Chapter 5: THE GREAT WAR, BLACK RADICALISM AND THE LAUNCHING OF THE MESSENGER
During the 1917 New York mayoral campaign, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen launched the Messenger, Harrison's first important competitor. Randolph argued that only socialist revolution could resolve the problems of African Americans because blacks, a permanent minority in the United States, could not improve their condition without substantial help from some portion of the white race. The IWW appealed to a working-class majority, while the Masses allied the radical intelligentsia with that majority and explicitly subordinated the intelligentsia to it. The Socialist Woman appealed to the working-class majority and to a sex that was not only a majority or near-majority in itself but had intimate connections with men as mothers, wives, daughters, and sisters. The anarchists either based their hopes on the working class (as did Alexander Berkman) or on a trans-class majority who would benefit from anarchism (Emma Goldman). African Americans, however, would always remain vastly outnumbered by whites.
Randolph's socialism was militant but not "impossibilist." Rather than placing all his hopes in ultimate revolution, Randolph propounded a coherent, wide-ranging program of immediate reforms and actions. "The race question has an economic foundation," he said. "In order to settle it, the Negro must organize his economic and political power."[1] From its inception, therefore, the Messenger propounded a sophisticated philosophy of interracial socialism. Adroitly integrating class and racial analysis, it systematically traced the manifold grievances of Afro-Americans to their sources in capitalism and explained the relationships between racial oppression and the injustices afflicting their white fellow workers. The Messenger initially proclaimed itself "the only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes" and "the only Radical Negro Magazine in America." By 1920, however, it dropped its reference to race and called itself "a journal of scientific radicalism" because of its appeal to readers of both races. Randolph claimed that "the Messenger is read by more thinkers--white and colored--than any publication Negroes have ever put out. It has more white readers than all the Negro publications in New York." He pledged that the Messenger had no "prejudice in favor of the Negro or against the White Man" and took "a courageous and sound position without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or political party." Randolph recognized that the Negro radicals' task "is doubly huge and difficult." They must convince white radicals "that capitalism is ever weaving a network of lies around Negroes" and "educate Negroes so that they may understand their class interests."[2]
The Messenger perceived the connections between the problems of Afro-Americans and those of oppressed peoples of all colors throughout the world. Randolph boasted that "the Messenger is the only magazine in the world which gives a scientific, interesting treatment of the Negro problem, interpreting also the interrelated and intertwined national and international problems." While allied with the Socialist party, it maintained editorial independence; Owen emphasized that "Even if it were against alleged Socialist principles to advocate what we regard as just and right, we would still advocate it, because we accept no Bibles or creeds even in Socialism."[3] In a major departure from SP doctrine and practice, Randolph demanded that white Socialists address racial injustices even as he urged blacks to embrace Socialism. The Messenger, therefore, propounded a systematic program of political, economic, social, and cultural revolution among peoples of all races in the United States and throughout the world. Of the hundreds of newspapers and magazines published by blacks during these years, the Messenger earned Attorney General Mitchell Palmer's designation as "by all odds the most able and the most dangerous"--an accolade with which its editors fully agreed.[4] The Post Office also considered the Messenger a threat, and for years denied it the second-class mailing permit routinely allowed all except the most radical publications. The Messenger, unique among Afro-American periodicals in winning this distinction, therefore appeared irregularly until it received a second-class permit in July 1921.[5]
Randolph and Owen escaped more severe persecution partly because of white racist condescension toward blacks. The pair was arrested in Cleveland for violating the Espionage Act, but released because the judge could not believe that they could have written the offending material in the Messenger. White Socialists, the judge insisted, were using Randolph and Owen for their own nefarious purposes. He told their high-profile Socialist attorney, Seymour Stedman, that the two "were nothing but boys" and demanded that they return home to their parents. However, other factors abetted their release. Randolph apparently produced false documents claiming that he was exempt from the draft because he supported his wife and children. (Actually, his wife supported him, and he had no kids). Owen correctly told the judge that he was properly registered for the draft; the Bureau of Investigation tried to have him called up immediately, and inducted straight from Cleveland. However, this effort proved unavailing. Still, Owen was drafted in August 1918, and served for four months in a Southern camp before returning to New York; Randolph was informed he would be called up in November, but was saved by the Armistice. Only the varagies of chance saved the Messenger's editors from long service in the military they so detested. This would have proven fatal to the Messenger, and perhaps to its editors.[6]
Although financed partly by Randolph's wife, by subscriptions and street sales, and by Randolph's and Owen's own lecture tours, the Messenger garnered significant funding from predominantly white unions and the Socialist party. While Harrison could not have relished competition from an Afro-American publication supported partly by the white funding which he himself disdained, he was not initially hostile. Indeed, he praised the editors in the Voice and in the first issue of the Messenger even though his black nationalism, however tinged with a class analysis, was simply incompatible with the Messenger's more orthodox Socialism.[7]
Owen also needlessly alienated Harrison when he inserted in the December 22, 1917 New York Call a "downright dishonest" advertisement for the next day's Palace Casino debate between himself and Harrison over the merits of Harrison's "race first" strategy for black liberation. Seeking to interest SP members, Owen falsely claimed that Harrison would argue that "Negro First" was "a logical and sound Socialist position." Harrison indignantly wrote the Call that he was not "so big a fool" as to maintain that "race first" was a Socialist idea. At the outset of the debate he condemned Owen's duplicity as tending "to alienate my friends" or "make them think me unsound in my view of Socialist principles."[8] Randolph and Owen may also have rejected Harrison's seminal essay, "The White War and the Colored Races" in 1918;[9] for whatever reason, Harrison never appeared in the Messenger after the first issue.
Black migration north during the Great War created a mass audience for radical Afro-American publications. Randolph and Owen, however, had arrived in New York during the smaller "migration of the talented tenth". Randolph, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal preacher, spent his youth in Florida. Reverend Randolph and his wife grew some of their own food and operated a backyard laundry and tailor shop in order to make ends meet. They inculcated racial pride and courage in their children. On one memorable occasion, which Randolph later described as "more revolutionary than sitting down and reading Karl Marx," Reverend Randolph, armed with the family pistol, helped defend a black criminal suspect against a lynch mob while Mrs. Randolph protected her home and children with a shotgun. Randolph was class valedictorian at Florida's Cookman Institute, which combined the liberal arts with vocational training. After working at the variety of menial jobs available to African Americans in the South, he took a steamboat to New York in 1911, scrubbing dishes to help pay his passage.[10]
In New York Randolph worked at odd jobs, but never for long. He sometimes quit in disgust; at other times he was fired for stirring up discontent among the workers. Randolph took night classes in elocution at City College and hired a tutor who taught him the Oxfordian English that, along with his dapper appearance and correct demeanor, made him a sort of American Nelson Mandela--a flaming radical who looked and sounded like an English gentleman. After his parents sternly vetoed his plans for a career on the stage, Randolph studied the social sciences. Acquainted with Socialism by a student group, he read Marx in his spare time "as children read Alice in Wonderland." He furthered his Socialist education at the SP's Rand School and at Harlem's "Streetcorner University," where he heard Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Eugene Debs, and Harrison speak. In 1914 Randolph married Lucille Green, a graduate of Howard University, ardent Socialist, devotee of Shakespeare, prominent socialite, and chaperon for the Debutantes Club. Lucille's lucrative Madame Walker beauty salon (which profited from the hair straighteners and skin whiteners so detested by Harrison) enabled Randolph to retire from his career as a sporadic worker and become a full-time radical agitator.[11] In 1917 he and his fellow Southern migrant Chandler Owen, a student at Columbia University's Law School, formed a black Socialist club in New York's twenty-first assembly district, where they managed Hillquit's campaign for mayor.
Randolph and Owen briefly edited the Hotel Messenger, the organ of the Headwaiters and Sidewaiters Society of New York, but were soon fired for exposing the exploitation of the sidewaiters by the headwaiters (a practice that might have taught them the limits of working-class solidarity).[12] The pair founded the Messenger in late 1917 and peddled it at street meetings where they spoke for Hillquit. Always short of cash (it was evicted from its offices for non-payment of rent before its third issue appeared) and suffering from official harassment, the Messenger was a creature of the vast intellectual upheavals generated in the Afro-American community by World War I.
African-American radicals of all persuasions agreed that the Great War and the social upheavals it accelerated or unleashed facilitated revolutionary change. "The passions of the Great War swept the hopes of all peoples upward," Randolph said. "War cries and slogans rang with promises of a 'new day'... a world without oppression of race, or class, creed or nation. Such was the dream of millions. This psychology was the handiwork of a plutocratic press, pulpit, and school. It was essential to the successful conduct of the war."[13] When the capitalists reneged on their promises, they sowed disillusionment. Harrison wryly remarked on the effects of wartime propaganda, which he compared to the "principle of repetition" embodied in commercial advertising. Democracy was the "U-Need-a-Biscuit" of Wilson and his cronies.
