Chapter 6: THE MESSENGER'S PHILOSOPHY OF INTERRACIAL SOCIALISM
Randolph's interracial version of Socialist mass action advocated some of the same tactics utilized by white Socialists, and some militant strategies specifically aimed at fighting white racism. All of his ideas, however, incorporated race as an important element of both analysis and action. Some of Randolph's proposals--such as unionization and Socialist voting--presumed a class alliance of black and white workers against capitalism. Even these actions based upon class consciousness rather than racial identity, however, assumed a unique form because of the special predicament of African Americans. Other proposals--such as armed black self-defense against white violence, the organization of black cooperatives, the fight against residential and school segregation, and the struggle for social equality--demanded black racial organization against white racism, and brought blacks into potential conflict with white workers. Despite his seemingly orthodox Socialist emphasis upon class, Randolph directly confronted the realities of race.
One key part of Randolph's program for action consisted of energetic black participation in the labor movement. Randolph asserted that the black race, 99 percent proletarian, would benefit immensely by unionization. Even the 1 percent who considered themselves businessmen were "nothing but workers who are working for themselves," and would profit from increasing the purchasing power of their customers. "Hence, there is every reason why the Negro as a race should support the workers as a class," Randolph declared. "The chief need of the Negro is the organization of his industrial power," more vital even than the vote. During the 1920 coal strike, Randolph noted that victory would net 50,000 Negro coal miners a total of $27 million per year; as most of these miners had families, approximately 250,000 Negroes would benefit. Yet most black editors, who exulted whenever a single prominent Negro received a lucrative patronage job, opposed this strike.[1]
Randolph regarded strikes as "great educators" and incubators of revolution because "discontent increases with social improvement. The more we have the more we want.... Just so soon as wages are high... labor will begin to think, and upon thinking, it will realize the condition in which it is and grasp the knowledge that relief is attainable by action. Capital is in a dilemma. If it does not grant labor's demands it will be overthrown by violent revolution. If it grants labor's demands it will be overthrown by peaceful revolution. But in either case it faces both overthrow and revolution, and overthrow by revolution." Strikes won the goods that would "satisfy the higher wants and create wants for the higher goods," including education and leisure. Strikes were "directly proportional to the intelligence and class consciousness of labor. Strikes are fewest where labor is most ignorant."[2]
The Messenger also asserted that unionization of blacks would foster integration and social equality because people who worked and fought together could not remain strangers outside of work. According to "the first and only Negro woman labor organizer in the United States," Nora Newsome, "unionism, perhaps more than any other agency, will do much toward cementing the relationship between white and colored workers. When white and colored men meet on an equal basis in the workroom, fight together for common betterment, and together bear the suffering resulting from that fight, I cannot possibly see how they can hate each other in the class room, restaurant, theatre, or any other place where social intercourse is desirable."[3]
Randolph's advocacy of unionism for blacks, however, was complicated by the exclusionary policies of most white unions. "Where unions refuse black workers admission into them," Randolph said, "the black workers should organize separate unions of their own; but where white unions are sufficiently enlightened to appreciate the menace of unorganized labor, white or black, to the march of industrial democracy, we recommend that the Negro workers combine with the white workers." All workers had identical interests in "more wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions"; interracial organizing would "increase their bargaining power" and defuse the threat of scabbing. All workers must organize "if labor would win its demands." Randolph said that blacks excluded from white unions "should organize their own unions and fight both the hostile labor unions and then hostile employers." Just as no sensible person would oppose writing because of its misuse for forgery, "it is folly for the Negro to fight labor organization because some white unions ignorantly ignore or oppose him."[4]
Although Randolph urged that black workers join whatever union controlled their industry, he had clear preferences among labor organizations. He castigated the AFL as a strikebreaking "Separation of Labor" that divided the working class by race and skill and by signing time contracts that prevented sympathy strikes. The AFL, he said, collaborated with the class enemy and endorsed anti-labor politicians. When the AFL pledged that it would recruit blacks, Randolph scornfully said that such resolutions were "not worth the paper they were written on" and that, in any event, the AFL could not protect its white members. Nevertheless, blacks should insist on equality within the AFL. Adumbrating his own strategy during the first lonely years of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph urged that "Even if [blacks] don't get any support from anybody, they should ... carry the fight to the floor for recognition as the industrial equals of their white brothers. It is not sufficient merely for Negroes to condemn the white workers for their economic ills, for they are not altogether blameless themselves."[5]
As virtually every other black radical, Randolph favored the Industrial Workers of the World. "The IWW prohibit discrimination on account of race or color in the first clause of their constitution, and they carry it out in practice," he said. "The Negroes and the Industrial Workers of the World have interests not only in common, but interests that are identical." Both wwere unskilled and disfranchised and hence had no other option than "industrial action.... The Negro who is disfranchised must join other voteless workers. The Negro who is largely the unskilled worker in industry, must join that organization in which the workers are organized upon the basis of industry, thereby giving the skilled and unskilled equality of rights." The Wobblies rejected the color line "not as a sentimental virtue which they dole out with hypocritical unctuousness, but because enlightened self-interest" revealed that this was the only way they could achieve their goals. Such common interest was a more solid basis for cooperation than altruism or philanthropy.[6] In July 1919 the Messenger reprinted, in slightly altered form, William Haywood's lengthy and important appeal to workers of color from the March 10, 1917 Solidarity.[7] The Messenger also touted the IWW's Marine Transport Workers Union #8 (Philadelphia) as exemplifying "the ability of white and black people to work, live and conduct their common affairs side by side." At MTWU social affairs, "the workers also mingle, fraternize, dance, eat and play together." The Messenger also praised the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) and the Internaitonal Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) for their racial policies. (Both were Socialist dominated). Randolph believed that if blacks formed their own unions, agitated within the AFL, and joined egalitarian unions such as the IWW and the ILGWU (itself an AFL affiliate), they would pressure the much larger AFL into according blacks genuine equality.[8]
If these methods failed, black workers could scab white unions into submission. Ben Fletcher, the IWW's most famous black leader, said that "Negro Labor's foothold nearly everywhere in organized labor's domains, has been secured by scabbing them into defeat or into terms that provided for Negro inclusion in their ranks." Fletcher, contravening IWW policy, endorsed this tactic. Owen, embittered when a Socialist garment union rejected his brother's application for membership, exclaimed that capitalists and unions collaborated in keeping blacks out of most jobs, so that Negroes interpreted the closed shop as meaning "closed to Negroes." Owen declared that "the Negro quite sanely prefers a lower standard of living, in the open shop, to starvation, or no standard of living, as a result of the closed shop!" The capitalists therefore "have appealed to the Negro worker on the ground that white unions were the Negro's enemies. Proof was never lacking" in history or personal experience. "Consequently Negroes were and are ever ready to take the places of union strikers. They are coddled by the employers and repulsed by the unions." White capitalists were "patrons" and friends of the blacks while white workers were "competitors" and enemies. Scabbing, therefore, combined the joys of revenge with the motivation of economic advancement. Owen then stated "a truth which we have nowhere seen expressed in the radical and labor literature":
The white employers and capitalists have placed the Negro workers both into the industries, and consequently into the unions, while the white trade unions have kept the Negroes out of both the unions and the industries, so long as they could!..... The Negro worker may not be able to state the philosophy and the theories underlying the situation, but he is well aware of the facts.[9]
Because capitalists were themselves racist (and would not gratuitously offend their white workers), they would not hire blacks unless they worked for less than whites. As Owen said, "the employers would no doubt discharge the Negroes if they did join the union."[10] This obviously undercut unionism's appeal for black workers.
When the AFL remained staunchly white supremacist, and government terrorism (abetted by the AFL) destroyed the IWW, the Messenger increasingly advocated organized scabbing as a method of pressuring white labor. Citing the hotel industry, Randolph had previously asserted that blacks usually gained little by scabbing on white workers. Negro workers slaved for intolerable hours for starvation pay when white workers struck, and after the strike "the white workers are reinstalled, while the Negro worker is discarded to the industrial scrap heap to starve until the masters of the hotel industry need him again to help them keep milk from the babies of their white hotel wage slaves. The organized Negro press, church and leadership condone, connive at, and in fact, support this criminal practice." Later, however, the Friends of Negro Freedom, Randolph's civil rights organization, pledged that it would "not allow Negroes to be called in as strikebreakers, only to be thrown out when the strike is settled. If the union in question admits Negroes, the Friends of Negro Freedom will use its influence to stop Negroes from acting as strikebreakers. If Negroes are denied entrance to the unions, the Labor Union committee is instructed to organize the Negroes separately and make flawless contracts with the employers whereby the Negro workers cannot be discharged. In short, the settlement of such a strike must be a settlement with the Negro workers." Randolph emphasized that "taking the jobs of the white workers is absolutely justified wherever Negroes are denied entrance to the unions." The Messenger said that "white workers cannot lynch Negro workers, debar them from joining their unions, and expect them to show the spirit of cooperation when white workers are sorely pressed by the brutal hand of capital."[11]
Randolph's vision of interracial unionism, therefore, was undermined by white racism, the consequent black working-class hostility toward unions, the vulnerability of black workers to firing if they signed up, and the capitalist terrorism that made most white workers avoid unions. In addition, Randolph's pro-union stance encountered the studied hostility of the black elite. Randolph complained that African-American leaders reinforced the anti-union bias of the black working class out of both economic interest (they were bought and paid for by white capitalists) and class snobbery. "The beneficiaries of a social order strive through force or deception to secure the acquiescence and support of the victims of the social order," the Messenger lamented. In furtherance of this, white capitalists subsidized, controlled, and propagandized black newspapers, churches, schools, and social welfare institutions. "Hence, through ignorance or error the opposition of the Negro to the very movements which are calculated to achieve his economic [and] political emancipation, is being effected by big, hand-picked Negro leaders--and the plutocratic interests of this country." Owen warned black workers that "you cannot depend upon your leaders for this work [of unionization]. Your leaders have already been employed by those more able to pay them than you are."[12] The Messenger complained that
in church, school, and press, the Negro has been taught to love and respect the rich, but to regard with requisite suspicion the "poor whites" or the white workers. Unfortunately, the attitude of the white workers has not been calculated to disabuse their minds of this view. Thus the Negro workers have been deprived of the leadership of a radical or liberal Negro intelligentsia.
