In June 1921, The Crusader became the official journal of the ABB, presenting communism as the solution to racial and economic inequality.

Briggs himself joined the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA) in 1921. In 1925 the African Blood Brotherhood was dissolved and replaced with a new organizational entity, the American Negro Labor Congress. Briggs became its national secretary. He was subsequently named to the CPUSA’s Central Committee in 1929. Together with other Black Communists he worked to make Harlem a Party stronghold, particularly through mass agitation and the publication of The Harlem Liberator newspaper, which he edited.

In 1933, however, differences over Party policy and practice in Harlem induced the national leadership to send James W. Ford into Harlem with a mandate to remold the local party organization. Briggs and his allies opposed what they perceived to be an initiative to moderate the Harlem party’s militant campaigns and struggle against white chauvinism and Black moderates. As a result, Briggs was removed as editor of The Harlem Liberator and delegated to work as a member of the Daily Worker staff.

At the Daily Worker Briggs wrote on a wide variety of topics, with special attention to African American issues, including the Scottsboro case. However, with the advent of the Popular Front line he found himself out of favor in the Party and ceased to write for the Daily Worker by 1935. At the end of the 1930s or early 1940s, he was expelled from the CPUSA, accused of maintaining a “Negro nationalist way of thinking” in defiance of the increasingly Browderite Party line on Afro-American issues.

Briggs was allowed to rejoin the CPUSA in 1948, following Browder’s defeat and expulsion. He would remain active in the organization for the rest of his life, participating in its west coast activities. Briggs died on October 18, 1966, in Los Angeles, California.