Now, you cannot get men to go out and get killed by telling them plainly that you who are sending them want to get the other fellow's land, trade, and wealth, and you are too cowardly or too intelligent to go yourself and risk getting shot over the acquisition. This would never do. So you whoop it up with any catchword which will serve as sufficient bait for the silly fools whom you keep silly in order that you may always use them in this way..... But, just as we prophesied in 1915, there was an unavoidable flare-back. When you advertise U-need-a-Biscuit incessantly people will want it; and when you advertise democracy incessantly the people to whom you trumpet forth its deliciousness are likely to believe you, take you at your word, and, later on, demand that you make good and furnish them with the article for which you yourself have created the appetite.... You have said to us "U need a biscuit," and, after long listening to you, we have replied "We do!".... The Negro of the Western world can truthfully say to the white man and the Anglo-Saxon in particular, "You made me what I am today, and I hope you're satisfied." And if the white man isn't satisfied--well, we should worry.[14]
Harrison said that "the subject populations who contributed their millions in men and billions in treasure for the realization of the ideal which was flaunted before their eyes are now clamoring for their share of it. They are demanding that those who advertised democracy shall now make good. That is the main root of that great unrest which is now troubling the decrepit statesmanship of Europe and America."[15]
As Harrison recognized, Wilsonian rhetoric both intensified the desire for democracy on the part of blacks (and workers and women), and provided an officially legitimized language in which to present such demands. Some radicals, such as Max Eastman and Harrison, pretended belief in Wilson's sincerity so that they could more effectively compare his slogans with reality; others, such as Du Bois, genuinely believed Wilson. The Messenger, however, feigned no such naivete, editorializing against "the inane and asinine stuff about what the war will do for the Negro" mouthed by the official black leadership. Owen reminded blacks that they had served with honor in America's previous wars and had been rewarded with slavery, peonage, lynching, and dishonor by the whites who had benefitted from such service. This result had nothing to do with color, Owen averred; the Irish suffered similar treatment from the English in whose wars they had fought. The Messenger predicted that returning soldiers of both races would encounter unemployment, lower wages, and worsened conditions. By July 1919, as blacks faced massive layoffs, continued discrimination and segregation, widespread lynching, and ferocious pogroms, its worst predictions had come true. "The Negro has gotten absolutely nothing from his shouldering arms and failing to produce mischief and confusion.... The Germans were alleged to be the enemy. But Germans are not lynched, while Negroes are.... Treason of the slave to his master is a virtue. Loyalty of a slave to his master is a vice. Liberty and justice have advanced in the world in proportion as people have been traitorous to their tyrants and oppressors.... The Huns of Georgia are far more menacing to Negroes than the Huns of Germany..... No barbarians of Turkey could ever be compared with the howling dervish, dancing barbarians of Tennessee."[16]
Wilson's insistence on "force, unstinted force" and the physical violence of war also increased black militance. "That the lesson did not take long to penetrate the minds of Negroes is demonstrated by the change that has taken place in their demeanor and tactics," the Messenger said. Blacks recited McKay's poem "If We Must Die," which urged black self-defense against white terrorism even in the face of certain death, and resolved upon liberty or death. The Messenger urged that violent self-defense was effective "beyond question.... Since white men believe in force, Negroes who have mimicked them for nearly three centuries must copy them in that respect.... Negroes are being driven by their white fellow citizens to investigate the curative values inherent in mass action, revolvers and other lethal devices when applied to social diseases." The Messenger proclaimed that "for four and one-half years the religion of violence has been taught to both white and black people of America. War has engendered the spirit of violence. The transition from shooting a white German is not very far from shooting a white American. Besides, Negroes hate American whites, but they almost uniformly report that the Germans were among the fairest and best people they have ever met."[17]
The obvious African roots of the Great War, the use of hundreds of thousands of African troops by the Allies, and Wilson's stirring rhetoric about national self-determination, also raised Afro-American racial consciousness. The World War, after all, was fought in the name of nationality as well as democracy, and the great European empires ("prisonhouses of nations") were dissolved and many captive nationalities liberated. Yet the victorious Allies regarded Africa and its peoples as merely the spoils of war, and re-partitioned them among the white European nations (sometimes under the guise of a League of Nations mandate).
Military service further radicalized blacks by ripping them out of the isolation of the rural South, assembling them in compact segregated masses where they could compare experiences and voice grievances, and teaching them soldierly organization and discipline, self-confidence, and the use of firearms. Decent treatment by the French and even their German enemies--sharply contrasting with the savagery meted out by their white American officers and the U.S. government--convinced blacks that the brutal racial folkways of the United States were not natural or immutable, but subject to change. (The Bolshevik revolution reinforced this idea.) Regular Messenger contributor William N. Colson, who had served overseas, said that "the Negro experienced a new sense of values in France" and claimed that "the colored officer, maltreated and thrust aside, has cursed the flag and the country for which it stands a thousand times." Colson predicted that "the Negro soldier, who is mentally free, [will] act as an imperishable leaven on the mass of those who are still in mental bondage."[18] Radical black publications reported that racist white officers deliberately sent untrained and poorly armed black soldiers into certain massacre, so that their failure would reinforce white racial stereotypes. They also charged that white medical personnel denied badly wounded black soldiers medical care while attending to the needs of injured Germans; that "cracker" officers brutally mistreated Afro-American enlisted men; and that U.S. propaganda told the French that African Americans were bestial rapists who had tails.
Additionally, the Messenger proclaimed that Southern blacks were galvanized by wartime migration north because of the "sociological law" that "discontent increases with social improvement." Directly contradicting Marxist immiseration theory, Randolph and Owen proclaimed that "the more we have the more we want, whether it be property, education, or rights." The editors proclaimed that they "grew up in the midst of discrimination" where blacks had few rights that "white men were bound to respect. But with our coming to the North, where we continued our education in the finest white universities, abandoned the Jim Crow car and began to vote, we were aroused from our apathy and slothful contentment. We grew to the place where we desired every right, and each fresh gain stimulated our desires and stiffened our determination."[19]
The Messenger proclaimed "the New Negro.... is the product of the same world wide forces that have brought into being the great liberal and radical movements that are now seizing the reins of political, economic and social power in all of the civilized countries of the world." In the heady days of the early postwar world, it seemed that the worldwide revolutionary tide was invincible. This view seemed especially apposite internationally because, as Harrison said, "the white race in its fratricidal strife is... destroying [the] very resources of ships, guns, men and money upon which its superiority is built.... [Therefore] the majority races cannot be eternally coerced into accepting the sovereignty of the white race." The war, Harrison continued, also undermined white hegemonic claims to superior civilization and order, a key factor in white rule. "They lie; they know that they lie, and now they're beginning to know that we know it also. This knowledge on our part is a loss of prestige for them, and our actions in the future, based upon this knowledge, must needs mean a loss of power for them."[20]
Uniquely among black publications, the Messenger analyzed events from a Socialist perspective that stressed class over race. But Randolph and his cohorts recognized the special position of African Americans, and peoples of color throughout the world, in capitalist society. Because the editors advocated justice for everyone, they acknowledged that the racial references in the title of their major policy statement, "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," required explanation. "The reconstruction program for the Negro must involve the introduction of a new social order--a democratic order in which human rights are recognized above property rights," they said. Although "there can not be any separate and distinct principles for the social, political, and economic emancipation of the Negro which are not applicable to all other people," blacks confronted somewhat different problems than whites because of their distinct appearance and their recent emancipation from slavery. The racist equation of "all persons" or "all people" with whites had "become a part of the public psychology"; therefore, Negroes must propound their own program.[21]
W. A. Domingo, a contributing editor of the Messenger (and simultaneously the first editor of Garvey's Negro World), agreed that both race and class oppressions afflicted Afro-Americans, but argued that class was more important. Blacks, overwhelmingly workers, had special grievances against the capitalists and special reasons for demanding "the downfall of those who manipulate public opinion for the creation of race prejudice which in turn divides the black and white workers of the country into warring camps.... To stop present robbery and remove the cause of most of our racial friction it is necessary to change the system which legalizes the robbery.... And color or race makes no difference. Jews underpay Jews, and Negro employers rob their employees regardless of race. The interests of all workers are alike."[22]
According to Domingo, the materialistic conception of history explained the capitalist origins of racism. Socialists taught "that the religious and ethical concepts of a people, as well as their general psychology, are mainly shaped by the prevailing economic system; and conversely that analysis of a given psychological attitude will reveal material causes. According to this dictum the ideology of a people, nation or race is but the result of accumulated material influences operating upon their consciousness for generations. So-called innate racial traits and animosities, if traced backward, will be found to be but effects of obscure economic causes. This is as true of race prejudice as it is of any other purely psychic quality of the human make-up." American experience demonstrated that physical differences, far from generating natural antipathies, caused "sexual affinity." Therefore, "race prejudice is not a reciprocal and general trait of humanity. White children and black children play together until they arrive at the age when they react to the influences of their environment. White, black and brown Mohamedans are never concerned about color as they do not live in an atmosphere that is permeated with... the cult of race superiority."[23]
Echoing Harrison (as well as foreshadowing some recent scholarship), Domingo traced the origins of American racism to the Anglo-Saxon enslavement of Africans, which gave the whites economic and psychological motives for ascribing inferiority to blacks. "The inevitable tendency of a conquering tribe is to hold the conquered people in contempt.... This is accentuated if the conquered and cheated people are of an opposite physical type." Ascription of inferiority, Domingo continued, inflated white egos and facilitated guiltless exploitation. Owen also explained the contemporary racism of the white working class not only on the basis of capitalist cultural hegemony, but by a similar resort to economic conditions. Capitalist society pitted workers against each other in a scramble for the resources essential for life. "White labor has constantly fought to keep Negroes out of the industries--not especially because of a dislike for Negroes but because to limit the supply of labor would increase the demand for white workers, raise their wages, shorten their hours, and extend their tenure of employment. The unions even try to limit white apprentices, also white women.... White employers take on the Negroes not because they (the white employers) particularly like Negroes, but because they like black labor cheap better than white labor dear." The races "do not fight each other because they hate each other, but they hate each other because they are constantly fighting each other. In the struggle to live each man usually decides that his life is more important to him than anybody else's. And where there is not enough work to go around, there will be a fight to secure the limited goods." The Messenger claimed that race riots were actually "labor riots" because "conflicts inevitably flare forth between the unionized and non-unionized regardless of race, creed, color, or nationality."[24]
Messenger writers appealed to contemporary experience to validate these claims. In the West Indies, the vastly outnumbered whites utilized mulattoes as an intermediate caste to help suppress the blacks. The mulattoes gained from this, and all three groups accepted the prevailing racial definitions as natural and immutable. "In the United States because of common exploitation, hybrids and pure bloods fight together against oppression. In the West Indies, because of different economic status, the two types stand divided--at daggers drawn.... [This] disproves the naturalness, the innateness of race prejudice because of physical differences." If whites became a majority in the West Indies, they would abolish the category of mulatto and declare that a single drop of African blood categorized a person as black.[25]
The Messenger also explained that a recent French law limiting foreigners to 10 percent of any orchestra was directed at American blacks, who were captivating French audiences. That the law was economically rather than racially motivated became apparent when Holland enacted a similar law directed against German musicians. "It makes no difference what may be the color of the skin," the Messenger announced; "human nature is uniform. Like causes produce like effects, as well in the social as in the physical world. The Dutchman will fight a German over his job just as quickly and as vigorously as a Frenchman will fight a Negro." The Messenger warned that American tourists, spending their dollars in France, would "introduce American [racial] customs as they have done in Bermuda where they are also the chief tourists."[26] Once again, monetary considerations undergirded racism.
