Briggs, a West Indian immigrant and publisher of the Crusader magazine, organized the African Blood Brotherhood.
Briggs, therefore, initiated the African Blood Brotherhood as a revolutionary secret organization along the lines of a fraternal society specifically for men and women of African descent.
Because of the secretive nature of the African Blood Brotherhood not much is known about its historical development.
The African Blood Brotherhood also came to public attention when the Tulsa, Oklahoma post was implicated in the Tulsa riot of 1921.
The purpose and program of the African Blood Brotherhood was the liberation of Africa and people of African descent and the redemption of the African race.
The African Blood Brotherhood also espoused Black Nationalism, which involved the right to self-determination and autonomous nationhood.
Finally, the African Blood Brotherhood formulated an economic analysis of the African American struggle which it linked to colonialism and imperialism.
Although the African Blood Brotherhood began as an independent organization, by 1921 it had established close ties with the Communist Party (Foner & Allen, 1987, 17).
What set the African Blood Brotherhood apart, both ideologically and programmatically, from other political organizations of that time was its combination of revolutionary Black Nationalism with Marxism/communism.
The Communist Party was no better; as breakaways from the Socialist Party, communists had no African American policy either and few, if any, African American members until a handful of key African Blood Brotherhood members joined around 1925 (Cruse, 1967, 82).
Therefore, the uniqueness of the African Blood Brotherhood was its militant Black Nationalism and left-wing communist ideology which none of the previously mentioned organizations in total sanctioned.
The influence of the African Blood Brotherhood on African American social and political thought was primarily its blending of Black Nationalism with socialism and its revolutionary program for the social, political, and economic liberation of African Americans.
So the African Blood Brotherhood extended the concept of internal statism into the twentieth century.
Therefore, the African Blood Brotherhood is part of an African American tradition which links socialism with Black Nationalism.
In lieu of just being an extension of radical African American political thought, the African Blood Brotherhood was also a precursor of the revolutionary Black Nationalism of the mid-1960s and early 1970s which also espoused liberation, armed self-defense, community control, unity and solidarity with African and other oppressed peoples, Pan-Africanism, and Marxist-Leninist-Maoist scientific socialism.
