For the Liberation of Black People Everywhere: The African Blood Brotherhood, Black Radicalism, and Pan -African Liberation in the New Negro Movement, 1917--1936
Makalani, Minkah
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https://hdl.handle.net/2142/84661
Description
Title
For the Liberation of Black People Everywhere: The African Blood Brotherhood, Black Radicalism, and Pan -African Liberation in the New Negro Movement, 1917--1936
Author(s)
Makalani, Minkah
Issue Date
2004
Doctoral Committee Chair(s)
Juliet E.K.Walker
Department of Study
History
Discipline
History
Degree Granting Institution
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Degree Name
Ph.D.
Degree Level
Dissertation
Keyword(s)
Black Studies
Language
eng
Abstract
This is a study of the African Blood Brotherhood's role in codifying black radicalism as a distinct political tendency during the New Negro Movement. It focuses on how they came to conceptualize the relationship between race, nation, class, and socialism as they related to the Black Freedom Movement in the United States. It argues that the African diasporic community of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s provided the ABB insight into how class and national differences complicated political projects for Pan-African liberation. They articulated an internationalist Pan-Africanism that refrained from romantic notions of African unity and the civilizationist approach to African liberation of their contemporaries by insisting on the autonomy of indigenous leadership in national liberation movements. Their internationalist Pan-Africanism also viewed African liberation as indelibly linked to anti-colonial struggles in Latin America, Asia, the Pacific Islands, and working class struggles for socialism. This history extends beyond the life of the ABB, which disbanded in 1925, and follows some of its members into the U.S. Communist movement. It is here that black radicals challenged the class reductionist thinking of the left on an international scale, and in the process joined with a coterie of colonial radicals in challenging a narrow conception of internationalism as merely international working class solidarity. They argued for a political program that recognized the centrality of anti-racist and national liberation movements to socialist revolution. It is also within the context of the international Communist movement that they were able to influence the Communist Party's organizing activities in the U.S. It takes an in-depth look at black radical organizing around housing in the Harlem Tenants League, which influenced the CPUSA's organizing campaigns in the Unemployed Councils. By abandoning a singular focus on the shop floor, black radicals introduced gender into discussions of race and class, and were able to diffuse black radicalism into the black community.
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