The controversy over which race should secure the jobs tending black war veterans at the new medical institute in Tuskegee likewise demonstrated the primacy of economic over racial motivations. In commenting on this case, the Messenger so strongly asserted the essential uniformity of human nature that it virtually denied the relevance of historically conditioned cultural differences. "The Alabama whites, in obedience to dollar diplomacy, which ... [violates] the sacred Nordic law of no contact between Negroes and whites, are fighting desperately for the right to minister to the wounded Negro World War veterans. These, too, are the very same whites who lynch and burn, disfranchise and jim-crow black World War veterans." The Messenger ironically noted that "human beings care little about logic and less about justice. They are concerned mainly about advantage.... In this respect Negroes and white people are quite similar. In fact, human nature is uniform. Under similar circumstances blacks act like whites, and vice versa.... The whites want that million and a quarter so badly, that the white crackers of Alabama are willing for white women to nurse Negro soldiers--even in Dixie!... Knowing the South as we know it, we say without reservations that those hungry 'crackers' will work under any Negro in the United States if that is necessary to get possession of that money." The Messenger also publicized a case where five men, two of them black, killed a black scab, the cousin of one of the murderers. This incident highlighted "the terrible struggle for existence. It shows the intensity with which the battle for life is waged. It demonstrates how weak are family ties when cold and hunger threaten. It exposes how empty are racial claims in the presence of an undermined job.... At present a man's job is his life."[27]
Rebuking Du Bois, who famously said that race was the twentieth century's most vexing problem, Owen exclaimed that "the problem of the twentieth century is distribution--the distribution of wealth, the distribution of education, the distribution of the means of satisfying human wants--verily the distribution of happiness, the end of all human effort." The Messenger said that "getting bread is the biggest problem of the American man and woman. All other questions pale into utter insignificance besides this momentous and grave problem." Indeed, unemployment was "far above the menace of lynching, because while one Negro may be lynched every three or five days, one million Negroes are starving slowly every day." The capitalists confiscated the bread which the workers produced; this was tantamount to owning the workers, "for the power over a man's bread is the power over a man's life, and this is all that slavery amounts to." The Messenger concluded: "The capitalists say to the poor, 'Unless you create profits for us you have no right to live.'"[28]
Following orthodox Socialist doctrine, the Messenger blamed capitalism for depressions and wars. The capitalists extracted surplus value from the workers, who could not buy back their product; this caused economic collapse and imperialism. "Business is run for profits and not for the service of its people.... The workers, under the modern capitalist system, produce themselves out of jobs. They produce so much food that they must starve to death; so many clothes that they must go in rags." Workers starve "not because there is not sufficient food; but because the workers are not able to buy the food they have produced. In other words, they must starve and their children must starve because they have produced too much food." A tiny group--2 percent of the American population--owned 60 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 60 percent owned but 5 percent. Although the capitalists and their minions claimed that high wages forced closure of factories, the opposite was true: low wages closed factories. The capitalists could not sell all of their goods unless they paid workers the full value of their labor; but payment of such wages would destroy capitalism. Negroes suffered disproportionately from depressions and panics. As workers they were the last ones hired and the first fired. Negro businesses, almost all of which were small, went under during hard times because Negro customers were bereft of spending money and small businesses could not wait out the storm. "Only big business benefits from panics. The trusts become bigger trusts."[29] The Messenger also blamed the Federal Reserve for fostering unemployment.
War was the corollary of depression, in the view of the Messenger. The destinies of white and black workers were inextricably related in international as well as domestic affairs. "The real bone of contention in this war is darker peoples for cheap labor and darker people's rich lands.... These are the tools of the capitalist--undeveloped resources and undeveloped peoples--cheap lands and cheap labor." Domingo argued that imperialism was based upon the need of industrialized capitalist countries for safe markets for surplus production that its underpaid workers could not purchase; for cheap raw materials (often guaranteed by preferential tariffs), especially those unavailable in the imperialist nations; and as an outlet for surplus population, especially members of the exploiting classes for whom there were no lucrative jobs at home. The freedom of the darker races abroad was thus inextricably linked to both the abolition of war and the freedom of both blacks and whites in the industrialized West. Randolph and Owen also mentioned the export of surplus capital as a reason for imperialism and war; as capitalists encountered diminishing returns in their exploitation of whites at home, they turned to darker races abroad. "Our present system of industry produces surplus capital. Capital seeks investment. When the capitalist invests in a foreign land the flag follows the investor," and armies and navies act as the collection agencies of the capitalists. "Investment bankers send millions of dollars into these undeveloped countries," Randolph argued, "and in order to protect the said investments, huge navies and armies are built up and maintained.... So long as investments are made in Africa or China, neither Africa nor China can be free, because whoever controls the economic power will control the social and political power. Thus the problem consists of overthrowing capitalism." Militarization was also self-perpetuating: "the possession of a large military machine and naval machine tends to incite the desire to use that machine."[30]
The solution to war and depression was the democratization of both politics and the economy. "The capitalists say to the workers: 'You make the bread, and we will eat it; you fight wars, and we will make them and profit from them.'" The workers paid for wars by conscription and death, high taxes and high prices, the repression of dissent, the diversion of public attention from exploitation and oppression and home, and the militarization of life. Randolph noted that knitting for the soldiers (which government propaganda touted as a patriotic duty) was "designed to foster the military mind throughout the nation" rather than efficiently supply clothes to the troops. "History records no case in which the people have declared a war or in which the ruling class has fought one. And when wars are declared by those who have to fight them, the day of a durable and permanent peace is close at hand."[31]
Dark peoples were exploited only incidentally because of their race, Owen and Randolph declared. "It is not because of their color, but because colored peoples happen to assume such a low place in the scale of civilization just now, as to make such exploitation attractive, easy, and possible. The stronger peoples will always exploit the weaker ones, if only they are given the opportunity--without regard to color. The Irish people understand what a little barrier their color is in preventing exploitation and injustice on the part of England.... And the present war exists because one group of whites desires to secure possessions of another group of whites, even to the extent of sacrificing millions of young white men in the bloody carnage and the horrible holocaust."[32]
Randolph not only argued that blacks suffered disproportionately from the ravages of capitalism and that capitalism directly generated racism; he also blamed capitalism for the specific oppressions suffered by blacks. Randolph said that capitalism, defined as "the exploitation of human labor-power and the natural resources of the country for private profits" was "the fundamental cause of lynching." Capitalism generated "peonage, the crop-lien system, tenant-farming" and convict labor. These obviously profit-making economic institutions were "the more immediate causes of lynching" because of the poverty, ignorance, and hatred they fostered. Owen said that "Negroes are still held as property, sold and transferred from one master to the other, passing title just as in 1850.... Overseers, whipping foremen, veritable slave drivers, exact reluctant labor from these poor wretches who are frequently locked up in stockades at night." The result, Randolph said, was that "Negroes and poor whites don't unite--unite against a common exploiter--because race prejudice exists and is artfully cultivated to keep them apart."[33]
Randolph dismissed the usual explanations for lynching--white racism, rape, and the law's delay--by pointing out that many whites and convicted black criminals were lynched and that few of the victims were even accused of rape. The fundamental cause, he asserted, was economic. "White laborers will not only shoot down Negro laborers, but also white laborers who are imported by capitalists to take their jobs or lower their wages.... Negro laborers would do the same thing if they were in the white laborers' places. We might as well meet the big, bald fact that Self-Interest is the supreme ruler of the actions of men. The reason does not lie in race prejudice, but in the class struggle." Randolph maintained that "the extreme oppositeness of physical characteristics.... are not a cause, but an occasion for racial strife."[34]
Temporarily forgetting his claim that substantial numbers of whites were lynched, Randolph asserted that capitalists encouraged lynching "to engender race prejudice, to prevent the lynchers and the lynched, the white and black workers, from organizing on the industrial field and voting on the political fields, to protect their labor power." Peonage, convict labor, vagrancy laws, and the crop lien system were new forms of slavery by which Southern capitalists extracted unpaid labor from blacks and inspired race prejudice among the poor whites who suffered from the consequent lowering of wages. Lynching and segregation "widen the chasm between the races.... Race antagonism, then, is profitable to those who own the farms, the mills, the railroads, and the banks. This economic arrangement in the south is the fundamental cause of race prejudice.... Prejudice is the chief weapon in the South which enables the capitalists to exploit both races."[35]
Randolph further asserted that "the ruling class of the South have, through disfranchisement and the poll tax, deprived the working class of the power to protect their interests." The one-party rule and diluting of working-class strength caused by the disfranchisement of blacks generated political passivity on the part of poor whites and rendered them susceptible to demagogues who rose to power upon the basis of "scurrilous harangues against the Negro." Randolph concluded that "disfranchisement strangle[s] the voice of protest in the throats of the common people."[36]
The Messenger asserted that racial prejudice was not natural, but the product of assiduous cultivation. "The chief need, after all, is to leave the people alone. Normally, they are friendly, fraternal in relations. Knowing this, those who profit from race prejudice constantly fan the fires of an artificial feeling." Segregation, however artificial, was devastatingly effective in dividing the races. Messenger writers complained that segregation in public accommodations, colleges, and schools was increasing, and vociferously repudiated blacks who favored segregated schools on the grounds that they employed Negro teachers and shielded Negro children from direct contact with racist whites. Segregation, Owen said, "intensifies racial prejudice by fostering the idea of a mental difference peculiar to race [and] results in giving Negroes inferior conditions which are sure eventually to produce an inferior race." Robert Bagnall, an important NAACP official and Messenger contributor, said that "the [white] child who has a Negro teacher and a Negro classmate can never feel the same as a child who never came in contact with them at school." White children who were taught that Negroes were not appropriate schoolmates later believed that Negroes were unfit associates in every sphere of life. And the Negro "either accepts the status of inferiority and so has his soul lynched or else he resents the implication and grows in bitterness and hatred toward his fellow white."[37] Segregation, therefore, embittered and divided the races.
