How Lenin and Bolshevism displaced Civic Republicanism with Socialism in Black Radicalism

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CIVIC REPUBLICANISM did not disappear because it was defeated in open ideological combat. It was crowded out by a louder, better-funded, more institutionally disciplined international movement that claimed the entire moral and linguistic territory of “revolution,” “liberation,” and “anti-imperialism” for Marxism-Leninism and its offshoots. Black Americans did not organically choose SOCIALISM over REPUBLICANISM; it was pushed, pulled, and finally boxed in by forces that made the socialist vocabulary appear to be the only revolutionary game in town.

In the period of 1917-1930s, there is the Bolshevik Revolution leading to Comintern (1919), which declares itself the world headquarters of all revolution. It funded, trained, and disciplined national Communist parties, declaring that only the Marxist road represents scientific and legitimate revolution. Black veterans of World War I such as Cyril Briggs, Hubert Harrison, the African Blood Brotherhood began as civic republican nationalists. By the late 1920s most of them are pulled into the Communist Party of USA, because the Comintern offered money, printing presses, legal defense, and international legitimacy.

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