Negro college students "thought it a mark of great learning to be curt, snobbish and satirical on matters of labor. Like the vast majority of white students," they considered a classical education "as a badge of the lady and gentleman." They were therefore "indifferent to the facts and principles of economics, the science of production and distribution." The Messenger urged that "Young Negro men and women of education must resolve to cast their lot in the labor movement" and impart "vision and hope and intelligence to the wide Negro masses."[13]
To achieve this objective, Randolph and Owen boosted three organizations which promoted labor organization among Negroes: the National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unions Among Negroes (NAPLUAN), the National Brotherhood Association of America (NBA) and the Friends of Negro Freedom (FNF). Owen and Randolph headed NAPLUAN, which had an advisory board of white Socialist labor activists. In July 1918 the Messenger declared itself the organ of NAPLUAN. The logo of NAPLUAN featured the sturdy hands of a black and white worker clasping in solidarity; its motto was "Black and White Workers Unite." Randolph almost certainly wrote NAPLUAN's statement of philosophy, which declared that all workers had one common interest, achievable only by unionizing all toilers of both races. As "self-interest is the only principle upon which individuals or groups will act if they are sane," Negro workers excluded from unions would eagerly scab upon unionized workers. "The employing class recognize no race lines," NAPLUAN proclaimed. "They will exploit a white man as readily as a black man. They will exploit women as readily as men. They will even go to the extent of coining the labor, blood and suffering of children into dollars.... Organized labor cannot afford to ignore any labor factor of production which organized capital does not ignore.... No union man's standard of living is safe so long as there is a group of men and women who may be used as scabs and whose standard of living is lower." Interracial unions would prove that unions were class, not race, organizations, and would "convert a class of workers, which has been used by the capitalist class to defeat organized labor, into an ardent, class conscious, intelligent, militant group."[14]
The National Brotherhood of America, the Messenger said, was an all-black "Negro Federation of Labor." T.G. Pree of Virginia headed it. Pree, and the other founder R.T. Sims, were longstanding radicals; both had been IWW officials. Taking its inspiration from the United Hebrew Trades, the NBA was "composed of Negro unions of all kinds from Florida to New York--Negroes who have combined to exact justice both from the employers and from the labor unions." Randolph wrote or heavily influenced the NBA's platform, adopted at its convention in the District of Columbia in September 1919. This militant and wide-ranging program focused on the grievances of blacks rather than on specifically labor union concerns. It denounced racial discrimination within the labor movement and demanded the abolition of peonage, lynching, and segregation; demanded free immigration and the vote for women; castigated U.S. military intervention against Mexico and the blockade against the Soviet Union; and denounced the League of Nations as a "combination of white capitalist governments against the masses of working colored people all over the world." The Messenger ran a picture of delegates to the convention, more than thirty men representing over twenty trades. With recent AFL verbal overtures toward black workers in mind (promises that usually earned Randolph's scorn), it implausibly claimed that "it was the power of [the NBA], more than anything else, which drove the American Federation of Labor to adopt its changed profession toward Negro labor."[15] Randolph and Owen also organized the Friends of Negro Freedom, one of whose functions was organizing black workers against both exploiting capitalists and discriminatory unions.
These organizations, founded at a time when depression and a capitalist and government anti-union offensive put even white labor on the defensive, achieved little, however. Sims later said that Randolph hoped that the NBA would boost the Messnger's circulation, and that Randolph's interest waned when he discovered that the NBA would drain, rather than augment, his magazine's treasury. In 1923 and 1924 the Messenger renewed its call for militant Negro labor organizing. "The problems of the Negro worker are increasing, not diminishing," it said. Negroes needed "the rigid discipline of self-government which only the union activities afford" and should organize a "United Negro Trades" modelled on the United Hebrew Trades and the Italian Chamber of Labor. Ben Fletcher, after recounting the vile record of the American labor movement, proclaimed that "Negro labor has a part to play also in changing this present day attitude of organized labor. It should organize a nation-wide movement to encourage, promote and protect its employment and general welfare" by both extorting justice from white labor unions and gaining entry into industries from which blacks were excluded. "To a large extent Negro Labor is responsible for this reprehensible exclusion, because of its failure to generate a force which when necessary could have rendered low the dragon head of Race prejudice, whenever and wherever it raised its head." Had blacks organized such an organization a generation ago, "the attitude of organized labor to the Negro would be just the reverse today."[16]
Randolph also advocated a massive political strike against brutal conditions in the South. Randolph asserted that the pivotal role of Southern blacks in producing cotton gave them the power to paralyze the South and, by extension, important sections of Northern industry. "Piteous appeals are of no avail," he said. "Positive demands enforced by the strike are the only things that count.... Not a sign of cotton can be raised without Negro labor." Randolph somewhat myopically claimed that "if Negroes formed a cotton workers union, to strike for more wages, shorter hours, and better conditions under which to work, it would arouse and frighten the South, North, and, too, foreign capitalists...." Randolph urged unionization of Southern black agricultural workers in the course of discussing armed self-defense against lynching and other forms of white terrorism. He regarded the strike as a potent weapon not only for labor's grievances, but against the racial oppressions of the blacks. "The power of such an organization [of Southern black workers] to paralyze Southern industry, will, by its very existence, strike fear into the heart of the South, forcing it to respect the rights, privileges and immunities of the Negro." However, the mass murder and torture of striking agricultural workers in Elaine, Arkansas (1919) amply demonstrated the fatuity of such proposals.[17]
A combination of black self-assertion and white enlightened self-interest, Randolph believed, would improve race relations within organized labor. He distrusted altruism and "benevolence" and placed his hope on self-interested struggle, probably because of black America's experience with white capitalist philanthropy and Randolph's own acquaintance with IWW literature, which stressed commonality of interest over moral sentiment. The Messenger, in fact, ignored the cultural components of a group's perceived self-interest in its focus on a narrow economic determinism. Correspondingly, it vastly overestimated the impact of rational argument. "White and black laborers must recognize their common interest in industry, in politics, in society, in peace," it said. "They should join hands not from any abstract altruistic motive, but for their mutual advantages. Neither should allow a horde of scabs and strike-breakers outside the union when it is possible to have them within the union. Besides, so long as the white dog and the black dog--laborers--fight over the bone, the third capitalist dog will surely run away with it." The Messenger said that "it is no use pleading for justice and fair play. Nobody acts upon those things. Organized labor is out to improve its standard of living. If keeping Negroes out of their unions will prevent that and that fact is demonstrated to them, they will throw race discrimination overboard. High wages, shorter hours of work and better working conditions are dearer to the white worker than snubbing the Negro."[18]
Experience demonstrated that such a recognition of common interests was not imminent, however. In 1920 Randolph said that he was not "overly optimistic" about imminent changes in white labor's attitude. "We simply realize that enlightened self-interest will dictate that the organized labor movement of America accord the Negro workers justice.... The logic of the class struggle will also force the black worker to go to the labor movement. For just as white and black capitalists will be forced to combine against black and white labor, black and white labor will be forced to combine against black and white capitalists."[19] Randolph insisted that as long as African Americans remained unorganized, they undermined the living standards of white Americans, even as they were themselves used as exploitable and disposable labor.
Randolph reminded his white and black readers that "those who dominate and control the government care nothing about a white man or a black man. They will starve white women as well as black women. They will coin the blood of white children into money as readily as they will that of black children. When either race rises to protest against exploitation or to adopt measures for relief or improvement, it will be crushed ruthlessly and relentlessly by our reactionary plutocrats." He said that "'Divide and Conquer' will always remain the slogan of the master class. The capitalists have no race, no nationality. The world is their country and to rob labor is their religion. When will black and white workers learn this? When will they wake up and stop fighting each other?"[20] Capitalists, he repeated, not only encouraged white racism, but heavily subsidized an entire array of African-American institutions--colleges, churches, newspapers, and social welfare organizations--to breed anti-union sentiments in black workers and black elites, and to train an anti-union cadre of black workers who could break white unions. The Messenger frequently pointed out that the KKK hated Catholics, Jews, labor unions, and radicals as well as blacks; it was the terrorist arm of capitalist reaction.
Randolph reminded his white readers that Southern racism not only impoverished whites in the South but, by fostering low-wage competition with Northern industry, debilitated Northern whites as well. He remained confident that "even the Southern white man will change when he is educated, and shown that the Bourbon, master class of the South keeps him in ignorance and poverty by playing race against race." Echoing IWW complaints, Randolph and Owen recognized that the capitalists profited by international animosities as well as domestic racism. Speaking of steel companies which produced cheap steel in India, the Messenger noted that capitalists "shift industry from place to place, wherever labor is cheapest.... The workers' only hope is to organize labor everywhere and of all colors." Owen linked the national and international migration of labor and machinery. "There are two forces which capital is adopting today," he said. Sometimes it moves the machinery or capital to the labor and raw materials. This is what generally happens as the result of imperialism in undeveloped countries.... The other method is to attract labor to the machinery, the raw materials and industry. That is what is going on in the case of the present large Negro migration."[21]
Randolph believed that African-American political activity was as necessary as participation in the labor movement. Aside from encouraging unionism among blacks, Randolph advocated African-American support for the Socialist party at the polls. Randolph's political views, however, like his pro-union stance, were shaped by his position as a black worker-intellectual. Randolph's Socialist party affiliation, his down-to-earth temperament which eschewed dogma and "impossibilism" in favor of immediate amelioration, and the heritage of the Washington-Du Bois controversy (Du Bois had convincingly equated black denigration of the franchise with craven surrender), ensured that he vigorously championed black political activity. However, his close reading of IWW literature, his position as a leader of a largely disfranchised race, and African-American disillusionment with past political achievements, all engendered doubts about the efficacy of the ballot and of government sponsored reform. As a result of these conflicts, Randolph, while unswerving in his support of political action, never evolved a fully consistent viewpoint on a subject that divided the IWW and the Socialist party.