Segregated schools not only degraded blacks with the badge of inferiority, the Messenger said, but allowed Southern governments to spend much less money on black education than on white, and much less on white education than did states with unsegregated schools. The capitalists, fearing an educated working class, starved the public schools and sent their own children to private institutions. They also devoured a million white children in the maws of the Southern textile mills in order to exploit their cheap labor and drive down the wages of their parents. "This is how much the Southern white gentlemen capitalists care about the white children [about] whom they prate so much. Capitalism knows no color line."[38]
Race riots also stemmed from the imperatives of capitalism. "Race riots are like wars," Randolph and Owen said. "Like wars, they are injurious to the masses who fight them. Like wars, a few profit from them.... The capitalist system is the fundamental cause of riots" because the capitalists imported blacks as scabs during strikes, or more generally to increase the supply of labor, thus decreasing wages. Residential segregation, another cause of misunderstandings and hatred between the races in urban areas, has "enabled the real estate speculators to exploit both whites and Negroes." Randolph noted that "in nearly every section of the country it has been the white capitalist who has fought most vigorously for segregation because of his property values."[39]
Randolph asserted that the Chicago race riot of 1919, which erupted in the stockyard district, "grew out of the fight between the packers and the workers" rather than between whites and blacks. Only a third of the black workers were unionized, largely because capitalists indoctrinated Negro workers with anti-union propaganda in the black churches, schools, newspapers, and social welfare institutions they subsidized. While denouncing the white working-class racism which excluded blacks from unions, Randolph nevertheless noted that the Chicago riot "was the most convenient and effective instrument" for squashing working-class insurgency. Because of the national importance of the packing industry, the Chicago riot "struck the blow at the unionism of black and white workers in nearly every industry in the United States."[40]
"It may not be possible to trace every lynching or act of prejudice to a direct economic cause," Randolph conceded, "but the case may be explained by the law of habit.... It is now a social habit to lynch Negroes. But when the motive for promoting race prejudice is removed, viz., profits, by the social ownership, control and operation" of the means of production, "the effects of prejudice, race riots, lynching, etc. will also be removed." Palliatives would not work; anti-lynching laws would remain as unenforced as the Reconstruction amendments. "Lynching will not stop until Socialism comes." Although Randolph and Owen advocated racial self-defense and other immediate measures against pogroms, they insisted that "revolution must come.... When no profits are to be made from race friction, no one will longer be interesting in stirring up race prejudice.... The capitalists are the beneficiaries of race riots. The workers are the losers by race riots."[41]
In its discussion of race riots and lynching, the Messenger completed the tour de force by which it propounded an orthodox Socialism which inconspicuously merged the problems that afflicted workers of both races with the specific oppressions of blacks, both of which it viewed as inevitable outgrowths of capitalism. Randolph and Owen employed orthodox Socialist doctrines, especially that of the materialist interpretation of history, as explanations for the racism of the white working class, which they blamed on capitalism. Largely exempting white workers from responsibility for their own racism, the Messenger laid the foundations for a trans-race, class-based alliance against capitalism and its oppressions. In strategy and tactics as well as in underlying philosophy, Randolph and Owen refurbished orthodox Socialist ideas as weapons for the liberation of blacks.
Notes:
[1] APR, "Legalized Lynching," TM, February 1920.
[2] TM, slogan and ad, November 1917; advertisement, TM,, January 1919; APR and CO, "The Negro--A Menace to Radicalism," TM, May-June 1919.
[3] "Messenger Stock Drive," TM, May-June 1919; "The Policy of the Messenger on West Indians and American Negroes: W.A. Domingo Vs. Chandler Owen," TM, March 1923.
[4] Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928 (Westport, 1975), 70. This is by far the most complete account of the Messenger and its milieu.
[5] "The New York Call Defeats Burleson," TM, October 1920; announcement, TM, July 1921.
[6] Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York, 1973), 106-107; Ellis, Surveillance, 108-112. (The judge's words are Randolph's paraphrase.) Indeed, the Wilson administration wreaked far more havoc on the white radical press than on Afro-American publications. Only one African-American editor was successfully prosecuted on the basis of the Espionage and Sedition Acts.
However, the denouement to Randolph's story provides an example of the effects of petty harassment even when the authorities failed in their larger goal of imprisoning radicals. When Randolph and Owen arrived in Chicago for their next scheduled speech, they found that the pastor of the black church where they intended to speak had heard of their misadventures in Cleveland and refused them use of his facility. They spoke on a soapbox, but could not sell any copies of the Messenger because the Cleveland authorities had confiscated them. Owen later claimed that the indictments against him and Randolph were still in effect as late as April 1919.
[7] HHH, "A Book Review," TM, November 1917 (a review of Randolph and Owen's pamphlet, "Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races.")
[8] JBP, 674-677.
[9] Harrison angrily said that "a well-known radical magazine" rejected his article; Perry speculates that he referred to the Messenger. The length, style and tone of the article would have made it fully appropriate for that publication but also for ISR. Harrison published it in WAA, 116-122.
[10] Anderson, Randolph, 11, 42-45, 53. Of the biographies of Randolph, Anderson's has the most material on his early years. Other excellent treatments include Paula Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rogue, 1990), and Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair. For Randolph's BSCP activities, see William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-37 Urbana, 1991); Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill, 2001), and Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana, 1998). Philip Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Greenwood: Westport, 1977), 265-287, 335-336, discusses the Messenger.
[11] Anderson, Randolph, 60-62, 67-71, 78.
[12] ibid., 81.
[13] APR, "The State of the Race," TM, April 1923.
[14] HHH, "U-Need-A-Biscuit," NW, July 17, 1920, reprinted in WAA, 98-199.
[15] HHH, "Introductory," WAA, p. 6.
[16] "The Crisis of The Crisis," TM, July 1919. Jordan, Newspapers, contains much nuanced discussion of the pros and cons of using the language of loyalty to pursue radical and (from the point of view of the power structure) subversive ends. Speaking of Afro-American use of preparedness rhetoric, for example, Jordan says (64) "These black writers were trying to bend to their own purpose words that were intended to crush dissent, bolster national unity, militarize the nation, and facilitate the process of making war."
[17] "If We Must Die," TM, September 1919; CO and APR, "The Cause and Remedy of Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[18] Colson, "Propaganda and the American Negro Soldier," TM, July 1919; Colson, "An Analysis of Negro Patriotism," TM, August 1919; Colson, "The Immediate Function of the Negro Veteran," TM, December 1919.
[19] "A Reply to Congressman James F. Brynes of South Carolina," TM, October 1919.
[20] "The New Negro--What Is He?," TM, August 1920; HHH, "When Might Makes Right," WAA 108-110.
[21] APR and CO, "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," (TM, March 1919).
[22] WAD, "A New Negro and a New Day," TM, November 1920.
[23] WAD, "Private Property as a Pillar of Prejudice," TM, April-May 1920.
[24] ibid.; CO, "White Superiority in Organized Labor," TM, September 1923; "Aftermath of Exodus," TM, November 1923.
[25] WAD, "Private Property as a Pillar of Prejudice," TM, August 1920.
[26] "The Nickel Under the Dutchman's Foot," TM, October 1922; "France and the Negro," TM, September 1923.
[27] "President Harding and the Tuskegee Veterans' Hospital," TM, August 1923; "Tuskegee," TM, September 1923; "Lynchers Get Life," TM, February 1922.
[28] "Henry Ford," TM, February 1922; "Bread!," TM, November 1917; "Unemployment," TM, July 1921; "Debs and the Negro," TM, November 1920; Snippet, TM, October 1920.
[29] "The Unemployment Crisis," TM, August 1921; "Hard Times," TM, November 1921.
[30] "Letter to the People's Council," TM, November 1917; APR and CO "Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races," (New York, 1917); "The Only Way To Redeem Africa," TM, February 1923.
[31] "The International Debacle," TM, November 1920; "Knitting for the Soldiers," TM, January 1918; "Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races" (New York, 1917).
[32] APR and CO, "Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races" (New York, 1917).
[33] "The Truth About Lynching. Its Causes and Effects by Asa Philip Randolph. The Remedy by Chandler Owen." (New York, 1917); CO, "Peonage, Riots, and Lynching," TM, August 1921. Randolph added that in other sections of the United States the capitalists used ethnic and religious hatreds, and armed violence, to divide and control the workers.
[34] APR and CO, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[35] APR, "Lynching: Capitalism its Cause, Socialism its Cure," TM, March 1919.
[36] ibid.; APR and CO, "The Truth About Lynching," (New York, 1917).
[37] "Light Breaking Through," TM, June 1922; CO, "Mistakes of Kelly Miller," TM, July 1922; Bagnall, "Why Separate Schools Should be Opposed," TM, September 1922.
[38] APR and CO, "The Cause of and Remedy For Race Riots," TM, September 1919; CO, "The Mistakes of Kelly Miller," TM, June 1922; Bagnall, "Why Separate Schools Should be Opposed," TM, September 1922; APR, "Lynching: Capitalism its Cause; Socialism its Cure," TM, March 1919.
