Cyril Briggs (1888-1966) |
Claude McKay (1889-1948) |
Briggs was an African-Caribbean American writer and communist political activist. He founded the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), a small but historically important radical organization dedicated to advancing the cause of Pan-Africanism. He founded and edited its publication, The Crusader. |
Jamaican-born black American poet, a key figure in the Harlem Renaissance, a prominent literary movement of the 1920s. In 1922, he traveled to Soviet Russia to participate in the Fourth Congress of the Communist International. |
James W. Ford (1893-1957) |
Harry Haywood (1898-1985) |
A Communist, party organizer for the CPUSA in New York City. He was vice-presidential candidate for the Communist Party USA in 1932, 1936 and 1940. He was the first African American to run on a U.S. presidential ticket. |
He is best known as the main theorist of the African American National Question within the CPUSA. Specifically, he developed the theory that African Americans make up an oppressed nation in the Black Belt region of the South where they have the right to self-determination, up to and including the right to independence. Haywood led the CP's work in the African American national movement for some time, both as the Chair of the CP's Negro Commission and as the General Secretary of the League of Struggle for Negro Rights, where he was instrumental in organizing the Sharecroppers Union and the Scottsboro defense. He lived for four and half years in the Soviet Union where he helped to author the 1928 and 1930 Comintern Resolutions on the African American National Question. |
Paul Robeson (1898-1976) |
C. L. R. James (1901-1989) |
African-American Marxist and world-renowned singer and civil rights and anticolonialist fighter. |
James was born in Trinadad and was won to the communist movement in the early 1930s. Joining the U.S. Socialist Workers Party he became a Party spokesperson not only anti-racist issues and Black Liberation generally but on the whole pantheon of Marxist theory from Political Economy to Philosophy. |
Henry Winston (1911-1986) |
Claudia Jones (1915–1964) |
A Marxist civil rights activist, Winston was an advocate of civil rights for African Americans decades before the idea of racial equality emerged as a mainstream current of American political thought. He was left permanently blind as a result of being denied medical treatment by the US Government while he was imprisoned for his communist beliefs. |
Trinidad and Tobago-born journalist and activist. As a child, she migrated to the United States, where she became a Communist political activist, feminist and Black nationalist. Due to the political persecution of Communists, she was deported in 1955 and subsequently lived in the United Kingdom. Upon arriving in the UK, she joined the Communist Party of Great Britain and founded Britain's first major Black newspaper, the West Indian Gazette. |
Malcolm X (1925-1965) |
The Black Panther Party (1966-1979) |
Revolutionary Black nationalist freedom fighter; Muslim Minister, formerly of the Nation of Islam, which he helped build from an organisation of hundreds to hundreds of thousands. Gave definition to the term Black Nationalism more than any other activist in the 1960s. Assassinated in 1965. |
The Black Panthers represented one of the first organized attempts in U.S. history to militantly struggle for racial and working class emancipation – a party which inherited the teachings from Malcolm X to Mao Tse-Tung, and set on their agenda the revolutionary establishment of real economic, social, and political equality across gender and color lines. |
Civil Rights Movement (under development) |
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Currently 3 speeches by Martin L. King, Jr., in MP3 format are available at this time. This section will cover the battle for civil rights in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. |
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The Crisis (1910-1922) |
The Messenger (1917-1928) |
The Crisis was founded by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1910, as the house magazine of the fledgling NAACP. Written for educated African-American readers, the magazine reached a truly national audience within nine years, when its circulation peaked at about 100,000. The Crisis's stated mission, like that of the NAACP itself, was to pursue "the world-old dream of human brotherhood" by bearing witness to "the danger of race prejudice" and reporting on "the great problem of inter-racial relations," both at home and abroad. |
A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owen founded The Messenger in 1917, after joining the Socialist Party of America. They wished to provide the African American community of the time with a radical left perspective and discussion forum. Their perspective differed from that of W.E.B. DuBois and Booker T. Washington, whom they saw as part of the older generation. Аfter 1920 Randolph and Owen began to back off from advancing socialism, and moved more toward union news and artistic commentary. By the time of the January 1924 issue, The Messenger had lost virtually all of its radical content, acquiring a liberal, reformist perspective, for the most part. |
The Crusader (1918-1922) |
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The Crusader was one of the most prominent and important black communist publications that period. It was the work of Cyril Valentine Briggs. In 1919 it began to take on an anti-imperialist orientation, linking colonization and racial oppression to capitalism. In October 1919, The Crusader announced the formation of the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB), and commitment to the anti-racism of international 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. |
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