Randolph usually argued that class voting, like class industrial organization, could achieve revolution by means of incremental reform. "Every time we can pull a brick out of the capitalist wall we are hastening its overthrow, speeding the day when it will topple over," he said. "Get women suffrage today. Strike to increase wages and shorten hours. Abolish child labor.... Don't refuse to strike these blows, because all cannot be gotten at once." Reforms, far from acting as a narcotic, spurred the working class to further effort; reformers dug capitalism's grave. "Here is the dilemma in which the high priests of capitalism find themselves. If labor's demands are not met, labor will revolt; if labor's demands are satisfied, it will still revolt. For the more labor gets, the more it wants, and the more it is able to secure. The law is: discontent increases with social improvement." Speaking of the Plumb Plan, which would have continued wartime government controls over the railroads, Randolph acknowledged that it did not "represent industrial democracy in the railway industry;" but he also asserted that "any proposal, the adoption of which, results in curtailment of profits and the recognition of the rights of labor, however little it might be, is a blow at the very foundation of government, law, and order.... Each step forward by labor, and each retreat by capital, emboldens and strengthens labor and weakens capital."[22] Capitalist hysteria over seemingly minor reforms was therefore rational.
The Socialist platform, Randolph said, eschewed "romance" in favor of "realism" and confronted the problems of the working class "scientifically and courageously." Immediate demands constituted "the only basis of working-class unity in aim and action. Political, social and economic ultimates don't touch the consciousness of the workers who are put to the task of winning a living from day to day." In a classic statement of the orthodox Socialist "dual arm" theory (somewhat radicalized to stress industrial over craft unions) Randolph said that "just as it was necessary for labor to form economic organizations--industrial unions--coextensive with the trusts, cartels, syndicates and monopolies of capital on the industrial field, so on the political field it is necessary for labor to form its political machine co-extensive with the political machine of labor's employers." The ballot was "the mightiest weapon of the ages."[23]
Randolph said that blacks should vote for the Socialist party because "politics should reflect the economic condition of a people." The Socialist party "represents the working people and 99 percent of Negroes are working people." The SP represented "both your interest as a race and your interests as a working man" and "has always, both in the United States and Europe, opposed all forms of race prejudice." Because those who fund a party control it, "a Socialist representative is the only one who has both the desire and the ability to represent the Negroes." During the 1917 mayoral contest in New York City, Randolph said that "Hillquit favors free food and free clothing for school children as a matter of right, and not as a matter of charity." He would fight for low food prices and low rents. Moreover, "Hillquit believes that the war is over the exploitation of the darker peoples--the stealing of their land and labor. He is the only candidate who dares to say so."[24] Randolph pointed out that the Socialist party nominated highly-qualified blacks for important state offices. He undoubtedly had himself and Owen in mind when he boasted that the SP was the only party that nominated students of social science for office. The November 1920 Messenger ran pictures of New York State Socialist party candidates; the five blacks included Randolph and Owen.
Only the Socialist party, Randolph declared, vigorously opposed racism in word and deed. In 1923 Randolph said that the Socialist and Farmer-Labor parties "would provide schools instead of battleships, for the people. They would abolish [all racial discrimination] because a working-class political party can have no motive or interest in oppressing any part of its own class...." Randolph insisted that a vote for the SP was not wasted even when the SP candidate could not win because a large Socialist tally would ensure that the capitalist parties would woo Negro voters. Negroes should sell their vote to the highest bidder as other groups did, rather than blindly voting Republican. In a statement as true today as in 1920 (except that the parties are reversed) Randolph said that "No one pays for a sure thing, but when one's position is uncertain, he immediately becomes a factor.... The Republican bosses know that the Negro is a Republican. The Democrats feel that they cannot get his vote, and the Republicans feel that nobody else but themselves can get it." Hence both parties ignored the blacks. "And why should they give us more? Negroes are known as sure things. You don't put bait on the line for fish which you have already caught. When Negroes turn to the Socialist party, they will get what they demand, and not before. For then the Republicans will grant them what they demand in order to get them back." When blacks voted Socialist, "the abolition of the jim-crow car, lynch law and disfranchisement would be a mere bagatelle" because the alternative to concessions was complete loss of governmental control by the capitalists. Both major parties were mere capitalist tools, and "Wall Street would not allow the South to continue in its brutal lynching, jim-crowing and disfranchising of Negroes if it thought that such practices were driving the Negro into the Socialist party and labor unions." Such concessions, rather than winning blacks back to the capitalist parties, would only further radicalize them.[25]
Although Randolph advocated the formation of all-black unions when white unions excluded blacks, he vehemently attacked the all-Negro Liberty party, formed in 1920 by William Bridges with the help of Randolph's old mentor, Hubert H. Harrison. Randolph labeled such an all-black party "political vaudeville" that "would have Negroes who can vote virtually disfranchise the entire race by voluntarily eliminating themselves from effective, intelligent and practical participation in politics." An African-American party could not win even if every black supported it. No other oppressed group had formed its own party. A race-based party would only justify whites in their own racially exclusive parties and "lend aid and comfort to the Vardamans, Hoke Smiths, [and] Watsons... in denying the Negro the right to vote." Even if Negroes could capture the government, this would not benefit the working-class majority because "political action is the reflex of economic interests."[26] A Negro government, like white supremacist ones, would perforce rule in the interests of the capitalist minority; it would be a class, not a race, government.
Although Randolph effusively praised the IWW, he called its anti-political stance "indefensible." In 1922, arguing for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, Randolph said that "we make no fetish of the federal government. At best, governments stand for and do little where workers are concerned. They are instruments of class oppression. But until the workers capture state power, they must drive the capitalist state to adopt measures bringing them certain forms of economic, social and political relief. We know that the master class only adopt such measures either when they reap an advantage or fear the violent revolt of the workers. But the motive of the capitalist government is not so material when the relief is achieved."[27]
Randolph's own endorsement of political action, however, was sometimes modified by his recognition of the class nature of the state. "To the political scientist the government is in Wall Street, New York [and other capitalist linchpins].... The press, Congress and the courts represent simply the little boy on the knee of the ventriloquist." Speaking in the aftermath of a violently suppressed strike in 1922, the Messenger said that "the Federal like the State Government is an instrument of class oppression. It is wielded by the dominant class against the working class. This will ever be so, just so long as society is divided into propertied and propertyless classes." Randolph spoke of "the futility of [workers] expecting relief from a State owned and controlled by their bosses." Randolph vehemently criticized the government Railway Labor Board (RLB), which had ostensibly "helped" workers during the war when labor was scarce and unionization was therefore possible, but had predictably abandoned them when the capitalists were impregnable after the war (when jobs were scarce and workers vulnerable), thus destroying a unionization drive. "Governments only grant concessions to the exploited toilers when they are capable of taking them without the aid of government." (Sadly, Randolph forgot this lesson in 1927-8, when he led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to rely on the RLB's successor, with catastrophic results.) Randolph also criticized liberals who would "feed the workers and farmers well, so that they would do more and better work and farming," even while insisting that the toilers remain wage and soil slaves. "A good cattle raiser will feed his cow well, in order that she might give more and better milk. But a cow she ever remains." Randolph bitterly accused New York reform Democrat Al Smith of starving babies by his alliance with the milk trust.[28]
Randolph also complained that "the Constitution is a fetish in America. Even the Negroes who have suffered more from its hands than any other class in America, except, perhaps, labor, think that the Constitution is the citadel of all liberties, although it has afforded him only the liberty to be lynched, jim-crowed and disfranchised." The Constitution "is much more sacred than the lives of children and Negroes, because it protects property interests." In a statement as applicable to white workers as blacks, the Messenger said that Wall Street "is the economic master of America." Therefore, "the little political tea-pot tempests among Negroes, North, South, East, and West, in the old parties, amount to nothing. They do not affect the trend of anything in America. They do not remove a single economic, political or social evil or produce a single good. They are not only carrying on useless and valueless political vaudeville," but making blacks a laughing-stock.[29] These statements echo IWW pronouncements on the futility of political action.
To reconcile these contradictions, Randolph touted the symbolic benefits of reform won by working-class, or African-American, self-activity. Even if few real benefits followed, self-won victories encouraged black and working class activism and revealed that the existing order was not immutable. Randolph felt that although the Dyer Bill would not pass, and would not stop lynching even if it did, "anything that focuses public attention to lynching, helps." He praised the Socialist party for endorsing the bill. Randolph also endorsed a proposal for a Negro cabinet member, despite his prediction that such a member would probably be "the worst hat-in-hand Negro in the country. No other could secure an appointment from the present regime. He would be of no more value to Negroes than would a labor member of the cabinet be of value to labor as such." Still, Randolph said, blacks must demand equality with whites and not content themselves with the low-level patronage jobs to which they were confined.[30]
Randolph observed that "our present economic system practically nullifies the vote of the working white man," but blacks were excluded even from token political democracy. "It is a true saying that half loaves given to the common people prevent their taking measures to get the whole loaf," but blacks were denied even the half loaf. The Messenger agreed with white Socialist Congressman Meyer London, who said that "it is true that we [white workers] have not many rights, but what few we have gained [the Negro] is entitled to, and he is further entitled to fight side by side with us to achieve real freedom."[31]
Randolph's third class-based strategy for black liberation, as important as unionization and political participation, entailed a socialist internationalism that applied his analysis of domestic racial divisions to the world scene and described the role of colonialism in maintaining capitalism. This internationalism was part of a long African-American tradition. Indeed, Afro-American leaders have been among the most internationally minded of American dissidents. Prominent black abolitionists, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael have mobilized world opinion against American racist injustices and recognized the connections between imperialism (European and American) and white supremacy at home. Randolph urged that "it is no more possible for Negroes in America to be indifferent to what takes place in Haiti, Egypt or Trinidad, than for New York Negroes to be indifferent to the fortunes of Negroes in Florida. The success of Negroes in one place encourages and emboldens Negroes in another.... The same is true of revolutions."[32]
Randolph understood the relationships between international black liberation and the working-class struggle as well as between black liberation at home and abroad. He criticized Garvey's race-based internationalism, Du Bois's theory that the white working class benefitted from imperialism, and Washington's alliance between poor blacks and white capitalists within the United States.