[39] APR and CO, "The Cause and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919; CO "Du Bois on Revolution," TM, September 1921;
[40] CO and APR, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[41] APR, "Lynching: Capitalism its Cause; Socialism its Cure," TM, March 1919; CO and APR, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
Randolph's socialism was militant but not "impossibilist." Rather than placing all his hopes in ultimate revolution, Randolph propounded a coherent, wide-ranging program of immediate reforms and actions. "The race question has an economic foundation," he said. "In order to settle it, the Negro must organize his economic and political power."[1] From its inception, therefore, the Messenger propounded a sophisticated philosophy of interracial socialism. Adroitly integrating class and racial analysis, it systematically traced the manifold grievances of Afro-Americans to their sources in capitalism and explained the relationships between racial oppression and the injustices afflicting their white fellow workers. The Messenger initially proclaimed itself "the only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes" and "the only Radical Negro Magazine in America." By 1920, however, it dropped its reference to race and called itself "a journal of scientific radicalism" because of its appeal to readers of both races. Randolph claimed that "the Messenger is read by more thinkers--white and colored--than any publication Negroes have ever put out. It has more white readers than all the Negro publications in New York." He pledged that the Messenger had no "prejudice in favor of the Negro or against the White Man" and took "a courageous and sound position without regard to race, creed, color, sex, or political party." Randolph recognized that the Negro radicals' task "is doubly huge and difficult." They must convince white radicals "that capitalism is ever weaving a network of lies around Negroes" and "educate Negroes so that they may understand their class interests."[2]
The Messenger perceived the connections between the problems of Afro-Americans and those of oppressed peoples of all colors throughout the world. Randolph boasted that "the Messenger is the only magazine in the world which gives a scientific, interesting treatment of the Negro problem, interpreting also the interrelated and intertwined national and international problems." While allied with the Socialist party, it maintained editorial independence; Owen emphasized that "Even if it were against alleged Socialist principles to advocate what we regard as just and right, we would still advocate it, because we accept no Bibles or creeds even in Socialism."[3] In a major departure from SP doctrine and practice, Randolph demanded that white Socialists address racial injustices even as he urged blacks to embrace Socialism. The Messenger, therefore, propounded a systematic program of political, economic, social, and cultural revolution among peoples of all races in the United States and throughout the world. Of the hundreds of newspapers and magazines published by blacks during these years, the Messenger earned Attorney General Mitchell Palmer's designation as "by all odds the most able and the most dangerous"--an accolade with which its editors fully agreed.[4] The Post Office also considered the Messenger a threat, and for years denied it the second-class mailing permit routinely allowed all except the most radical publications. The Messenger, unique among Afro-American periodicals in winning this distinction, therefore appeared irregularly until it received a second-class permit in July 1921.[5]
Randolph and Owen escaped more severe persecution partly because of white racist condescension toward blacks. The pair was arrested in Cleveland for violating the Espionage Act, but released because the judge could not believe that they could have written the offending material in the Messenger. White Socialists, the judge insisted, were using Randolph and Owen for their own nefarious purposes. He told their high-profile Socialist attorney, Seymour Stedman, that the two "were nothing but boys" and demanded that they return home to their parents. However, other factors abetted their release. Randolph apparently produced false documents claiming that he was exempt from the draft because he supported his wife and children. (Actually, his wife supported him, and he had no kids). Owen correctly told the judge that he was properly registered for the draft; the Bureau of Investigation tried to have him called up immediately, and inducted straight from Cleveland. However, this effort proved unavailing. Still, Owen was drafted in August 1918, and served for four months in a Southern camp before returning to New York; Randolph was informed he would be called up in November, but was saved by the Armistice. Only the varagies of chance saved the Messenger's editors from long service in the military they so detested. This would have proven fatal to the Messenger, and perhaps to its editors.[6]
Although financed partly by Randolph's wife, by subscriptions and street sales, and by Randolph's and Owen's own lecture tours, the Messenger garnered significant funding from predominantly white unions and the Socialist party. While Harrison could not have relished competition from an Afro-American publication supported partly by the white funding which he himself disdained, he was not initially hostile. Indeed, he praised the editors in the Voice and in the first issue of the Messenger even though his black nationalism, however tinged with a class analysis, was simply incompatible with the Messenger's more orthodox Socialism.[7]
Owen also needlessly alienated Harrison when he inserted in the December 22, 1917 New York Call a "downright dishonest" advertisement for the next day's Palace Casino debate between himself and Harrison over the merits of Harrison's "race first" strategy for black liberation. Seeking to interest SP members, Owen falsely claimed that Harrison would argue that "Negro First" was "a logical and sound Socialist position." Harrison indignantly wrote the Call that he was not "so big a fool" as to maintain that "race first" was a Socialist idea. At the outset of the debate he condemned Owen's duplicity as tending "to alienate my friends" or "make them think me unsound in my view of Socialist principles."[8] Randolph and Owen may also have rejected Harrison's seminal essay, "The White War and the Colored Races" in 1918;[9] for whatever reason, Harrison never appeared in the Messenger after the first issue.
Black migration north during the Great War created a mass audience for radical Afro-American publications. Randolph and Owen, however, had arrived in New York during the smaller "migration of the talented tenth". Randolph, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal preacher, spent his youth in Florida. Reverend Randolph and his wife grew some of their own food and operated a backyard laundry and tailor shop in order to make ends meet. They inculcated racial pride and courage in their children. On one memorable occasion, which Randolph later described as "more revolutionary than sitting down and reading Karl Marx," Reverend Randolph, armed with the family pistol, helped defend a black criminal suspect against a lynch mob while Mrs. Randolph protected her home and children with a shotgun. Randolph was class valedictorian at Florida's Cookman Institute, which combined the liberal arts with vocational training. After working at the variety of menial jobs available to African Americans in the South, he took a steamboat to New York in 1911, scrubbing dishes to help pay his passage.[10]
In New York Randolph worked at odd jobs, but never for long. He sometimes quit in disgust; at other times he was fired for stirring up discontent among the workers. Randolph took night classes in elocution at City College and hired a tutor who taught him the Oxfordian English that, along with his dapper appearance and correct demeanor, made him a sort of American Nelson Mandela--a flaming radical who looked and sounded like an English gentleman. After his parents sternly vetoed his plans for a career on the stage, Randolph studied the social sciences. Acquainted with Socialism by a student group, he read Marx in his spare time "as children read Alice in Wonderland." He furthered his Socialist education at the SP's Rand School and at Harlem's "Streetcorner University," where he heard Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Eugene Debs, and Harrison speak. In 1914 Randolph married Lucille Green, a graduate of Howard University, ardent Socialist, devotee of Shakespeare, prominent socialite, and chaperon for the Debutantes Club. Lucille's lucrative Madame Walker beauty salon (which profited from the hair straighteners and skin whiteners so detested by Harrison) enabled Randolph to retire from his career as a sporadic worker and become a full-time radical agitator.[11] In 1917 he and his fellow Southern migrant Chandler Owen, a student at Columbia University's Law School, formed a black Socialist club in New York's twenty-first assembly district, where they managed Hillquit's campaign for mayor.
Randolph and Owen briefly edited the Hotel Messenger, the organ of the Headwaiters and Sidewaiters Society of New York, but were soon fired for exposing the exploitation of the sidewaiters by the headwaiters (a practice that might have taught them the limits of working-class solidarity).[12] The pair founded the Messenger in late 1917 and peddled it at street meetings where they spoke for Hillquit. Always short of cash (it was evicted from its offices for non-payment of rent before its third issue appeared) and suffering from official harassment, the Messenger was a creature of the vast intellectual upheavals generated in the Afro-American community by World War I.
African-American radicals of all persuasions agreed that the Great War and the social upheavals it accelerated or unleashed facilitated revolutionary change. "The passions of the Great War swept the hopes of all peoples upward," Randolph said. "War cries and slogans rang with promises of a 'new day'... a world without oppression of race, or class, creed or nation. Such was the dream of millions. This psychology was the handiwork of a plutocratic press, pulpit, and school. It was essential to the successful conduct of the war."[13] When the capitalists reneged on their promises, they sowed disillusionment. Harrison wryly remarked on the effects of wartime propaganda, which he compared to the "principle of repetition" embodied in commercial advertising. Democracy was the "U-Need-a-Biscuit" of Wilson and his cronies.
