History
Toward the end of 1916, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen dropped out of college, joined the Socialist Party, and gave soapbox orations on street corners around Harlem. Their socialist and labor union propagandizing gained them celebrity in the area. When they walked into the office building at 486 Lenox Avenue, while looking for a meeting space for their Independent Political Council, they were recognized by William White, President of the Headwaiters and Sidewaiters Society of Greater New York. He suggested they move into his society's headquarters and edit a monthly magazine for waiters.
From January until August 1917, Randolph and Owen published the Hotel Messenger. But their exposé of union corruption (wherein the headwaiters were selling uniforms to sidewaiters at high prices and pocketing the kickbacks from uniform dealers) resulted in their immediate dismissal.
They moved into an office next door at 513 Lenox Avenue. With the patronage of Randolph's wife Lucille, they launched The Messenger. The first issue cost 15 cents (its price would never change) and ran the mission statement written by Randolph and Owen:
- "Our aim is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy of the times, and above the cheap peanut politics of the old reactionary Negro leaders. [This was a reference to Booker T. Washington, who promoted rural skills and compromise at Tuskegee Institute.] Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight with us; principle has. Loyalty is meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to. Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer as nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is". [3]
Declaring that "with us, economics and politics take precedence to music and art", the magazine's first two years were primarily devoted to advocating black labor unionism and socialism, and denouncing the War and its effects on black Americans. The magazine attacked President Woodrow Wilson's call to make "the world safe for democracy", when the black community was at risk in the U.S. Since the late 19th century, it had suffered a high rate of lynchings and violence in the South. At the turn of the century, most blacks were disenfranchised by changes in state law across the region that raised barriers to voter registration. They were excluded from the political system. The editors of the Messenger also criticized major northern black figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who was pro-war at the time, and Marcus Garvey, an activist from Jamaica. They believed that Garvey's program to "repatriate" native-born American black citizens to Africa was illogical and far fetched.
The Messenger declared:
"No intelligent Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it now exists. Intelligent Negroes have now reached the point where their support of the country is conditional".
Such statements led to Justice Department agents ransacking the Messenger's editorial office in the dead of night, breaking furniture and confiscating back issues. Randolph and Owen conducted a public speaking tour against the war, appearing in Chicago and Cleveland, while selling copies of their fiery July 1918 issue.
Reaching Cleveland on 4 August, Randolph and Owen took turns addressing the mass meeting gathered by the city's Socialist Party leader Walter Bronstrup. He sold issues of the Messenger in the crowd until an undercover Justice Department official bought an issue and broke up the meeting. The DOJ official pulled Randolph from the stage, arrested him and Owen, and held them the following day for investigation. Randolph and Owen were held for trial under charges of violating the Espionage Act by:
"unlawfully, knowingly and feloniously, the United States being then and there at war with the Imperial German Government, willfully print and cause to be printed, publish and cause to be published, circulated, in a certain language intended to incite, provoke and incur resistance to the United States and to promote the cause of its enemies in a certain publication known as the Messenger.” [4]
After two days in jail, the two men were brought to trial. The judge, looking at the two men and what they had written, said that he could not believe they were old enough, or, being black, smart enough to write that "red-hot stuff". [4] He did not doubt that they were being used by white socialists who had written the editorials for them. He said there would be no trial and ordered Randolph and Owen returned to their parents' homes; telling them to leave town quickly. The men continued their tour. When they returned to New York, they learned that the Postmaster General Albert Burleson had denied second-class mailing privileges to their magazine because of its content.
Socialism failed to attract followers in Harlem. By February 1920 the Messenger identified as "A Journal of Scientific Radicalism;” in June 1923, it billed itself as "The World’s Greatest Negro Monthly". It published increasing amounts of poetry, stories, and other work of Harlem intellectuals as the area became the center for black culture.
Although lacking a literary editor, The Messenger was influential in the Harlem Renaissance; it published a range of new writers before they had reached literary reputations. Theophilus Lewis, the magazine's drama critic from September 1923 till May 1926, supported the African-American little theatre movement, and helped develop a black aesthetic in the theater. Lewis may have been untrained and was not paid for his contributions (apparently the Messenger offices paid only for his cab fare to and from shows), but his enthusiasm for the theater led to well-developed criticism. He helped shape African-American theater on many levels, from the little theaters to Broadway.
Lewis helped recruit Wallace Thurman to the magazine as a contributing editor. He later founded the influential magazine Fire!! Thurman worked at The Messenger from late 1925 to 1926 and helped to publish Zora Neale Hurston's "Eatonville Anthology", as well as the early stories of Langston Hughes (Hurston and Hughes joined Thurman as an editors of Fire!!). Thurman also became known for his novels The Blacker the Berry and Infants of Spring. George S. Schuyler, a staple of the magazine for his satiric column "Shafts and Darts" (which he sometimes wrote with help from Lewis), contributed the piece "Hobohemia" to the Messenger. He became a correspondent and Chief Editorial Writer for the Pittsburgh Courier . Schuyler earned some renown for his satirical novel Black No More .