The liberation of Africa can only come by allying the Negro liberation movement with the movements for the liberation of all of the world's enslaved of all races, creeds, and colors. Imperialism is at the bottom of African bondage. Only the abolition of imperialism can free Africa.... First, the black workers in America and the West Indies must change their own social systems. They must raise the workers to power. The workers have no interest in holding colonies in subjection; for they reap no profits.... Negroes of the world must turn their faces toward the radical international labor and socialist forces of the world. For with the present stages of African economic, political, and social development, only a world-wide proletarian revolution can achieve her liberation.... Garveyism... will set back the clock of Negro progress by cutting the Negro workers away from the proletarian liberation movement... by setting them against instead of joining them with the white workers.[33]
The dirt-eating cracker in the South did not benefit from imperialism; nor did English or Japanese workers. Negroes oppressed others when they could. Therefore, "oppression is not racial... no particular race has absolutely clean hands." Those who profited from racism and capitalism were "dignified statesmen, liberal philanthropists, devout Churchmen and prominent social and political leaders. The freedom of Africa from alien exploitation, if that is what is meant by redeeming Africa, must comprehend a defeat of these men and all the moral and physical resources they control."[34]
While urging African Americans to ally themselves with the international white proletariat, Randolph demanded that the white workers reciprocate. Many of his ideas on this subject echoed Du Bois, whose prescient 1915 essay, "African Roots of the War" (discussed above) had warned of "armed national associations of labor and capital whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world outside the European circle of nations.... Successful aggression in economic expansion calls for a close union between capital and labor at home." Capitalists defused revolutionary sentiment by dividing the workers according to skill and nationality as well as race. Militant workers who threatened capitalism were appeased with social welfare legislation and by "admitting to a share of the spoils of capital only the aristocracy of labor." Du Bois predicted that "war will come from the revolutionary revolt of the lower workers" of all races.[35]
Randolph similarly recognized the dangers posed by nationalistic co-optation of an aristocracy of labor pacified with spoils from national and racial imperialism. He also warned that complicity in imperialism would destroy white unions. In South Africa (as in the United States), white unions excluded blacks, thus driving blacks into the arms of European exploiters. This showed the fallacy of white-man's unionism, internationally as well as domestically. "The native Africans rallied to the support of the British and Dutch imperialists," Randolph said. "The black Senegalese have fought bravely to uphold French imperialism. The black citizens of America have crimsoned the soil of many a battlefield to protect and extend American imperialism. The white workers, too, have done no less. But the point is that black workers will swing toward the imperialists all the more if their white brothers continue to practice their narrow, bigoted, racial proletarian imperialism toward them. And what else in the name of God is there for them to do?"[36]
Harrison, Domingo, and Briggs severely criticized white Socialist movements for condoning the colonialisms of their respective nations' master classes. Randolph himself lamented that working people of all nations readily criticized the abuses of others while ignoring their own, thus distracting attention from domestic injustices. However, he insisted that such blindness was national rather than racial in character, and criticized Das, an Indian Socialist, who claimed the opposite. Das maintained that "Asians are convinced that racial antagonism is harbored by the white race and is as determining a factor as the economic." The pro-Soviet stance of British labor, Das said, stemmed not from international working-class solidarity but from labor's desire for a Russian alliance that would preserve the British empire. British labor "uses its economic power for countries outside the British empire. It does not use it for nations within that empire." Randolph, however, claimed that "Reforms and revolutions are always popular if they are far enough away.... Capitalism has fostered national conceit to such an extent that the workers do not like to criticize their own masters. It is so comforting to note that someone else has a worse boss."[37] Ignoring the English racialization of the Irish, Randolph cited Das's own example of Ireland to show that national conceit and the ubiquitousness of familiar evils rather than racism accounted for working-class acquiescence in imperialism.
Criticizing the racism of the international socialist movement, Randolph asked "What will the British, Dutch, French, Irish and American labor movements do about the black colonial labor problem?" With the possible exception of Russia, "they have done nothing definite." Each international labor organization must "present a definite, clearcut policy on this grave issue." Randolph urged that "the black workers in America and the West Indies should force a showdown by the labor movements of their respective countries on the black colonial labor problem." This would demonstrate whether the white unions were "so tied up with the fortunes of empire that they dare not take a hand in the colonial labor debacle" and foster the unity of workers of all races. "Only a genuine class struggle world labor movement can prevent the Black peasants and workers from becoming the counter-revolutionary white guard of international imperialism."[38] Owen lamented that capitalists, unlike workers, were true internationalists. "Their income is everywhere. Not so with labor. It has not yet worked out a method of international sharing in strikes. As a rule it engages in international scabbing."[39]
Randolph detested nationalism as inherently reactionary and thus unsuitable as a vehicle for revolution. Nationalist movements aided workers only by eliminating foreign rulers, "thereby throwing the class struggle in sharp relief" and helping workers "focus their attacks upon class despotism, which arises out of the economic system of capitalism, and not out of the fact of alien rule..... Nationalist, like racial and religious conflicts, cut across class lines and confuse the vision of the workers, making them susceptible to the intrigues and cunning of insincere and unscrupulous demagogues."[40]
Other black radicals, however--including Harrison, Domingo, McKay, and Briggs--perceived nationalisms among colonized peoples, including Garvey's Afro-centrism, as appropriate vehicles for proletarian revolution, and agitated within Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association for a systematic class analysis and program. This difference eventually caused a split between Randolph and the Socialist party on one hand, and the African Blood Brotherhood and the Communist party (with which Briggs, McKay, and Messenger contributor Lovett Fort-Whiteman affiliated), on the other. In 1920, however, Randolph published Domingo's optimistic declaration that Persia, India, and Armenia were combining Bolshevism with nationalism and "girding up their loins to do battle with alien and native exploiters alike." Domingo recognized that anti-imperialist revolution was not easy, and required ideas as well as arms; bullets should be "respected and feared, but ideas are the bête noir of those who prey upon ignorance." Capitalist imperialists knew that "the peals of church bells and the chants and prayers of hypocritical clergymen" rendered their violence more effective. Similarly, "the light-giving current of Bolshevism will pass over the conducting wires of Turkish, Syrian and Arabian nationalism until it reaches the better conductor of Mohammedanism which will challenge British, French and Belgian imperialism in the heart of tropical Africa." Bolshevism was "the greatest hope to the Negro race everywhere. For opposition to imperialism makes allies of all oppressed races and those who support Socialism in Russia and the rest of Europe, must, sooner or later, support Socialism in Asia and Africa."[41]
Extensive foreign-affairs coverage in the Messenger emphasized race-related developments. Discussing U.S. aggression against Hawaii, the Philippines, Haiti, and Panama, George Frazier Miller, a black Socialist clergyman, said that "because the virus of American prejudice follows the flag and the constitution, the black man in America should be always an ardent opponent of imperialism." The Messenger, alarmed that the U.S. coveted Mexican oil and resented Mexico's ultra-democratic constitution, warned African Americans that shedding their blood in a war against Mexico would only spread white supremacy. "With America's entrance into Mexico will also go its chief attribute, race prejudice," just as the American government had exported white racism to France. Mexico, the Messenger said, treated colored peoples better than did any portion of the United States. Randolph lamented that "no power can save Mexico from American capitalism except the American workers, and they are too backward and reactionary for the nonce."[42]
The Messenger touted James Weldon Johnson's Nation articles on U.S. atrocities in Haiti and declared that "the National City Bank in New York is the government of Haiti." Randolph warned that "the case of Haiti ought to be ample proof to the Negro[es] that they can not free their race in Africa or Haiti until they are able to secure a large measure of freedom for the workers, black and white, in America and England." Condemning U.S. outrages in Santo Domingo, it said that "American hands are incarnate with the blood of her black citizens at home and subjects abroad. Least of all the World Powers, can she moralize about international justice." Similarly, the people of the Virgin Islands "were not conquered, but purchased by a treaty." Although their lives were devastated by inappropriate American laws, constitutional rights did not apply there. Considering Southern barbarities, U.S. pretensions of maintaining law and order were a cruel mockery. American diplomats pretended sympathy for oppressed peoples abroad while other Americans burned America citizens alive "at their very doors." But "it is not a question of race or color; it is a question of sugar, tobacco, oil--the raw material needed by industrial capitalists."[43]
The Messenger recognized the connection between corporate loans and U.S. military actions. "The Four Power loan [to China] will be supported by the armies and navies of the several nations," Randolph asserted. Discussing Africa, he said that "the investment bankers send millions of dollars into these undeveloped countries, 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." Nor could third-world peoples remain outside the international capitalist economy: "No small nation can accept a loan from one of the great powers, and remain independent, and when the small countries, rich in raw material, desired by the great Powers, refuse to borrow, then they, like a lamb before a lion, are gobbled up."[44]
The Messenger opposed American imperialism not only for sacrificing workers' and blacks' lives for capitalist profits, and not only for extending U.S. racism, but also for militarizing society and encouraging the suppression of dissent. Capitalists must crush opposition to avoid "revolt among those who comprise the armies and navies which act as collecting agencies for the American investors at home and abroad.... Territories unjustly governed, inequitably exploited, must repeatedly be conquered." Demonstrating the congruence of his domestic and international analyses and programs, Randolph, for similar reasons, hailed the Boston Police Strike of 1919. Recognition by police that they were merely workers was "the beginning of the end. For when one part of the working class which is used to hold down the large masses of the workers, strikes--then truly the end of capitalism is at hand. Since without the police, the militia, and the regular army, the ruling class is powerless and impotent." Capital "knows that the police will not beat up other strikers when they recognize that they are all members of the same group--simply plain working men exploited, underpaid, overworked and overcharged.... The fear of the policeman's strike was that there might be no instrument of lawlessness and disorder to carry out the whims and wishes of capital."[45]
