Ligue de défense de la race nègre

The was founded on April 30, 1924, by Beninese Pan-Africanist Kojo Tovalou Houénou who also acted as chairman. It was the first major rallying organization of specifically Caribbean- as well as African-descended black people in France. It published the bimonthly journal from May 1924, headed by Martinican writer René Maran. That same year, Tovalou traveled to the United States and attended a convention of Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), where he went on to speak at Carnegie Hall. Upon his return to Paris, these contacts were deemed dangerous by French authorities and Tovalou was forced to leave the country. The simultaneous publication in of a sharp text by Maran against the first African member of the French parliament, Blaise Diagne, led to a libel suit. Weakened by the absence of its chairman, the Ligue disbanded. founded a new organization, the (CDRN), in March 1926. It edited the magazine . Particularly through the efforts of Senghor, who traveled through French port cities and gave speeches to workers, offshoots of the CDRN were founded there as in West Africa. In 1926, the CDRN had about 1000 members, 250 in Marseille, 150 in Bordeaux, 300 in Le Havre and 200 in Paris. However, content-related disputes quickly developed in the CDRN. On the one hand, there was the question of whether the term or should serve as a self-designator - the retention of the term was important to Senghor; he wanted to reappropriate the term and "pull this word out of the mud through which they drag it to make it a symbol." According to him, symbolized African origins and political radicalism, whereas was associated with colonialist political ideas. At the center, however, was the question of the group's political radicalism. The assimilationist part of the committee was concerned with the decidedly anti-colonial as well as more working-class and consequently communist orientation of the faction around Senghor and its willingness to openly criticize the French government, which could be interpreted as anti-French. These disputes led to a split in the CDRN at a general meeting on February 27, 1927. The moderate faction under Afro-Caribbean leadership took over the CDRN and renamed it . == ==

As a result of the split, Senghor, Tiemoko Garan Kouyaté from French Sudan, and postal employee Camille Sainte-Rose from Martinique founded the (LDRN) in May 1927, initially led by Senghor. Now without restrictions from the moderate and assimilationist members, the League formulated anti-colonialist positions such as the demand for independence of the colonies and linked them with communist ideas. It had active groups in all major port cities, with a total of about 1,000 members. Like its predecessor and successor organizations, the LDRN was monitored by the authorities. Of the 50 or so members spied on in Paris, about half worked as service providers or laborers, 7 were students and 5 were lawyers, and the rest were mostly small employees. In early 1931, a dispute over the leadership of the group began between the communist wing around Kouyaté and a "merely" anti-imperialist wing around Émile Faure, an engineer from Senegal, In April 1931, two different issues of appeared, one by Kouyaté, the other by Émile Faure, the lawyer André Béton of Guadeloupe, and Ludovic Lacombe. The issue of ownership of the names Ligue de Défense de la Race Nègre and the magazine La Race Nègre was litigated in court between Faure and Kouyaté and in 1932 the court decided, that it was Faure's. In August 1931, Kouyaté had already changed the title of his journal though to . Either in 1931 or 1932 the (UTN) was founded then as an undogmatic communist successor to the Ligue, but it was soon taken over by dogmatic communists and expelled Kouyaté. In 1939, the UTN dissolved itself. After the split, the now weakened LDRN remained inactive until 1934, when it re-emerged to celebrate the death of Blaise Diagne. Led by Émile Faure as president, it took a resolutely pan-African and anti-colonialist position, attacking assimilationists as well as communist anti-colonialists and the Négritude movement. La Race Nègre was published sporadically until it ceased in 1936, representing "the core of a full-blown doctrine of nationalism, cultural and political, the first breakthrough of this kind among French Negroes". The LDRN was finally suppressed in 1937 by French authorities, and Faure was arrested and banished to the Sahara until the end of World War II. == The German chapter: ==

In Berlin on September 17, 1929, seven men from Douala, Cameroon founded the (LzVN). With this step, they opposed worsening economic difficulties and racial prejudice in Germany and wanted to establish an organisation for political work and some mutual moral and financial support. Over the course of the year, about 30 black men and women came together, some of whom had already met in the , the first organisation of Black Germans, centered on mutual support, which had disbanded in the mid-1920s. The founding of the German section of the LDRN was supported by Willi Münzenberg, founder of the League Against Imperialism (LgI), who had already been bringing together important people from the African community in Berlin for anti-colonialist motives since 1926. He also established contact with Kouyaté, who was present at the founding meeting. A few months earlier, Kouyaté had already had copies of distributed in Berlin via Münzenberg. In its statutes, the LzVN declared as its purpose to achieve the "liberation of the Negroes" internationally and to fight nationally for a large, independent African state. The group smuggled political writings such as the statutes of the LzVN, among others, to Cameroon and maintained contact with activists there; most likely, they were also involved in anti-colonial protests in Douala. In 1930, the group performed Brody's play Sunrise in the Orient in Neukölln, the first half in Duala, the second in French, English and German. The play presented African history and culture of Africans probably for the first time in Germany without resorting to contemporary stereotypes. However, plans to establish its own "race theater" were not realized because the financial resources expected by the French Ligue were not available. Also in 1930, Bilé attended the First International Conference of Negro Workers in Hamburg as a delegate of the LzVN, which enhanced his status within the anti-colonial movement, as did subsequent discussions about him in the LgI and the Comintern, which earmarked him for training in Moscow and deployment as an agitator in Africa. As the debate over Bilé continued, there were also accusations by the LzVN against the LgI that it was not providing the group with sufficient financial support. According to Bilé, the responsible supervisors, Virendranath Chattopadhyaya and Bohumír Šmeral, had failed to honor several funding pledges; according to Kouyaté, Chattopadhyaya had even opposed any further funding for the group, seeing it as no loss if it disbanded. As a result, the LzVN refused to continue working with the LgI and instead turned to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD) for support. Although this pacified the conflict, the personal hardship of the members led to internal squabbles and intrigue. With the Nazi seizure of power in 1933 the group became defenseless. In 1933, the KPD and the German section of the LgI struggled under the new rule, Padmore and Münzenberg had left the country, and Kouyaté was on his own after being expelled by the Ligue, its successor and the French Communist Party alike. As a result, the LzVN ceased its work completely. Many members of the LzVN left Germany; by August 1934, according to Bell, the group had only two members left. In 1935 the group was officially disbanded. == References ==