While the magazine was based in Harlem, its essays from the 1920s onward took a look at black culture across the whole nation with contributors such as Schuyler, Thurman, Lewis, E. Franklin Frazier and others (see: Tom Lutz and Susanna Ashton's edited collection of a series of essays from this period known as "These 'Colored' United States"). In 2004, Adam McKible "discovered" and helped reprint Edward Christopher Williams’ anonymously published serialized novel, The Letters of Davy Carr. Republished as When Washington Was in Vogue, Williams' book is a slyly humorous and culturally critical epistolary novel following members of the black bourgeoisie in 1920s Washington, D.C. Other contributors of note include Arna Bontemps, who later wrote Story of the Negro , and Claude McKay, whose poem, "If We Must Die", was reprinted in the Messenger as an anti-lynching, pro-self-defense statement to all African-Americans.
The magazine was always in such debt that it did not publish at all during some months where coeditors were on fundraising lecture tours. Contributors received only token payments. Money problems forced the magazine to change offices after being evicted from its first base. They were evicted again after three years, and leased space at 2311 Seventh Avenue. It published from there until folding in 1928 from lack of funds.
Social influence
In addition to providing a platform for African-American literature, The Messenger published much political writing. Randolph also served as editor for The Socialist magazine. Writers published in The Messenger tackled issues which other journals and magazines avoided. The Messenger was notable for its critical perspective during the Harlem Renaissance. It was described as "The most feared black publication" during its reigning era from 1917 until 1928. Randolph and his wife Lucille ran for secretary of state and the state legislature of New York on the Socialist ticket in 1917. The January issue of 1918 supported Bolshevism in Russia after its revolution.
The Messenger became a voice for those who were oppressed socially and economically. Many people would have suffered injustice for a longer period of time had it not been for The Messenger. For eleven years, it paved the way for social justice and equality. It was respected by many. Its influence was also described in 1919 by the U.S. Justice Department: "the most able and the most dangerous of all Negro publications.". [5] Randolph and Owen did not believe that blacks should participate in the Great War because they did not have political equality in the United States. When questioned on his views, Randolph wrote what he described as a "satirical and sarcastic" response. [6] He wrote:
"the Negro may be choosing between being burnt by Tennessee, Georgia or Texas mobs or being shot by Germans in Belgium. We don't know about this pro-Germanism among Negroes. It may be only their anti-Americanism -meaning anti-lynching." [7]
"Garvey Must Go" campaign
The Messenger openly critiqued Marcus Mosiah Garvey's theory of Black Nationalism. Garvey had immigrated from Jamaica. His pan-African approach promoted the "return" of [blacks] from the United States and the Caribbean, to "go back to Africa, and more basically, back to their own blackness". [8] Randolph and Owen criticized Garvey's goal of re-populating the African continent solely with blacks and his promotion of the idea in the United States. "Even the Senegalese French Deputy, Blaise Diagne, agreed that Africa was too diverse and fragmented for Garvey’s black Zionism to be realized". [9] Instead, the editors wanted to present "the possibilities of an American future devoid of lynching and Jim Crow, discrimination and prejudice". [10]
They believed that Garvey's ideas diverted African Americans from working on current racial issues and change in the United States. Randolph and Owen started the "Garvey Must Go" campaign in 1922, with the goal of getting Garvey deported. This appeared to contradict their original mission statement. "Chandler Owen explained that historically radicals had opposed deportation only in cases of expression of political or class war opinions". [11]
Garvey and the editors of The Messenger represented competing strains of thought among African-American leaders in Harlem and the United States. In the small world of Harlem, Garvey rented offices for his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the same building as those of The Messenger.
Randolph and Owen continued to criticize Garvey. In the September 1922 issue, they described Garvey as a tool of the recently revived Ku Klux Klan (KKK), saying he was "the chief hat-in-hand, me-too-boss 'good nigger' puppet of the Ku Klux Klan Kleagle, Edward Young Clarke of Georgia.” [12]
Asa Philip Randolph was an American labor unionist and civil rights activist. In 1925, he organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first successful African-American led labor union. In the early Civil Rights Movement and the Labor Movement, Randolph was a prominent voice. His continuous agitation with the support of fellow labor rights activists against racist unfair labor practices, eventually helped lead President Franklin D. Roosevelt to issue Executive Order 8802 in 1941, banning discrimination in the defense industries during World War II. The group then successfully maintained pressure, so that President Harry S. Truman proposed a new Civil Rights Act and issued Executive Orders 9980 and 9981 in 1948, promoting fair employment, anti-discrimination policies in federal government hiring, and ending racial segregation in the armed services.
Arturo Alfonso Schomburg, was a historian, writer, collector, and activist. Schomburg was a Puerto Rican of African and German descent. He moved to the United States in 1891, where he researched and raised awareness of the contributions that Afro-Latin Americans and African Americans have made to society. He was an important intellectual figure in the Harlem Renaissance. Over the years, he collected literature, art, slave narratives, and other materials of African history, which were purchased to become the basis of the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, named in his honor, at the New York Public Library (NYPL) branch in Harlem.