Randolph's racialized working-class internationalism was also manifest in the Messenger's insistence that blacks make lynching an international scandal. The Messenger declared that the U.S. government was embarrassed by the public discussion even of segregation, much less lynching, because both practices undermined its unctuous pretensions to liberty, justice, and order. Perhaps influenced by Ida Wells-Barnett's previous international campaign against lynching, the Messenger declared that lynching was not a merely domestic question. "Neither the Jews nor the Irish have stood by any such foolhardy program"; instead, they had utilized international public opinion in their battles for freedom. "The problems of the Negroes should be presented to every nation in the world," and U.S. conduct, "a rape on decency," exposed. "When lynching gets to be an international question, it will be the beginning of the end." The abolitionists had appealed for international support in their campaign against slavery; both the American Revolution and the Civil War were decided in large part by the actions of foreign nations. "Carry the Negro problem out of the United States at the same time you present it in the United States. The mere fact that the country does not want the Negro problem carried to Europe is strong evidence that it ought to be carried there."[46]
Randolph strongly condemned Japan, the only non-white nation which was flexing its muscles in the international arena, when it threatened the Soviet Union. The Western imperialist powers, although fearing Japanese competition, feared the Soviet Union even more, and hence encouraged Japanese designs in Siberia. "We admonish the Negroes not to be appealed to on the ground of color," Randolph said; rather, they should support democratic forces of all colors throughout the world. "Japan, though a nation of color, will fight Socialism as savagely as any other nation.... Japan will use the color issue, however, to stir up prejudice against the white nations, and the white nations will do the same against Japan.... Japan does not want Asia for the Asiatics. She wants Asia for Japan." The Messenger warned that "the smug and oily Japanese diplomats are no different" from those of other capitalist-imperialist powers. Japan's rulers "care nothing for even the Japanese people," horribly exploited and abused other Asians, and distracted attention from their own depredations at home and abroad by shedding crocodile tears about white racism. "The real conflict is commercial and industrial," not racial.[47]
Randolph, however, sardonically noted the discrepancy between American responses to Japan and its own and its allies' actions. In 1917 he said that China, not Japan, should be awarded Kiao Chau, and predicted that Japanese occupation "may be productive of a world war with only the difference that it is carried on upon a different continent." But in 1920 he pointed to the difference between U.S. conduct and its demands upon Japan. "Witness the hysteria caused by the awarding of Shantung to Japan," he said. "We drove Spain out of the Philippines and kept what we took. Japan drove Germany out of Shantung and kept what she took. The two cases are exactly the same, one set of usurpers merely ousting another set of usurpers in both instances. We have no more right in the Philippines than Japan has in Shantung." Japan emulated the United States and sought "a Monroe Doctrine of the Far East." In November 1920 the Messenger noted that "three great oil, coal and iron owning nations, then, stand face to face, fearful of each other and hating each other."[48] The United States, it predicted, would fight Japan rather than England for oil because the U.S. could not incite race hatred against England. (This, however, accorded more importance to racism as a system of practice and belief partly independent of capitalism, than Randolph usually conceded.) When Japan condemned the U.S. practice of lynching, the Messenger, in a remarkable and prescient editorial, said that
While we are pleased to see foreign criticism of American atrocities, and we regard it as very wholesome for another nation to hold up to scorn the vices of the United States--we are nevertheless aware of the implications of the new Japanese attitude.
Under normal conditions the international thieves maintain a code of honor (or dishonor) whereby no official criticism of the other is permitted. Especially rigid is this rule with respect to the treatment of colonies, classes or races by the ruling capitalist government or empire.... lest the other might expose the criticizer as being "not without sin" itself.
When the international thieves begin this kind of thing--it means war!....
War today means preparedness--preparedness not only in munitions, but preparedness in popular opinion. The Japanese people must be made to believe that America aims to subjugate them, segregate them, lynch and burn them because they are colored. Nor is it difficult with such a concrete case as the burning at the stake in broad day light of a Negro citizen![49]
Japanese anti-lynching propaganda would instill hatred of the United States among the Japanese population and, the masters of Nippon hoped, undermine the patriotism of African Americans, who, as the poorest group of Americans, "will be the front line trench men against Japan in the case of war."[50]
The Messenger also attacked American domestic anti-Japanese racism. In late 1920 it noted that with elections approaching, "the Japanese question in America is approaching the boiling point." Slander and irrationality characterized U.S. culture, which seemingly required a scapegoat. The American population was hysterical about Reds in the North, Negroes in the South, and Japanese in the West. The immigration law of 1924 which banned Japanese immigration was, the Messenger asserted, an affront "which no people who are fit to live, will accept or tolerate."[51]
For reasons of both race and class, Randolph strongly supported the Bolshevik Revolution, "the most significant experiment in the international laboratory of world politics, sociology, and economics." He attacked Woodrow Wilson's unconstitutional war against the Soviet Union and called the Hoover relief mission "a form of counter-revolution via the stomach." In 1922, when Emma Goldman denounced Bolshevik tyranny, the Messenger asserted that "we need not take her ravings against Soviet Russia seriously" because she, as an anarchist, opposed all government. He viewed the New Economic Policy as a necessary consolidation of the Revolution's gains, but worried that it might erode socialism. Randolph also hailed the success of the Bolsheviks in stamping out anti-Jewish pogroms, "little different from the mob violence and lynching perpetrated upon Negroes," as demonstrating that anti-Semitic violence originated in capitalist exploitation and manipulation. Randolph blamed pogroms on "the capitalists and reactionaries" upset at Jewish radicalism and asserted that "the Jewish people have been fairer and squarer in their treatment of Negroes, than any other people in the world."[52] In 1923 Randolph noted that persecutions and massacres of Jews were on the rise in much of Europe outside the Soviet Union and decried the activities of "Hittler" in Germany.
Randolph's ecumenical internationalism encompassed everyone, not merely blacks and Jews. Randolph vigorously supported the cause of the Irish, a people not known (in the United States) for their progressive racial views. The Messenger also denounced British atrocities in India, including the massacre of civilians by aircraft, machine guns, and tanks. It blamed English rule for a famine that killed thirty-two million people in a single year, even while Britain exported wheat and rice from India "for the maintenance of the English army and the manufacture of liquor to keep Europe intoxicated." It praised Gandhi (although Randolph viewed him as a mere nationalist) and advocated that Southern blacks adopt his "spinning wheel" method of economic self-sufficiency. It favored independence for India and denounced U.S. efforts to deport Indian political activists to torture and death at the hands of the British authorities.[53]
Vehemently opposing what he termed the "League of White Nations" as a counter-revolutionary conspiracy that would plunder workers and peoples of color throughout the world, Randolph satirized the League's attitude as implying that "there must be no more Belgiums. There may be Congo massacres of innocent Africans by Belgians, though. There may be Memphis and Waco (Texas) burnings of Negroes."[54] Owen, in a detailed analysis of the charter of the League of Nations, called the organization "a league of white capitalist governments against the peoples of all the nations. The object of its members is to suppress and exploit white, black and brown working men, women and children everywhere, of every nationality, religion, race or color. It is the Capitalist International suavely and subtly set forth in saccharine language.... [and] a living challenge of capitalist internationalism against working-class internationalism." Owen lamented that although the population of the Congo had fallen from twenty million to eight million under Belgian rule, it was to remain in European hands. Other nations were promised eventual freedom "when they have reached a certain stage. That stage we understand is their willingness to maintain capitalist and bourgeois governments for themselves. If they desire to be democratic or Bolshevistic, it is a conclusive presumption that they are not prepared for self-government!" The provisions regarding equal opportunities for trade meant "equal opportunity [for Britain, France, the United States, and Italy] to rob the natives of their land and labor.... This is the real motive power behind the whole League of Nations idea." The League or its members would "break and suppress strikes" and "terrorize the workers" much as the national guard did in the United States.[55]
In addition to the working-class strategies of unionization, Socialist voting, and internationalism, Randolph advocated strictly racial forms of mass action. The Messenger urged black self-defense against white violence, black tenants' leagues and consumer cooperatives, and the boycotting and picketing of segregated schools and of racist businesses, landlords, and films. Randolph and Owen also demanded full social equality, including the right of intermarriage.
The anti-black pogroms of the war era, starting with the East St. Louis massacre of 1917, soon turned into "race riots" characterized by black self-defense. Differentiating lynchings and pogroms, where blacks remained passive victims, from race riots, where blacks fought back, Owen said that "hereafter Race Riots will, as they ought, be the order of the day. Negroes are going to make their dying a costly investment. No bands will be played. No women and children will be peddling souvenirs. The picnic phase of Negro lynching is drawing to a close.... Fire is the impartial force of nature which knows no race or color line. It will burn a white man's house just as readily and quickly as a Negro's house...."[56]
The Messenger extolled black resistance for a variety of reasons, predicting that as Afro-Americans had gone thousands of miles to fight the foreign Hun, so they would "enforce the laws which American Huns are trampling in the dust." The Messenger stressed that self-defense against violent attack was both legal and universally acknowledged as justified, but added that "we stand by the law, when the law stands by us, and when the law does not stand by us, we stand by such principles as those of Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and John Brown."[57] The Messenger occasionally approved the execution of Negro "leaders" who counseled surrender, and of white policemen who stood idly by while blacks were assaulted.