Now, you cannot get men to go out and get killed by telling them plainly that you who are sending them want to get the other fellow's land, trade, and wealth, and you are too cowardly or too intelligent to go yourself and risk getting shot over the acquisition. This would never do. So you whoop it up with any catchword which will serve as sufficient bait for the silly fools whom you keep silly in order that you may always use them in this way..... But, just as we prophesied in 1915, there was an unavoidable flare-back. When you advertise U-need-a-Biscuit incessantly people will want it; and when you advertise democracy incessantly the people to whom you trumpet forth its deliciousness are likely to believe you, take you at your word, and, later on, demand that you make good and furnish them with the article for which you yourself have created the appetite.... You have said to us "U need a biscuit," and, after long listening to you, we have replied "We do!".... The Negro of the Western world can truthfully say to the white man and the Anglo-Saxon in particular, "You made me what I am today, and I hope you're satisfied." And if the white man isn't satisfied--well, we should worry.[14]
Harrison said that "the subject populations who contributed their millions in men and billions in treasure for the realization of the ideal which was flaunted before their eyes are now clamoring for their share of it. They are demanding that those who advertised democracy shall now make good. That is the main root of that great unrest which is now troubling the decrepit statesmanship of Europe and America."[15]
As Harrison recognized, Wilsonian rhetoric both intensified the desire for democracy on the part of blacks (and workers and women), and provided an officially legitimized language in which to present such demands. Some radicals, such as Max Eastman and Harrison, pretended belief in Wilson's sincerity so that they could more effectively compare his slogans with reality; others, such as Du Bois, genuinely believed Wilson. The Messenger, however, feigned no such naivete, editorializing against "the inane and asinine stuff about what the war will do for the Negro" mouthed by the official black leadership. Owen reminded blacks that they had served with honor in America's previous wars and had been rewarded with slavery, peonage, lynching, and dishonor by the whites who had benefitted from such service. This result had nothing to do with color, Owen averred; the Irish suffered similar treatment from the English in whose wars they had fought. The Messenger predicted that returning soldiers of both races would encounter unemployment, lower wages, and worsened conditions. By July 1919, as blacks faced massive layoffs, continued discrimination and segregation, widespread lynching, and ferocious pogroms, its worst predictions had come true. "The Negro has gotten absolutely nothing from his shouldering arms and failing to produce mischief and confusion.... The Germans were alleged to be the enemy. But Germans are not lynched, while Negroes are.... Treason of the slave to his master is a virtue. Loyalty of a slave to his master is a vice. Liberty and justice have advanced in the world in proportion as people have been traitorous to their tyrants and oppressors.... The Huns of Georgia are far more menacing to Negroes than the Huns of Germany..... No barbarians of Turkey could ever be compared with the howling dervish, dancing barbarians of Tennessee."[16]
Wilson's insistence on "force, unstinted force" and the physical violence of war also increased black militance. "That the lesson did not take long to penetrate the minds of Negroes is demonstrated by the change that has taken place in their demeanor and tactics," the Messenger said. Blacks recited McKay's poem "If We Must Die," which urged black self-defense against white terrorism even in the face of certain death, and resolved upon liberty or death. The Messenger urged that violent self-defense was effective "beyond question.... Since white men believe in force, Negroes who have mimicked them for nearly three centuries must copy them in that respect.... Negroes are being driven by their white fellow citizens to investigate the curative values inherent in mass action, revolvers and other lethal devices when applied to social diseases." The Messenger proclaimed that "for four and one-half years the religion of violence has been taught to both white and black people of America. War has engendered the spirit of violence. The transition from shooting a white German is not very far from shooting a white American. Besides, Negroes hate American whites, but they almost uniformly report that the Germans were among the fairest and best people they have ever met."[17]
The obvious African roots of the Great War, the use of hundreds of thousands of African troops by the Allies, and Wilson's stirring rhetoric about national self-determination, also raised Afro-American racial consciousness. The World War, after all, was fought in the name of nationality as well as democracy, and the great European empires ("prisonhouses of nations") were dissolved and many captive nationalities liberated. Yet the victorious Allies regarded Africa and its peoples as merely the spoils of war, and re-partitioned them among the white European nations (sometimes under the guise of a League of Nations mandate).
Military service further radicalized blacks by ripping them out of the isolation of the rural South, assembling them in compact segregated masses where they could compare experiences and voice grievances, and teaching them soldierly organization and discipline, self-confidence, and the use of firearms. Decent treatment by the French and even their German enemies--sharply contrasting with the savagery meted out by their white American officers and the U.S. government--convinced blacks that the brutal racial folkways of the United States were not natural or immutable, but subject to change. (The Bolshevik revolution reinforced this idea.) Regular Messenger contributor William N. Colson, who had served overseas, said that "the Negro experienced a new sense of values in France" and claimed that "the colored officer, maltreated and thrust aside, has cursed the flag and the country for which it stands a thousand times." Colson predicted that "the Negro soldier, who is mentally free, [will] act as an imperishable leaven on the mass of those who are still in mental bondage."[18] Radical black publications reported that racist white officers deliberately sent untrained and poorly armed black soldiers into certain massacre, so that their failure would reinforce white racial stereotypes. They also charged that white medical personnel denied badly wounded black soldiers medical care while attending to the needs of injured Germans; that "cracker" officers brutally mistreated Afro-American enlisted men; and that U.S. propaganda told the French that African Americans were bestial rapists who had tails.
Additionally, the Messenger proclaimed that Southern blacks were galvanized by wartime migration north because of the "sociological law" that "discontent increases with social improvement." Directly contradicting Marxist immiseration theory, Randolph and Owen proclaimed that "the more we have the more we want, whether it be property, education, or rights." The editors proclaimed that they "grew up in the midst of discrimination" where blacks had few rights that "white men were bound to respect. But with our coming to the North, where we continued our education in the finest white universities, abandoned the Jim Crow car and began to vote, we were aroused from our apathy and slothful contentment. We grew to the place where we desired every right, and each fresh gain stimulated our desires and stiffened our determination."[19]
The Messenger proclaimed "the New Negro.... is the product of the same world wide forces that have brought into being the great liberal and radical movements that are now seizing the reins of political, economic and social power in all of the civilized countries of the world." In the heady days of the early postwar world, it seemed that the worldwide revolutionary tide was invincible. This view seemed especially apposite internationally because, as Harrison said, "the white race in its fratricidal strife is... destroying [the] very resources of ships, guns, men and money upon which its superiority is built.... [Therefore] the majority races cannot be eternally coerced into accepting the sovereignty of the white race." The war, Harrison continued, also undermined white hegemonic claims to superior civilization and order, a key factor in white rule. "They lie; they know that they lie, and now they're beginning to know that we know it also. This knowledge on our part is a loss of prestige for them, and our actions in the future, based upon this knowledge, must needs mean a loss of power for them."[20]
Uniquely among black publications, the Messenger analyzed events from a Socialist perspective that stressed class over race. But Randolph and his cohorts recognized the special position of African Americans, and peoples of color throughout the world, in capitalist society. Because the editors advocated justice for everyone, they acknowledged that the racial references in the title of their major policy statement, "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," required explanation. "The reconstruction program for the Negro must involve the introduction of a new social order--a democratic order in which human rights are recognized above property rights," they said. Although "there can not be any separate and distinct principles for the social, political, and economic emancipation of the Negro which are not applicable to all other people," blacks confronted somewhat different problems than whites because of their distinct appearance and their recent emancipation from slavery. The racist equation of "all persons" or "all people" with whites had "become a part of the public psychology"; therefore, Negroes must propound their own program.[21]
W. A. Domingo, a contributing editor of the Messenger (and simultaneously the first editor of Garvey's Negro World), agreed that both race and class oppressions afflicted Afro-Americans, but argued that class was more important. Blacks, overwhelmingly workers, had special grievances against the capitalists and special reasons for demanding "the downfall of those who manipulate public opinion for the creation of race prejudice which in turn divides the black and white workers of the country into warring camps.... To stop present robbery and remove the cause of most of our racial friction it is necessary to change the system which legalizes the robbery.... And color or race makes no difference. Jews underpay Jews, and Negro employers rob their employees regardless of race. The interests of all workers are alike."[22]
According to Domingo, the materialistic conception of history explained the capitalist origins of racism. Socialists taught "that the religious and ethical concepts of a people, as well as their general psychology, are mainly shaped by the prevailing economic system; and conversely that analysis of a given psychological attitude will reveal material causes. According to this dictum the ideology of a people, nation or race is but the result of accumulated material influences operating upon their consciousness for generations. So-called innate racial traits and animosities, if traced backward, will be found to be but effects of obscure economic causes. This is as true of race prejudice as it is of any other purely psychic quality of the human make-up." American experience demonstrated that physical differences, far from generating natural antipathies, caused "sexual affinity." Therefore, "race prejudice is not a reciprocal and general trait of humanity. White children and black children play together until they arrive at the age when they react to the influences of their environment. White, black and brown Mohamedans are never concerned about color as they do not live in an atmosphere that is permeated with... the cult of race superiority."[23]
Echoing Harrison (as well as foreshadowing some recent scholarship), Domingo traced the origins of American racism to the Anglo-Saxon enslavement of Africans, which gave the whites economic and psychological motives for ascribing inferiority to blacks. "The inevitable tendency of a conquering tribe is to hold the conquered people in contempt.... This is accentuated if the conquered and cheated people are of an opposite physical type." Ascription of inferiority, Domingo continued, inflated white egos and facilitated guiltless exploitation. Owen also explained the contemporary racism of the white working class not only on the basis of capitalist cultural hegemony, but by a similar resort to economic conditions. Capitalist society pitted workers against each other in a scramble for the resources essential for life. "White labor has constantly fought to keep Negroes out of the industries--not especially because of a dislike for Negroes but because to limit the supply of labor would increase the demand for white workers, raise their wages, shorten their hours, and extend their tenure of employment. The unions even try to limit white apprentices, also white women.... White employers take on the Negroes not because they (the white employers) particularly like Negroes, but because they like black labor cheap better than white labor dear." The races "do not fight each other because they hate each other, but they hate each other because they are constantly fighting each other. In the struggle to live each man usually decides that his life is more important to him than anybody else's. And where there is not enough work to go around, there will be a fight to secure the limited goods." The Messenger claimed that race riots were actually "labor riots" because "conflicts inevitably flare forth between the unionized and non-unionized regardless of race, creed, color, or nationality."[24]
Messenger writers appealed to contemporary experience to validate these claims. In the West Indies, the vastly outnumbered whites utilized mulattoes as an intermediate caste to help suppress the blacks. The mulattoes gained from this, and all three groups accepted the prevailing racial definitions as natural and immutable. "In the United States because of common exploitation, hybrids and pure bloods fight together against oppression. In the West Indies, because of different economic status, the two types stand divided--at daggers drawn.... [This] disproves the naturalness, the innateness of race prejudice because of physical differences." If whites became a majority in the West Indies, they would abolish the category of mulatto and declare that a single drop of African blood categorized a person as black.[25]
The Messenger also explained that a recent French law limiting foreigners to 10 percent of any orchestra was directed at American blacks, who were captivating French audiences. That the law was economically rather than racially motivated became apparent when Holland enacted a similar law directed against German musicians. "It makes no difference what may be the color of the skin," the Messenger announced; "human nature is uniform. Like causes produce like effects, as well in the social as in the physical world. The Dutchman will fight a German over his job just as quickly and as vigorously as a Frenchman will fight a Negro." The Messenger warned that American tourists, spending their dollars in France, would "introduce American [racial] customs as they have done in Bermuda where they are also the chief tourists."[26] Once again, monetary considerations undergirded racism.