Hubert Henry Harrison was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, race and class conscious political activist, and radical internationalist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by activist A. Philip Randolph as "the father of Harlem radicalism" and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers as "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time." John G. Jackson of American Atheists described him as "The Black Socrates".
The Communist Party USA, ideologically committed to foster a socialist revolution in the United States, played a significant role in defending the civil rights of African Americans during its most influential years of the 1930s and 1940s. In that period, the African-American population was still concentrated in the South, where it was largely disenfranchised, excluded from the political system, and oppressed under Jim Crow laws.
The Niggerati was the name used, with deliberate irony, by Wallace Thurman for the group of young African-American artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. "Niggerati" is a portmanteau of "nigger" and "literati". The rooming house where he lived, and where that group often met, was similarly christened Niggerati Manor. The group included Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, and several of the people behind Thurman's journal FIRE!!, such as Richard Bruce Nugent, Jonathan Davis, Gwendolyn Bennett, and Aaron Douglas.
The African Blood Brotherhood for African Liberation and Redemption (ABB) was a U.S. black liberation organization established in 1919 in New York City by journalist Cyril Briggs. The group was established as a propaganda organization built on the model of the secret society. The group's socialist orientation caught the attention of the fledgling American communist movement and the ABB soon evolved into a propaganda arm of the Communist Party of America. The group was terminated in the early 1920s.
George Samuel Schuyler was an American writer, journalist, and social commentator known for his conservatism after he had initially supported socialism.
Wallace Henry Thurman was an American novelist and screenwriter active during the Harlem Renaissance. He also wrote essays, worked as an editor, and was a publisher of short-lived newspapers and literary journals. He is best known for his novel The Blacker the Berry: A Novel of Negro Life (1929), which explores discrimination within the black community based on skin color, with lighter skin being more highly valued.
Chandler Owen was an African-American writer, editor and early member of the Socialist Party of America. Born in North Carolina, he studied and worked in New York City, then moved to Chicago for much of his career. He established his own public relations company in Chicago and wrote speeches for candidates and presidents including Thomas Dewey, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Lyndon B. Johnson.
"New Negro" is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation. The term "New Negro" was made popular by Alain LeRoy Locke in his anthology The New Negro.
Fire!! was an African-American literary magazine published in New York City in 1926 during the Harlem Renaissance. The publication was started by Wallace Thurman, Zora Neale Hurston, Aaron Douglas, John P. Davis, Richard Bruce Nugent, Gwendolyn Bennett, Lewis Grandison Alexander, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. The magazine's title referred to burning up old ideas, and Fire!! challenged the norms of the older Black generation while featuring younger authors. The publishers promoted a realistic style, with vernacular language and controversial topics such as homosexuality and prostitution. Many readers were offended, and some Black leaders denounced the magazine. The endeavor was plagued by debt, and its quarters burned down, ending the magazine after just one issue.
Richard Benjamin Moore was a Barbados-born Afro-Caribbean civil rights activist, writer and prominent socialist. He was also one of the earliest advocates of the term African American, as opposed to Negro or "black".
Opportunity: A Journal of Negro Life was an academic journal published by the National Urban League (NUL). The journal acted as a sociological forum for the emerging topic of African-American studies and was known for fostering the literary culture during the Harlem Renaissance. It was published monthly from 1923 to 1942 and then quarterly through 1949.
Theophilus Lewis (1891–1974) was an African-American drama critic, a writer, and a magazine editor during the Harlem Renaissance whose contributions primarily appeared in The Messenger, the socialist African-American magazine founded by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. Lewis was well known for his staunch support of the advancement of a black aesthetic in the arts, particularly the advancement of plays that represented African-Americans well.
African-American socialism is a political current that emerged in the nineteenth century, specifically referring to the origins and proliferation of Marxist ideologies among African-Americans for whom socialism represents a potential for equal class status, humane treatment as laborers, and a means of dismantling American capitalism. Black liberation is in line with Marxist theory, which asserts that the working class, regardless of race, has a common interest against the bourgeoisie.
Eugene Gordon was a journalist, editor, fiction writer, World War I officer, and social activist. He cofounded and edited the Harlem Renaissance literary magazine Saturday Evening Quill and edited a magazine put out by the Boston John Reed Club. He wrote primarily on subjects related to racial discrimination and social justice. He published some fiction under pseudonyms, using Egor Don and Clark Hall and Frank Lynn.
Wilfred Adolphus Domingo was a Jamaican activist and journalist who became the youngest editor of Marcus Garvey's newspaper, the Negro World. As an activist and writer, Domingo travelled to the United States advocating for Jamaican sovereignty as a leader of the African Blood Brotherhood and the Harlem branch of the Socialist Party.
Grace P. Campbell was the first African-American woman to run for state office in New York. She was also the first female African-American member of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party of America.
Walter Everette Hawkins was a poet, mail clerk, and freethinker, described as being 'an important figure in the transition of black literature from the genteel modes of the nineteenth century to the flowering of black militancy often identified with the Harlem Renaissance'.
William Jourdan Rapp was a writer and editor in the United States. He wrote plays, novels, and radio scripts. He edited True Story magazine.