The Messenger reprinted Mckay's incendiary poem "If We Must Die" and touted "the curative values inherent in mass action, revolvers and other lethal devices when applied to social diseases." It declared that "the Negro must develop the will to resist, to sacrifice his life in protection of his children, his wife, his mother and sister, his home and his right to live like any other man.... It is far nobler to perish fighting back than to be driven, hunted and murdered like rats by Southern barbarians." Blacks confronted "not a choice between life and death, but a choice between dying, fighting for your home and family, and being stamped to death, lynched and ground into a red mush of mud like cringing craven curs."[58]
More often, however, the Messenger argued that active self-defense would discourage white violence and save black lives. "The appeal to the conscience of the South has been long and futile...." it said. "The black man has no rights which will be respected unless the black man enforces that respect." The Messenger noted many instances where black self-defense had intimidated cowardly white mobs, and asserted that "Chicago would have been another East St. Louis except for the Negroes stopping the rioters." The Chicago riot "will make the future relations between the races decidedly better" because white friends would see the danger posed to the social fabric by white violence, and white racists would fear and respect blacks. White governments would forestall black armed self-defense by defending Negroes themselves. In 1920 the governor of Kentucky stopped a lynch mob with bullets; in 1923 Oklahoma's governor declared martial law to suppress the KKK and urged citizens to kill in self-defense, promising to pardon anyone convicted as a result of such self-protection. The Messenger attributed these actions to black militancy: blacks would stop the lynchers if the government did not, and the ensuing disorder would cause a flight of capital and labor from the afflicted area. The Messenger said that "the march of progress has been chiefly marked by a disregard of the law and order of every age" and that "the New Negro of both sexes has resolved to make America a fit place for himself to live in, or else we shall make it an unfit hell hole for anybody to live in." In Northern cities, throughout the South, and on the West Coast, it said, many police officers were virulently racist (often enough members of the KKK), so blacks could not depend upon official protection. Not only Negroes, but Jews, Catholics, foreigners, and union members "must be well armed, must shoot to kill any one who encroaches upon their lives."[59]
Despite his doubts about official protection, however, Owen did believe that blacks could enlist the capitalist state in defense of their rights. The class interests of the ruling minority, he said, would trump the racist inclinations of ruling-class and working-class whites alike. Active self-defense and retaliatory violence would lead to much greater losses of life and property, which would lessen property values and inhibit investment in the South. Northern industrial capitalism, which had overthrown Southern feudalism during the Civil War, was now invading the South itself. "If life and property become too insecure, labor will not remain in the South, and of course capital will not invest, which means no development," Owen said. Capitalists, including life and fire insurance companies, "can get Congress busy, not only in passing but enforcing a federal law against lynching, against destruction of property or anything of that type, within a few hours. They can do in a minute what all of us, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People included, would take half a century to do." Similarly, Randolph predicted that black Northern migration would improve the conditions of Southern blacks because Southern whites would modify their racism to retain black laborers. "Profits are dearer to Southern plutocrats than are mobocrats," he asserted.[60]
Owen recognized that armed black self-defense would alarm the majority of whites who condoned anti-black terrorism while taking no direct part in it. "Race riots will arouse the inert, lethargic, sleepy, indolent neutral who usually takes no risks himself, but nevertheless doesn't care who kills the 'nigger.' Walking along, rather innocently, some Negro sniper will shift him into another world one of these race riot days. He constitutes the great bulk of the so-called best white Southerners which never lynches, but just acquiesces and fails to restrain those who do." Owen might have added--as the Messenger often noted--that those "best" whites actively encouraged lynching by fostering segregation, peonage, disfranchisement, and other badges of Negro inferiority.[61]
Though the Messenger said that black policemen would lessen violence by quickly arresting white terrorists, Randolph and Owen realized that systematic change was imperative. Black policemen would brutalize Afro-American prisoners as much as would white ones, just as white police maltreated white suspects. "Nor is the reason far to find. Negroes, like whites, desire advancement. If they are in a system which rewards brutality and penalizes gentleness--then naturally they will, like the whites, follow the course which leads to advancement." The Messenger warmly defended Luther Boddy, a black suspect who, fearing a repetition of the savage beatings he had previously suffered at the hands of the police, killed two detectives while in custody. Boddy was "just a young man who has been unfortunate in life. He has been made a criminal by the police, to a great extent."[62]
Organized self-defense by "Race Defense Legions," recruited especially from among ex-soldiers, were warranted. "Under no circumstances should you Southern Negroes surrender your arms," the Messenger exhorted. "Do not get excited, but face your work with cold resolution." Northern blacks should help their Southern brethren defend themselves. The Messenger also demanded that black communities organize the systematic, professional legal defense of those placed on trial for defending themselves against white violence. It demanded pardons for the surviving Houston "martyrs to racial self-respect, manhood and decency," who had killed white attackers. Even if legally guilty, they were justified because of "the provocation, abuse, insult and calumny heaped upon them in the hell-hole of Texas."[63]
For the Messenger, black self-defense was a metaphor for social revolution itself. Only revolution could overthrow racism by abolishing the deadly competition between the races. Law and order need not imply freedom or justice; rather, "the march of progress has been chiefly marked by a disregard of the law and order of every age." Owen said that "today we are on the threshold of a new revolution--the revolution from capitalism to socialism. With it may come the shedding of blood just as the revolution from slavery to capitalism in the United States was accompanied by the mass murder of the Civil War. Whatever the condition of transition, the labor and Socialist movement is making every effort for peace." The same was true of African Americans fighting white oppression. "We are pacific only on matters which can be settled peacefully," the Messenger said.[64]
When black lives were not immediately at stake--and sometimes when they were--Randolph advocated that African Americans fight discrimination by means of boycotts, picketing, rent strikes, and consumer cooperatives. "A blow in the pocketbook is sometimes as effective as a bullet in the belly," the Messenger proclaimed. Blacks could use bullets and boycotts simultaneously. "It is not a wise policy to supply your enemy with a club to beat you down with," the Messenger said. "And what can be a greater weapon in the hands of your enemy than your own hard dollars? With your dollars he sends his children to colleges, while yours are in the cotton fields." Randolph said that "when race prejudice ceases to pay, it will be thrown aside.... Negroes can make race prejudice a liability with the boycott." Randolph cited as evidence the boycott of a major Jacksonville insurance company in 1920 because one of its agents had led a lynch mob. Crippled by the boycott, the company begged for black patronage, hired black agents, and bade its white agents treat their black customers with respect.[65]
Three years later, the Messenger praised the black parents of Springfield, Ohio, who blocked a proposed segregated school by a boycott, mass picketing, a willingness to accept arrest, and a court challenge. "The real men and women of Springfield have set an example worthy of emulation in all sections of the country where efforts are made to inaugurate separate Negro schools. Fight the effort to death. Fight Negro preachers, politicians, editors, anybody and everybody--black or white--who attempts to impose a badge of inferiority upon your children." The Messenger heartily endorsed an NAACP picketing of D.W. Griffith's racist film, Birth of a Nation: "This modern method of fighting race prejudice... is far more effective than the bourgeois, respectable and dilettante, but futile plan of dispatching notes to mayors and governors." The Messenger hailed "this trend toward a methodology of power--mass action." Randolph's Friends of Negro Freedom had a boycott committee that would publish an "unfair" list of businessmen who abused or overcharged blacks, and would boycott and picket theatrical productions that stigmatized them. Randolph also advocated rent strikes, recognizing that, although tenants would save little money before they were evicted, such strikes were a way to publicize substandard housing and rent gouging. The Friends of Negro Freedom had a Tenants' Committee, from which landlords and real estate agents were excluded.[66]
George Schuyler, a satirist and political commentator who had his own column in the Messenger by 1923, likewise said that consumer spending constituted "the economic ballot." Many blacks despaired of effecting change through occasional voting, but in their spending habits "they can vote every day in the year. They can also be sure that their vote will be counted and respected. This vote, this daily ballot, is an economic one--the dollar bill. The cash register is the ballot box.... The economic ballot is not a cure-all, but it is a cure-most.... There is no use complaining when such power resides in your hands every day of the year," and is perforce used, whether consciously and intelligently or not.[67]
The Messenger viewed the consumer cooperative, "organizing the economic power of the workers at the point of consumption," as the ultimate form of boycott. Blacks, exploited more viciously than whites both as workers and as consumers--they were paid less than whites and charged more for rent and other necessities--would especially benefit from cooperatives. Black-owned cooperatives would save money, keep precious funds within the community, and employ educated blacks disdained by white businesses; they would both cultivate black leadership and train the black masses in the democratic administration of their own affairs. Randolph stressed that black cooperatives were based on both race and class because black consumers and tenants "are exploited as much by Negroes as they are by whites." Randolph hoped that cooperatives would finance their own halls, schools, and libraries with some of their savings.[68]
