Cyril Briggs

Cyril Valentine Briggs (May 28, 1888, Nevis – October 18, 1966, Los Angeles, California) was an American writer and communist political activist. Briggs is best remembered as founder and editor of The Crusader, a seminal New York magazine of the New Negro Movement of the 1920s and as founder of the African Blood Brotherhood, a small but historically important radical organization dedicated to advancing the cause of Pan-Africanism.

Cyril Valentine Briggs was born on May 28, 1888 on the Caribbean island of Nevis, part of the West Indies. His father, Louis E. Briggs, was a white plantation overseer; his mother, Mary M. Huggins, was of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity. In accord with the racial caste system in colonial Nevis, the biracial Briggs was regarded as "coloured" despite his extremely light complexion. While accorded the benefit of a quality colonial education, neither was he accepted as a potential member of the island's ruling elite due to his ethnically-mixed parentage.

As a youth Briggs worked as an assistant in the library of a local clergyman, where he was first exposed to political works critical of imperialism. He would later move to become a writer himself, taking jobs with the St. Kitts Daily Express and the St. Christopher Advertiser. Recognized for his promise as an aspiring writer, in his later teenaged years Briggs was awarded a scholarship to study journalism at the university level. He ultimately turned down this opportunity, however, emigrating to the United States in July 1905 to join his mother, who had already emigrated there.

Little is known about Briggs' first 7 years in America, as he never wrote of the experience in his extremely short autobiographical note housed in the Marcus Garvey Papers at UCLA, "Angry Blond Negro."

Briggs' first American writing job came in 1912 at the Amsterdam News.

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