The controversy over which race should secure the jobs tending black war veterans at the new medical institute in Tuskegee likewise demonstrated the primacy of economic over racial motivations. In commenting on this case, the Messenger so strongly asserted the essential uniformity of human nature that it virtually denied the relevance of historically conditioned cultural differences. "The Alabama whites, in obedience to dollar diplomacy, which ... [violates] the sacred Nordic law of no contact between Negroes and whites, are fighting desperately for the right to minister to the wounded Negro World War veterans. These, too, are the very same whites who lynch and burn, disfranchise and jim-crow black World War veterans." The Messenger ironically noted that "human beings care little about logic and less about justice. They are concerned mainly about advantage.... In this respect Negroes and white people are quite similar. In fact, human nature is uniform. Under similar circumstances blacks act like whites, and vice versa.... The whites want that million and a quarter so badly, that the white crackers of Alabama are willing for white women to nurse Negro soldiers--even in Dixie!... Knowing the South as we know it, we say without reservations that those hungry 'crackers' will work under any Negro in the United States if that is necessary to get possession of that money." The Messenger also publicized a case where five men, two of them black, killed a black scab, the cousin of one of the murderers. This incident highlighted "the terrible struggle for existence. It shows the intensity with which the battle for life is waged. It demonstrates how weak are family ties when cold and hunger threaten. It exposes how empty are racial claims in the presence of an undermined job.... At present a man's job is his life."[27]
Rebuking Du Bois, who famously said that race was the twentieth century's most vexing problem, Owen exclaimed that "the problem of the twentieth century is distribution--the distribution of wealth, the distribution of education, the distribution of the means of satisfying human wants--verily the distribution of happiness, the end of all human effort." The Messenger said that "getting bread is the biggest problem of the American man and woman. All other questions pale into utter insignificance besides this momentous and grave problem." Indeed, unemployment was "far above the menace of lynching, because while one Negro may be lynched every three or five days, one million Negroes are starving slowly every day." The capitalists confiscated the bread which the workers produced; this was tantamount to owning the workers, "for the power over a man's bread is the power over a man's life, and this is all that slavery amounts to." The Messenger concluded: "The capitalists say to the poor, 'Unless you create profits for us you have no right to live.'"[28]
Following orthodox Socialist doctrine, the Messenger blamed capitalism for depressions and wars. The capitalists extracted surplus value from the workers, who could not buy back their product; this caused economic collapse and imperialism. "Business is run for profits and not for the service of its people.... The workers, under the modern capitalist system, produce themselves out of jobs. They produce so much food that they must starve to death; so many clothes that they must go in rags." Workers starve "not because there is not sufficient food; but because the workers are not able to buy the food they have produced. In other words, they must starve and their children must starve because they have produced too much food." A tiny group--2 percent of the American population--owned 60 percent of the wealth, while the bottom 60 percent owned but 5 percent. Although the capitalists and their minions claimed that high wages forced closure of factories, the opposite was true: low wages closed factories. The capitalists could not sell all of their goods unless they paid workers the full value of their labor; but payment of such wages would destroy capitalism. Negroes suffered disproportionately from depressions and panics. As workers they were the last ones hired and the first fired. Negro businesses, almost all of which were small, went under during hard times because Negro customers were bereft of spending money and small businesses could not wait out the storm. "Only big business benefits from panics. The trusts become bigger trusts."[29] The Messenger also blamed the Federal Reserve for fostering unemployment.
War was the corollary of depression, in the view of the Messenger. The destinies of white and black workers were inextricably related in international as well as domestic affairs. "The real bone of contention in this war is darker peoples for cheap labor and darker people's rich lands.... These are the tools of the capitalist--undeveloped resources and undeveloped peoples--cheap lands and cheap labor." Domingo argued that imperialism was based upon the need of industrialized capitalist countries for safe markets for surplus production that its underpaid workers could not purchase; for cheap raw materials (often guaranteed by preferential tariffs), especially those unavailable in the imperialist nations; and as an outlet for surplus population, especially members of the exploiting classes for whom there were no lucrative jobs at home. The freedom of the darker races abroad was thus inextricably linked to both the abolition of war and the freedom of both blacks and whites in the industrialized West. Randolph and Owen also mentioned the export of surplus capital as a reason for imperialism and war; as capitalists encountered diminishing returns in their exploitation of whites at home, they turned to darker races abroad. "Our present system of industry produces surplus capital. Capital seeks investment. When the capitalist invests in a foreign land the flag follows the investor," and armies and navies act as the collection agencies of the capitalists. "Investment bankers send millions of dollars into these undeveloped countries," Randolph argued, "and in order to protect the said investments, huge navies and armies are built up and maintained.... So long as investments are made in Africa or China, neither Africa nor China can be free, because whoever controls the economic power will control the social and political power. Thus the problem consists of overthrowing capitalism." Militarization was also self-perpetuating: "the possession of a large military machine and naval machine tends to incite the desire to use that machine."[30]
The solution to war and depression was the democratization of both politics and the economy. "The capitalists say to the workers: 'You make the bread, and we will eat it; you fight wars, and we will make them and profit from them.'" The workers paid for wars by conscription and death, high taxes and high prices, the repression of dissent, the diversion of public attention from exploitation and oppression and home, and the militarization of life. Randolph noted that knitting for the soldiers (which government propaganda touted as a patriotic duty) was "designed to foster the military mind throughout the nation" rather than efficiently supply clothes to the troops. "History records no case in which the people have declared a war or in which the ruling class has fought one. And when wars are declared by those who have to fight them, the day of a durable and permanent peace is close at hand."[31]
Dark peoples were exploited only incidentally because of their race, Owen and Randolph declared. "It is not because of their color, but because colored peoples happen to assume such a low place in the scale of civilization just now, as to make such exploitation attractive, easy, and possible. The stronger peoples will always exploit the weaker ones, if only they are given the opportunity--without regard to color. The Irish people understand what a little barrier their color is in preventing exploitation and injustice on the part of England.... And the present war exists because one group of whites desires to secure possessions of another group of whites, even to the extent of sacrificing millions of young white men in the bloody carnage and the horrible holocaust."[32]
Randolph not only argued that blacks suffered disproportionately from the ravages of capitalism and that capitalism directly generated racism; he also blamed capitalism for the specific oppressions suffered by blacks. Randolph said that capitalism, defined as "the exploitation of human labor-power and the natural resources of the country for private profits" was "the fundamental cause of lynching." Capitalism generated "peonage, the crop-lien system, tenant-farming" and convict labor. These obviously profit-making economic institutions were "the more immediate causes of lynching" because of the poverty, ignorance, and hatred they fostered. Owen said that "Negroes are still held as property, sold and transferred from one master to the other, passing title just as in 1850.... Overseers, whipping foremen, veritable slave drivers, exact reluctant labor from these poor wretches who are frequently locked up in stockades at night." The result, Randolph said, was that "Negroes and poor whites don't unite--unite against a common exploiter--because race prejudice exists and is artfully cultivated to keep them apart."[33]
Randolph dismissed the usual explanations for lynching--white racism, rape, and the law's delay--by pointing out that many whites and convicted black criminals were lynched and that few of the victims were even accused of rape. The fundamental cause, he asserted, was economic. "White laborers will not only shoot down Negro laborers, but also white laborers who are imported by capitalists to take their jobs or lower their wages.... Negro laborers would do the same thing if they were in the white laborers' places. We might as well meet the big, bald fact that Self-Interest is the supreme ruler of the actions of men. The reason does not lie in race prejudice, but in the class struggle." Randolph maintained that "the extreme oppositeness of physical characteristics.... are not a cause, but an occasion for racial strife."[34]
Temporarily forgetting his claim that substantial numbers of whites were lynched, Randolph asserted that capitalists encouraged lynching "to engender race prejudice, to prevent the lynchers and the lynched, the white and black workers, from organizing on the industrial field and voting on the political fields, to protect their labor power." Peonage, convict labor, vagrancy laws, and the crop lien system were new forms of slavery by which Southern capitalists extracted unpaid labor from blacks and inspired race prejudice among the poor whites who suffered from the consequent lowering of wages. Lynching and segregation "widen the chasm between the races.... Race antagonism, then, is profitable to those who own the farms, the mills, the railroads, and the banks. This economic arrangement in the south is the fundamental cause of race prejudice.... Prejudice is the chief weapon in the South which enables the capitalists to exploit both races."[35]
Randolph further asserted that "the ruling class of the South have, through disfranchisement and the poll tax, deprived the working class of the power to protect their interests." The one-party rule and diluting of working-class strength caused by the disfranchisement of blacks generated political passivity on the part of poor whites and rendered them susceptible to demagogues who rose to power upon the basis of "scurrilous harangues against the Negro." Randolph concluded that "disfranchisement strangle[s] the voice of protest in the throats of the common people."[36]
The Messenger asserted that racial prejudice was not natural, but the product of assiduous cultivation. "The chief need, after all, is to leave the people alone. Normally, they are friendly, fraternal in relations. Knowing this, those who profit from race prejudice constantly fan the fires of an artificial feeling." Segregation, however artificial, was devastatingly effective in dividing the races. Messenger writers complained that segregation in public accommodations, colleges, and schools was increasing, and vociferously repudiated blacks who favored segregated schools on the grounds that they employed Negro teachers and shielded Negro children from direct contact with racist whites. Segregation, Owen said, "intensifies racial prejudice by fostering the idea of a mental difference peculiar to race [and] results in giving Negroes inferior conditions which are sure eventually to produce an inferior race." Robert Bagnall, an important NAACP official and Messenger contributor, said that "the [white] child who has a Negro teacher and a Negro classmate can never feel the same as a child who never came in contact with them at school." White children who were taught that Negroes were not appropriate schoolmates later believed that Negroes were unfit associates in every sphere of life. And the Negro "either accepts the status of inferiority and so has his soul lynched or else he resents the implication and grows in bitterness and hatred toward his fellow white."[37] Segregation, therefore, embittered and divided the races.