Randolph's most incendiary cause (in the eyes of homicidal, sexually insecure whites) was social equality, including intermarriage. "The acceptance of laws against intermarriage is tantamount to the acceptance of the stigma of inferiority," the Messenger said. Randolph argued for the right of intermarriage on the grounds of individual rights: "We favor intermarriage between any sane, grown persons who desire to marry--whatever their race or color." He also claimed that "society is the beneficiary of race miscegenation" because interbreeding improved the stock. At any rate, "race purity is both a myth and without any value. There is no pure race in the world."[69]
Randolph and Owen recognized that whites did not truly oppose miscegenation if it was done on their terms--white men and black women, often underwritten by coercion or rape. (Similarly, despite all the hysteria about close association of the races, racist whites would live in close proximity to and intimacy with blacks, as long as the latter were slaves or servants.) Laws against intermarriage, in fact, encouraged white male depredations on black females even as they incited the lynching of black males. White men used their economic, legal, and physical power to impose themselves upon black women, but the laws against intermarriage freed them of all responsibility for their offspring and their black consorts. White men could therefore abuse black women and abandon their children with impunity. J.A. Rogers, who also wrote for Garvey's Negro World, claimed that "intermixture is going on perhaps as much as in the days of slavery" and that a large proportion of white men who did business in black neighborhoods kept black mistresses. Essentializing a feminine trait associated with socially imposed economic dependence, Rogers said that "Since race intermixture is going on, and since it is likely to go on as it is the nature of women, regardless of race or class, to look up to and seek the favor of the men with the superior power and wealth, the Negro will have to choose between bastardy and agitation for a law making marriage among all citizens legal." Randolph and Owen sardonically noted that "as for social equality, there are about five million mulattoes in the United States. This is a product of semi-social equality. It shows that social equality galore exists after dark, and we warn you that we expect to have social equality in the day as well as after dark." Legalizing intermarriage, of course, would allow, rather than compel, interracial unions. "Inasmuch as no law requires any woman under any circumstances to marry a man whom she does not will or want to marry, these laws narrow themselves down to the prevention of white woman marrying colored men whom they desire to marry."[70]
In September 1922 the Messenger tacitly endorsed violence against white men who debauched black women, reprinting, as the "month's best editorial," a piece from the Pittsburgh American. (Randolph probably reprinted it tongue in cheek, because of its exposure of white male hypocrisy. Its implicit view of women as trophies reflecting male status, and its assumption that some women deserved no respect, contradicted Randolph's moderate feminist views.) "Spurious Social Equality" said that black men should treat white men who consorted with black women just as white men treated black men who associated with white women. Black men must abolish the double standard. "They should be as solicitous about Negro women as white men are about white women when they consort with a man of the other race.... If Negro women are to be debauched in white clubs by white men we demand the right to debauch white women in Negro clubs.... There can be no social relation between white men and colored women that cannot exist between Negro men and white women. We must insist on this and be prepared to enforce it. We must do away with these infamous practices born of slavery. White men, as a rule, have no respect for the best Negro women. They have got to be made to respect them."[71]
Randolph, Owen, and the Messenger, therefore, propounded a distinct form of Socialism, universal and yet specifically addressing racial concerns in a manner which (they hoped) would unite workers of all races throughout the world. In common with white Socialist publications, the Messenger advocated unionism, voting, and internationalism, albeit with a distinctive emphasis which focused on specific oppressions afflicting Afro-Americans and their implications for white workers. It also explicitly advocated strictly racial forms of mass action largely ignored by the white Socialist press. However, Randolph and his cohorts understood the resistance their message would encounter among Afro-Americans and whites of all classes.
Notes:
[1] "Should Black Workers Join White Unions," TM, September 1920; "The Negro Radicals," TM, October 1919; "The Miners' Strike and the Negro," TM, February 1920.
[2] "Strike Influenza," TM, December 1919; "Strikes," TM, July 1923. In the former article Randolph declared that "England will arrive at a peaceful new order, while America will reach it through blood and tears simply because American capital is the most hidebound, reactionary, archaic, narrow and visionless of any similar group in the world--Japan not excepted." See also "The High Cost of Living," TM, September 1919.
[3] Newsome, "The Negro Woman in the Trade Union Movement," TM, July 1923; "Our Contributors," TM, July 1923. Ms. Newsome worked for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. In "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," TM, March 1919, Randolph and Owen said "We cannot work side by side in factory, field and office and then maintain that we cannot sit side by side in restaurant, theatre, and public conveyance."
[4] "Reasons Why White and Black Workers Should Combine in Labor Unions," TM, July 1918, reprinted as part of "The Negro and the New Social Order," TM, March 1919; APR, "The New Negro: What Is He?," TM, August 1920; "Railway Clerks for Russian Recognition," TM, June 1922.
[5] "Railway Clerks for Russian Recognition, TM, June 1922; "Organized Labor and Negro Workers," TM, March 1920; "The New Negro--What is He?" TM, August 1920; "Unionism of Negro Workers," October 1919; "The A.F. of L.'s Convention," TM, December 1924.
[6] "Unionization of Negro Workers," TM, October 1919; "The Negro Radicals," TM, October 1919.
[7] "Negro Workers: The AFL or IWW," TM, July 1919. The Messenger added four paragraphs to the beginning, but otherwise left the article unchanged, including its passing reference to the IWW's having been founded "twelve years ago," appropriate for 1917 but not 1919. Strangely, the Messenger did not credit Haywood with authorship. Haywood had assumed the persona of a black worker in writing the article, so that the Messenger could print it as if it had been written by one of the editors. Although the article is not in Randolph's style, the fact that Haywood spoke as if he were a black worker raises the possibility that Randolph or some other African American (perhaps Harrison) actually wrote it.
[8] "The Forum of Local 8," TM, August 1921; "The Task of Local 8--The Marine Transport Workers of Philadelphia," TM, October 1921.
[9] Fletcher, "The Negro and Organized Labor," TM, July 1923; CO, "White Supremacy in Organized Labor," TM, September 1923. In fact, the Messenger had stated this idea on numerous occasions in the past, as in "Messenger Work Bears Fruit," April 1922, or "Australia to Give Up the Color Line," August 1922.
[10] CO, "White Supremacy in Organized Labor," TM, September 1923.
[11] "The Negro Hotel Worker," TM, November 1920; "The Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, June 1922; "The Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, July 1922; "Sending 5,000 Negro Miners to Break the German Miners' Strike," TM, April 1923; Fletcher, "The Negro and Organized Labor," TM, July 1923.
[12] "The Negro--A Menace to Radicalism," TM, May-June 1919; CO, "Labor Leaders and Negro Leaders in Council," TM, July 1918.
[13] "Negro Labor Organizers," TM, June 1923.
[14] "Reasons Why White and Black Workers Should Combine in Labor Unions," TM, July 1918; "The Negro and the New Social Order," TM, March 1919.
[15] "Report of the Resolutions Committee of the National Brotherhood Workers of America," TM, December 1919; "The National Brotherhood Association," TM, August 1919; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 118-119, 395.
[16] "A United Negro Trades," TM, July 1923; Fletcher, "The Negro and Organized Labor," July 1923; Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 118-119, 395.
[17] "Strikes," TM, September 1919 (this was just before the Elaine massacre); "Organized Labor and Negro Workers," TM, March 1920; "Why and How to Stop Negroes From Being Driven Out of the South," TM, August 1920.
[18] Summary of the APR and CO pamphlet, "The Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races," TM November 1917; "Migration Will Stop Lynching in the South," TM August 1923.
[19] "Migration Will Stop Lynching in the South," TM, August 1923; "Should Black Workers Join White Unions?," TM, September 1920; "Letter to the People's Council," TM, November 1917.
[20] "The Deportation of Agitators," TM, March 1919; "The Fight of the Negro Worker," TM, August 1920.
[21] "Propaganda," TM, February 1920; "Where Labor is Cheap," TM, June 1922; CO, "White Supremacy and Organized Labor," TM, September 1923.
[22] "The Right and Left Wing Interpreted," TM, May-June 1919; "The High Cost of Living," TM, September 1919; "The Plumb Plan," TM, October 1919.
[23] "The New York Campaign," TM, November 1921; "Chicago Political Labor Conference," TM, March 1922; "The Passing of the Republican and Democratic Parties," TM, April-May 1920; "The Independent Political Council," TM, November 1917.
[24] "Negro Mass Movement," TM, May-June 1919; "Who Shall Be Mayor?," TM, November 1917; "The Negro in Politics," TM, July 1918; "Should Negroes Be Socialists?," TM, October 1920; "Who's Who: Assemblyman E.A. Johnson," TM, July 1919.
[25] APR, "American Politics," TM, February 1923; "Who's Who: Professor Harry H. Jones," TM, April-May 1920; "Republicans and the Jim-Crow Car," TM, February 1920; "Debs and the Negro," TM, November 1920; "Why Negro Republicans Should Vote the Socialist Ticket," TM, November 1920.
[26] "The Liberty Party," TM, November 1920; "A Negro Party," TM, October 1920; "The Garvey Movement: A Promise or a Menace," TM, December 1920.
[27] "The Passing of the Republican and Democratic Parties," TM, April-May 1920; "Again the Dyer Bill," TM, May 1922. The IWW opposed electioneering and voting as useless or worse, and viewed political parties as instruments of capitalist hegemony. Ironically, the failure of the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill, which never became law, helps validate this view.
[28] "NAACP Political Logic," TM, November 1920; "The Labor World," TM, June 1922; "Wages Reductions," TM, August 1922; "Who's Who: La Follette," TM, September 1920; "Du Bois and the Crisis," TM, September 1919; "The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill," TM, January 1922; "U.S. Supreme Court Declares Child Labor Law Unconstitutional," TM, August 1922; "Lilly-Whitism," TM, August 1920.
[29] "NAACP Political Logic," TM, November 1920; "The Labor World," TM, June 1922; "Wages Reductions," TM, August 1922; "Who's Who: La Follette," TM, September 1920; "Du Bois and the Crisis," TM, September 1919; "The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill," TM, January 1922; "U.S. Supreme Court Declares Child Labor Law Unconstitutional," TM, August 1922; "Lilly-Whitism," TM, August 1920.
[30] "The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill," TM, January 1922; "Messenger Work Bears Fruit," TM, April 1922.
