In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London 1917–1939 by Minkah Makalani (review)

After hearing Minkah Makalani’s 2008 lecture, I waited in great anticipation for In the Cause of Freedom: Radical Black Internationalism from Harlem to London 1917–1939. This well-researched book explores the history of Black internationalism to examine how the African Blood Brotherhood (1919) and the International African Service Bureau (1937) promoted Black Diasporic alliances to create a Black radical internationalism of Marxist social and political thought. It presents exciting stories of intrigue, espionage, and revolution, with exotic locals, narrow escapes from Nazis and Stalinists, and constant surveillance by US, European, and Colonial African governments. Black socialists remain central to the story, working for socialist revolutionary change, partnering with Asian radicals to actively fight racism, colonialism, and classism, advocating for pan African, Asian, and Latin American liberation.

In Chapter 1 Makalani complicates notions of race by looking at how lightskinned middle-class Barbadian Richard B. Moore, Nevisian Cyril Briggs, and Dutch Guianese Otto Huiswoud held privileged positions in the Caribbean but found themselves raced in New York. Makalani contends that their consignment to Blackness led them to radical activism in Harlem and with African American Grace Campbell they founded the African Blood Brotherhood (abb) in 1919. They maintained a longstanding intellectual engagement with Sen Katayama, leader of the Japanese Socialist Group in America (1916), who proved pivotal in their political growth. Makalani touches on Campbell and Louise Jackson’s work on Black and Asian liberation, their founding of the Peoples Educational Forum, and the white left’s unwillingness to work for Black equality, which led to the 1919 Black exodus from the Socialist Party of America (spa).

In Chapter 2 Makalani explores Blacks’ radical alliances with Diasporic Africans through their understanding of race with the point of entry as the establishment of the abb, and the Crusader (1918). Of incredible interest to understanding Black self-defence ideologies is Makalani discussion of Briggs, Campbell, Huiswoud, and Claude McKay founding the abb as a working-class socialist-based secret paramilitary group who promoted selfdefence and Bolshevism in their constitution. Of salience abb World War I veterans fought white supremacists during the Tulsa Riots (1921). Makalani notes that the abb’s mission involved community organizing, intellectual education, studying theories of race and class, building alliances across races, fighting oppression through anti-racist and anti-imperialist politics, and working towards African Diasporic and Asian liberation, to lead worldwide freedom struggles. Makalani offers that the abb supported the United Negro Improvement Association (unia), but fissures arose given Marcus Garvey’s myopic strategies and his deal with the US government to inform on and publicly attack Black radicals, compelling Briggs to use US authorities to suppress Garvey. Their partnership with the spa and struggles with Garvey marked the abb’s demise. Of interest is the verity that while fighting for Black liberation, both Garvey and Briggs informed on the other to the government. The utter absurdity of advocating ending oppression while using the tools of hegemony to suppress the other remains mindboggling. It leads to the question of these men’s trustworthiness in leading revolution.

Chapter 3 proves thought provoking as Makalani considers how in 1922 McKay and Huiswoud shaped a Black International communism by working with Katayama, Bengalese M.N. Roy, and at Moscow’s the Fourth Congress Comintern, to successfully compel them to actively engage in pan-African activism and liberation. Makalani reveals how Vietnam’s communist leader and future president Nguyễn Ái Quốc (Ho Chi Minh), at the Parti Communiste Français and the Union Intercoloniale, and Katayama, Roy, McKay, and Huiswoud at the Comintern, re-centred discourse towards anti-colonialist struggles in Asia, Africa, the US, and the Caribbean as essential to “Proletarian Revolution.” They argued that white workers’ liberation would only occur through Asian liberation, and gained Comintern support despite white leftist resistance. Makalani explores their internationalism through Roy’s 1914 attempted uprising with his Jugantar...