Settlers - San Francisco Bay Area Independent Media Center

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In 1921 the African Blood Brotherhood (ABB),
the first modern Afrikan communist organization in the
U.S. Empire, was formed in New York City. Defining
itself as a "revolutionary secret order, " the ABB raised the
goal of liberating and bringing socialism to the Afrikan
Nation in the Black Belt South. The Brotherhood soon
claimed 2,500 members in fifty-six "pqsts" throughout
the Empire. Most of these members were proletarians (as
were most of the Garvey movement activists) - miners in
Virginia, railroad workers in Chicago, garment workers in
New York, etc. These Afrikan communists focused heavily
on education work and on "immediate protection purposes,"
organizing armed self-defense units against the
KKK revival that was sweeping the Empire. Soon the
police and press spotlighted the Brotherhood as the supposed
secret organizers of Afrikan armed activity during
the Tulsa, Oklahoma "riots." (9)
The birth of modern Afrikan communism within
the U.S. Empire was the most clear-cut and irrefutable
evidence that the Afrikan Nation was starting to rise. It
was significant that this new organization of Afrikan communists
without hesitation proclaimed the goal of
socialism through national liberation and independence.
The existence of a socialist-minded vanguard naturally implied
that at the base of that peak the masses of Afrikans
were pushing upwards, awakening politically, creating new
possibilities.
Tenants, 1925
% of all farmers who
were tenants
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more than 90%
I less than30%
Mississippi
Mav have odd jobs
Cycle of Debt
Much of the present written accounts of Afrikan
politics in this period centers around events in the refugee
communities of the North - the "Harlem Renaissance,"
tenants' organizations fighting evictions in the Chicago
ghetto, Afrikan participation in union drives in Cleveland
and Detroit, and so on. All these struggles and events were
indeed important parts of the developing political
awareness. But they were not the whole of what was happening.
The intensity and full scope of the Afrikan struggle
can only be accurately seen when we also see the southern
region of the U.S. Empire, and particularly the National
Territory itself. There, under the terroristic armed rule of
the settler occupation, the Afrikan Revolution started to
develop despite the most bitterly difficult conditions.
While Euro-Amerikan trade-unionism has always
tried to restrict Afrikan labor's political role, no propaganda
could change the basic fact that in the South, Afrikan
labor was the primary factor in labor struggles. Notice that
we say that Afrikan labor was the "primary factor" - not
"minority" partners, not passive "students" awaiting the
lead of Euro-Amerikan trade-unionism, and certainly not
just "supporters" of white trade-unionism. In the South,
Afrikan labor was the leading force for class struggle. But
that class struggle was part of the New Afrikan liberation
struggle.
Starting in the early 1920s Afrikan labor in the
South struck out in a remarkable series of union organizing
struggles. This was part of the same explosion of
Afrikan consciousness that also produced the Garvey
movement, the great breakthroughs in Afrikan culture and
the Afrikan communist movement. These things were not
completely separate, but linked expressions of the same
historic political upheaval of the whole oppressed Afrikan
Nation.
When we think about the early organizing strug-
loz
Sharecropping Causes Dependence
gles of the United Mine Workers Union in the Southern
Appalachian coal fields, we are led to picture in our minds
"poor white" hillbilly miners walking picket lines with
rifles in hands. This is just more settleristic propaganda.
The fact is that modern unionism in the Southern Appalachian
coal fields came from a "Black thing" - manned,
launched and led by Afrikan workers in their 1920s
political explosion. In both the initial 1908 strike and the
great 1920-1921 strikes in the Alabama coal fields the majority
of strikers were Afrikan. In fact, in the main
1920-1921 strikes fully 76% of the striking miners were
Afrikan. Those were Afrikan strikes. Much of the severe
anti-unionism and violent repression of strikes in the 1920s
South was linked by the imperialists to the need to stop the
rising of Afrikans. (10)