black worker struggle and on civil rights for blacks were based in the broader terms of anti-colonialism. From its early years in the U.S., the party recruited African-American members, with mixed results. Some African Americans preferred competing groups such as the ABB. In its early days, the party had the greatest appeal among black workers with an internationalist bent. From 1920 it began to intensively recruit African Americans as members. The most prominent black Communist Party members at this time were largely immigrants from the West Indies, who viewed a black worker struggle as being part of the broader campaigns against capitalism and imperialism. The party's first significant move to attract black support was its outreach to Cyril Briggs, founder of both the ABB and the magazine The Crusader. The party had begun to promote The Crusader from early 1921. At the 1922 Fourth Congress of the Comintern, Claude McKay, a Jamaican poet, and Otto Huiswoud, born in Suriname, persuaded the Comintern to set up a multinational Negro Commission that sought to unite all movements of blacks fighting colonialism. Harry Haywood, an American communist drawn out of the ranks of the ABB, also played a leading role. McKay persuaded the founders of the Brotherhood to affiliate with the Communist Party in the early 1920s. The African Blood Brotherhood claimed to have almost 3,500 members; relatively few of them, however, joined the party. The Fourth Comintern Congress passed a set of "Theses on the Negro Question", which guided the party's stance on race issues, contextualising the African-American struggle for civil rights as part a broader wavenation|views on nationalism]], which distinguished between the nationalism of "oppressor nations" (which should be opposed) and that of "oppressed nations" (which should be supported), and drew parallels between national liberation movements and the fight against racial segregation in the United States. However, the theses were not received enthusiastically by the American party's leading faction, led by C. E. Ruthenberg, who wrote to the Comintern to argue that they were unhelpful in the United States. He also claimed that the ABB was fomenting scabbing by encouraging blacks to leave the South, and the party's central committee passed a resolution stipulating that neither Briggs nor Huiswold should be involved in the party's work on race issues. However, there was support for the Comintern line within the party: Robert Minor, who had been appointed to lead the party's Negro