Segregated schools not only degraded blacks with the badge of inferiority, the Messenger said, but allowed Southern governments to spend much less money on black education than on white, and much less on white education than did states with unsegregated schools. The capitalists, fearing an educated working class, starved the public schools and sent their own children to private institutions. They also devoured a million white children in the maws of the Southern textile mills in order to exploit their cheap labor and drive down the wages of their parents. "This is how much the Southern white gentlemen capitalists care about the white children [about] whom they prate so much. Capitalism knows no color line."[38]
Race riots also stemmed from the imperatives of capitalism. "Race riots are like wars," Randolph and Owen said. "Like wars, they are injurious to the masses who fight them. Like wars, a few profit from them.... The capitalist system is the fundamental cause of riots" because the capitalists imported blacks as scabs during strikes, or more generally to increase the supply of labor, thus decreasing wages. Residential segregation, another cause of misunderstandings and hatred between the races in urban areas, has "enabled the real estate speculators to exploit both whites and Negroes." Randolph noted that "in nearly every section of the country it has been the white capitalist who has fought most vigorously for segregation because of his property values."[39]
Randolph asserted that the Chicago race riot of 1919, which erupted in the stockyard district, "grew out of the fight between the packers and the workers" rather than between whites and blacks. Only a third of the black workers were unionized, largely because capitalists indoctrinated Negro workers with anti-union propaganda in the black churches, schools, newspapers, and social welfare institutions they subsidized. While denouncing the white working-class racism which excluded blacks from unions, Randolph nevertheless noted that the Chicago riot "was the most convenient and effective instrument" for squashing working-class insurgency. Because of the national importance of the packing industry, the Chicago riot "struck the blow at the unionism of black and white workers in nearly every industry in the United States."[40]
"It may not be possible to trace every lynching or act of prejudice to a direct economic cause," Randolph conceded, "but the case may be explained by the law of habit.... It is now a social habit to lynch Negroes. But when the motive for promoting race prejudice is removed, viz., profits, by the social ownership, control and operation" of the means of production, "the effects of prejudice, race riots, lynching, etc. will also be removed." Palliatives would not work; anti-lynching laws would remain as unenforced as the Reconstruction amendments. "Lynching will not stop until Socialism comes." Although Randolph and Owen advocated racial self-defense and other immediate measures against pogroms, they insisted that "revolution must come.... When no profits are to be made from race friction, no one will longer be interesting in stirring up race prejudice.... The capitalists are the beneficiaries of race riots. The workers are the losers by race riots."[41]
In its discussion of race riots and lynching, the Messenger completed the tour de force by which it propounded an orthodox Socialism which inconspicuously merged the problems that afflicted workers of both races with the specific oppressions of blacks, both of which it viewed as inevitable outgrowths of capitalism. Randolph and Owen employed orthodox Socialist doctrines, especially that of the materialist interpretation of history, as explanations for the racism of the white working class, which they blamed on capitalism. Largely exempting white workers from responsibility for their own racism, the Messenger laid the foundations for a trans-race, class-based alliance against capitalism and its oppressions. In strategy and tactics as well as in underlying philosophy, Randolph and Owen refurbished orthodox Socialist ideas as weapons for the liberation of blacks.
Notes:
[1] APR, "Legalized Lynching," TM, February 1920.
[2] TM, slogan and ad, November 1917; advertisement, TM,, January 1919; APR and CO, "The Negro--A Menace to Radicalism," TM, May-June 1919.
[3] "Messenger Stock Drive," TM, May-June 1919; "The Policy of the Messenger on West Indians and American Negroes: W.A. Domingo Vs. Chandler Owen," TM, March 1923.
[4] Theodore Kornweibel, Jr. No Crystal Stair: Black Life and the Messenger, 1917-1928 (Westport, 1975), 70. This is by far the most complete account of the Messenger and its milieu.
[5] "The New York Call Defeats Burleson," TM, October 1920; announcement, TM, July 1921.
[6] Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York, 1973), 106-107; Ellis, Surveillance, 108-112. (The judge's words are Randolph's paraphrase.) Indeed, the Wilson administration wreaked far more havoc on the white radical press than on Afro-American publications. Only one African-American editor was successfully prosecuted on the basis of the Espionage and Sedition Acts.
However, the denouement to Randolph's story provides an example of the effects of petty harassment even when the authorities failed in their larger goal of imprisoning radicals. When Randolph and Owen arrived in Chicago for their next scheduled speech, they found that the pastor of the black church where they intended to speak had heard of their misadventures in Cleveland and refused them use of his facility. They spoke on a soapbox, but could not sell any copies of the Messenger because the Cleveland authorities had confiscated them. Owen later claimed that the indictments against him and Randolph were still in effect as late as April 1919.
[7] HHH, "A Book Review," TM, November 1917 (a review of Randolph and Owen's pamphlet, "Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races.")
[8] JBP, 674-677.
[9] Harrison angrily said that "a well-known radical magazine" rejected his article; Perry speculates that he referred to the Messenger. The length, style and tone of the article would have made it fully appropriate for that publication but also for ISR. Harrison published it in WAA, 116-122.
[10] Anderson, Randolph, 11, 42-45, 53. Of the biographies of Randolph, Anderson's has the most material on his early years. Other excellent treatments include Paula Pfeffer, A. Philip Randolph, Pioneer of the Civil Rights Movement (Baton Rogue, 1990), and Kornweibel, No Crystal Stair. For Randolph's BSCP activities, see William H. Harris, Keeping the Faith: A. Philip Randolph, Milton P. Webster, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, 1925-37 Urbana, 1991); Beth Tompkins Bates, Pullman Porters and the Rise of Protest Politics in Black America, 1925-1945 (Chapel Hill, 2001), and Melinda Chateauvert, Marching Together: Women of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters (Urbana, 1998). Philip Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Greenwood: Westport, 1977), 265-287, 335-336, discusses the Messenger.
[11] Anderson, Randolph, 60-62, 67-71, 78.
[12] ibid., 81.
[13] APR, "The State of the Race," TM, April 1923.
[14] HHH, "U-Need-A-Biscuit," NW, July 17, 1920, reprinted in WAA, 98-199.
[15] HHH, "Introductory," WAA, p. 6.
[16] "The Crisis of The Crisis," TM, July 1919. Jordan, Newspapers, contains much nuanced discussion of the pros and cons of using the language of loyalty to pursue radical and (from the point of view of the power structure) subversive ends. Speaking of Afro-American use of preparedness rhetoric, for example, Jordan says (64) "These black writers were trying to bend to their own purpose words that were intended to crush dissent, bolster national unity, militarize the nation, and facilitate the process of making war."
[17] "If We Must Die," TM, September 1919; CO and APR, "The Cause and Remedy of Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[18] Colson, "Propaganda and the American Negro Soldier," TM, July 1919; Colson, "An Analysis of Negro Patriotism," TM, August 1919; Colson, "The Immediate Function of the Negro Veteran," TM, December 1919.
[19] "A Reply to Congressman James F. Brynes of South Carolina," TM, October 1919.
[20] "The New Negro--What Is He?," TM, August 1920; HHH, "When Might Makes Right," WAA 108-110.
[21] APR and CO, "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," (TM, March 1919).
[22] WAD, "A New Negro and a New Day," TM, November 1920.
[23] WAD, "Private Property as a Pillar of Prejudice," TM, April-May 1920.
[24] ibid.; CO, "White Superiority in Organized Labor," TM, September 1923; "Aftermath of Exodus," TM, November 1923.
[25] WAD, "Private Property as a Pillar of Prejudice," TM, August 1920.
[26] "The Nickel Under the Dutchman's Foot," TM, October 1922; "France and the Negro," TM, September 1923.
[27] "President Harding and the Tuskegee Veterans' Hospital," TM, August 1923; "Tuskegee," TM, September 1923; "Lynchers Get Life," TM, February 1922.
[28] "Henry Ford," TM, February 1922; "Bread!," TM, November 1917; "Unemployment," TM, July 1921; "Debs and the Negro," TM, November 1920; Snippet, TM, October 1920.
[29] "The Unemployment Crisis," TM, August 1921; "Hard Times," TM, November 1921.
[30] "Letter to the People's Council," TM, November 1917; APR and CO "Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races," (New York, 1917); "The Only Way To Redeem Africa," TM, February 1923.
[31] "The International Debacle," TM, November 1920; "Knitting for the Soldiers," TM, January 1918; "Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races" (New York, 1917).
[32] APR and CO, "Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races" (New York, 1917).
[33] "The Truth About Lynching. Its Causes and Effects by Asa Philip Randolph. The Remedy by Chandler Owen." (New York, 1917); CO, "Peonage, Riots, and Lynching," TM, August 1921. Randolph added that in other sections of the United States the capitalists used ethnic and religious hatreds, and armed violence, to divide and control the workers.
[34] APR and CO, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[35] APR, "Lynching: Capitalism its Cause, Socialism its Cure," TM, March 1919.
[36] ibid.; APR and CO, "The Truth About Lynching," (New York, 1917).
[37] "Light Breaking Through," TM, June 1922; CO, "Mistakes of Kelly Miller," TM, July 1922; Bagnall, "Why Separate Schools Should be Opposed," TM, September 1922.
[38] APR and CO, "The Cause of and Remedy For Race Riots," TM, September 1919; CO, "The Mistakes of Kelly Miller," TM, June 1922; Bagnall, "Why Separate Schools Should be Opposed," TM, September 1922; APR, "Lynching: Capitalism its Cause; Socialism its Cure," TM, March 1919.
[39] APR and CO, "The Cause and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919; CO "Du Bois on Revolution," TM, September 1921;
[40] CO and APR, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[41] APR, "Lynching: Capitalism its Cause; Socialism its Cure," TM, March 1919; CO and APR, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.