The Hamitic League of the World was a short-lived African-American Pan-African organization founded in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1917 by the writer and activist George Wells Parker. It promoted race pride and the argument that African peoples had shaped the ancient civilizations of the Mediterranean and beyond. In 1918 the League published Parker's pamphlet The Children of the Sun. From December 1918, Cyril Briggs's New York magazine The Crusader appeared as the League's publicity organ. Briggs was listed as vice-president. The magazine later became the paper of the African Blood Brotherhood.
History Parker founded the League in Omaha in 1917. Historian Jak Peake writes that it was an Afrocentric group committed to fostering Black pride and that it was revived in 1918 after a period of dormancy, when Parker formed an alliance with Briggs. An advertisement later described Briggs as an original founder. Peake finds no evidence that the two men were associated before 1918.
The League took its name from Ham, the son of Noah in the Hebrew Bible. In early-twentieth-century usage, "Hamitic" was also the label of a racial theory that credited a supposed Hamitic strain with bringing civilization into Africa. Parker and the League used the word in the opposite direction. In a 1917 lecture published in The Journal of Negro History, Parker argued that anthropological research showed Mesopotamian and Greek civilization originating in Africa, and that Asia as well as Africa had been a home of Black peoples.
In December 1918 The Crusader, which Briggs had launched in Harlem that September, was named the "Publicity Organ of the Hamitic League of the World". The issue printed a League appeal to the coming peace conference, signed by Parker as president from Omaha and by Briggs as vice-president. The appeal asked that "the full rights of citizenship be granted to all people of Color", that color discrimination be made illegal and that self-determination be extended "to all nations and tribes within the African continent". The masthead also named Fred C. Williams as secretary and listed associates in Puerto Rico, Haiti and the Gold Coast. The League's own statement that it had branches in the United States, Africa and the West Indies is a primary claim and has not been independently verified.
The Crusader advertised The Children of the Sun as a Hamitic League publication sold from Parker's Omaha address, , and from the magazine's New York office. Briggs called the pamphlet a blow against the teaching that African people had been "backward savages and non creators". Black Classic Press reprinted the work in 1971.
By late 1920 the League had dropped off The Crusaders masthead as Briggs moved the magazine toward Marxism and toward the African Blood Brotherhood, which he had announced in 1919. In June 1921 the magazine became the Brotherhood's official journal. Peake writes that the League served as a template for the Brotherhood and that Parker and Briggs shared an outlook of Pan-African liberation, race pride and something like the "race first" politics associated with Hubert Harrison.
See also
Civil rights movement in Omaha, Nebraska African Blood Brotherhood Hamites
References