[31] "Negro Elective Representation," TM, November 1917; "Meyer London Demands Justice for the Negro," TM, February 1922.
[32] APR, "Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, April-May 1920.
[33] APR, "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922.
[34] "Africa for the Africans," TM, September 1920.
[35] DB, "The African Roots of the War," Atlantic Monthly, May 1915, as reprinted in Philip S. Foner, W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919 (New York, 1970), 244-257.
[36] APR, "Revolt in South Africa," TM, March 1922.
[37] APR, "National Paradoxes," TM, October 1920.
[38] "Revolt in South Africa," TM, March 1922.
[39] CO, "International Scabbing," TM, December 1922.
[40] APR, "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922.
[41] Domingo, "Will Bolshevism Free America?," TM, September 1920.
[42] Miller, "Uncle Sam No Land Grabber (?)," TM, May-June 1919; "Why Negroes Should Be Interested in Mexico," TM, July 1919; "The Mexican Revolution," TM, August 1920.
[43] "Haiti," TM, October 1920; "Haiti," TM, March 1922; "Santo Domingo Protests," TM, August 1921; "The Virgin Islands," TM, February 1923; "Americanism," TM, September 1920.
[44] "Four Power Loan and China," TM, August 1920; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, February 1923; APR, "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922.
[45] "A Republic on the Imperial Highway," TM, October 1921; "Strikes," September 1919; "Wilson Congratulates Coolidge," TM, February 1920.
[46] "Lynching a Domestic Question," TM, July 1919; "Internationalism," TM, August 1919.
[47] "Japan and the Far East," TM, July 1918; "Trend of the Times," TM, March 1919; "Japan and the Race Issue, TM, May June 1919.
[48] APR and CO,"Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races" (New York, 1917); "Americanism," TM, September 1920; "Four Power Loan and China," TM, August 1920; "The Japanese Problem," TM, November 1920.
[49] "Japan on American Lynching," TM, August 1921.
[50] ibid.
[51] "The Japanese Problem," TM, November 1920; "Japan," June 1924.
[52] "Get Out of Russia!," TM, March 1919; "Hoover and Relief for Soviet Russia," TM, September 1921; "Emma Goldman on Bolshevism," TM, April 1922; "Jewish Pogroms," TM, July 1919.
See also "The Cloakmakers Strike" (TM, December 1921): "The Jews are the freest of all from race and color prejudice. They have more successfully resisted American race and color prejudice than any national or racial group in the country." In "Harvard University and Racial Discrimination" (August 1922), the Messenger complained that President Lowell had instituted quotas for Jews and segregation for blacks. "Fortunately, however, crimes and evils, first visited upon one people, eventually spread to others. It is like a disease; the Negro has it today, the white man tomorrow. It knows no race or color line. We have no prejudice against Jews, but we are glad to see them being excluded along with the Negro" because this mobilized them against oppression. Jews had money but few numbers; blacks had numbers but little money. An alliance between the two groups was therefore helpful.
The Messenger often made this same point about whites in general, and sardonically rejoiced when whites suffered evils previously confined to blacks because this caused the whites to suddenly take an interest in those evils. "The Deportation of Agitators" (TM, March 1919), used the lynching of Leo Frank and the Bisbee deportations as examples of atrocities that evoked white concern. The lynching of Robert Prager during World War I was another example. In January 1923 ("Civil Liberties Passing"), the Messenger described lynchings, tar-and-featherings, floggings, and mob deportations, many of which victimized whites. "We are simply overjoyed to see the lesson brought home to all races," it said. In February 1923 ("Lynching Labor"), the Messenger repeated the disease analogy and said that "so long as only Negroes fell before the vicious and brutal fury of the mob, the conscience of white America was not aroused." In May 1923 the Messenger ("Peonage in Florida"), described the death of white Martin Tabert in a Florida peonage farm.
[53] "Civil War in Germany," TM, October 1923; "Deportation of Hindu Political Refugees," TM, March 1920; "Gandhi and Non-Violent Resistance," TM, May 1922.
[54] "Peace Conference," TM, March 1919; See also "The League of Nations," November 1920.
[55] Ironically, Randolph himself said that "the fact that we desire 'Africa for the Africans' does not imply that we recognize the ability of the Africans to assume the responsibilities and duties of a sovereign nation, at the present." Randolph compared Africans to boys who, although now still children, would some day become men. This was not due to any racial inferiority, however: "Numberless causes are responsible for the backwardness and unprogressiveness of Africa." "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, November 1922. Randolph used this argument against Garvey, and also said that "Africa is a continent, not a nation" and consisted of many religions and groups.
[56] CO, "Peonage, Riots, and Lynching," TM, August 1921.
[57] "How to Stop Lynching," TM, August 1919; "Our Mr. Fortune," TM, July 1919.
[58] "If We Must Die," TM, September 1919; "The New Migration," TM, April 1923.
[59] "How to Stop Lynching," TM, August 1919; "Negro Leaders Compromise as Usual," TM, September 1919; "A Report on the Chicago Race Riot by an Eye-Witness," TM, September 1919; "Law and Order. In Whose Interest?," TM, October 1919; "KKK Reorganizing," TM, November 1920; "The Ku Klux Klan: How to Fight It," TM, November 1921.
[60] CO, "Peonage, Riots, and Lynching," TM, August 1921; APR, "A New Negro Labor Exodus North," TM, March 1923. Ellis (Surveillance, 19-20) and Jordan (Newspapers, 101), claim that migration North did improve the conditions of blacks who remained in the South, at least marginally.
[61] CO, "Peonage, Riots, and Lynching," TM, August 1921. Ernest McKinney said that "the mob uses a direct method and lynches while the other, refraining from and deprecating violence, incites to violence by practicing segregation and discrimination." McKinney, A Vanishing Conservatism," TM, October 1924.
[62] "Who's Who. Luther Boddy," TM, February 1922. The Messenger added that "more than casual attention must be given to an alleged murderer who, when asked what he desired to read, called for Milton's Paradise Lost."
[63] "How to Stop Lynching," TM, August 1919; "The Houston Martyrs," TM, December 1923.
[64] "Du Bois on Revolution," TM, September 1921; "How to Stop Lynching," TM, August 1919.
[65] "The New Migration," TM, April 1923; "Jacksonville Negroes Boycott Big White Insurance Company," TM, March 1920. White agents now took their hats off when in African-American homes, and called their black customers "Mr." and "Mrs."
[66] "Springfield, Ohio," TM, February 1923; "Picketing and the NAACP," TM, July 1921; "The Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, August 1922. The Tenants' Committee would also educate the tenants recently arrived from the rural South: "Raising their aesthetic and property-preservation tastes is rightly a part of the work of the tenants' league."
[67] GSS, "The Economic Ballot," TM, September 1923.
[68] "Cooperation," TM, October 1920; "Negro to Organize Tenants and Cooperative League," TM, January 1918.
[69] "The New Negro--What Is He?," TM, August 1920; APR and CO, "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," TM, March 1919. Randolph and Owen also claimed that the purity or near-purity of the Native Americans might account for their near extermination. (To the extent that the geographic and hence genetic isolation of New World peoples rendered them defenseless against European diseases, this is in a sense partly accurate.)
[70] Rogers, "Critical Excursions and Reflections," TM, June 1924; APR and CO, "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," TM, March 1919; CO, "Harding at Birmingham," TM, December 1921. Ironically, because both Rogers and Owen assumed that women were attracted to richer and more powerful males--Owen attributed this partly to the sexual initiative of the male and partly to the slave psychology of the oppressed females--the economic status of black males in racist America would not have made them attractive to white females. Owen asserted that prohibition creates desire, thus drawing white women and black men together; but he failed to notice that this attraction would disappear if such unions were legally and socially acceptable.
[71] "Month's Best Editorial: Spurious Social Equality," reprinted in the Messenger, September 1922. Garvey, as will be discussed below, also praised black men who assaulted whites who consorted with black women.
One key part of Randolph's program for action consisted of energetic black participation in the labor movement. Randolph asserted that the black race, 99 percent proletarian, would benefit immensely by unionization. Even the 1 percent who considered themselves businessmen were "nothing but workers who are working for themselves," and would profit from increasing the purchasing power of their customers. "Hence, there is every reason why the Negro as a race should support the workers as a class," Randolph declared. "The chief need of the Negro is the organization of his industrial power," more vital even than the vote. During the 1920 coal strike, Randolph noted that victory would net 50,000 Negro coal miners a total of $27 million per year; as most of these miners had families, approximately 250,000 Negroes would benefit. Yet most black editors, who exulted whenever a single prominent Negro received a lucrative patronage job, opposed this strike.[1]
Randolph regarded strikes as "great educators" and incubators of revolution because "discontent increases with social improvement. The more we have the more we want.... Just so soon as wages are high... labor will begin to think, and upon thinking, it will realize the condition in which it is and grasp the knowledge that relief is attainable by action. Capital is in a dilemma. If it does not grant labor's demands it will be overthrown by violent revolution. If it grants labor's demands it will be overthrown by peaceful revolution. But in either case it faces both overthrow and revolution, and overthrow by revolution." Strikes won the goods that would "satisfy the higher wants and create wants for the higher goods," including education and leisure. Strikes were "directly proportional to the intelligence and class consciousness of labor. Strikes are fewest where labor is most ignorant."[2]
The Messenger also asserted that unionization of blacks would foster integration and social equality because people who worked and fought together could not remain strangers outside of work. According to "the first and only Negro woman labor organizer in the United States," Nora Newsome, "unionism, perhaps more than any other agency, will do much toward cementing the relationship between white and colored workers. When white and colored men meet on an equal basis in the workroom, fight together for common betterment, and together bear the suffering resulting from that fight, I cannot possibly see how they can hate each other in the class room, restaurant, theatre, or any other place where social intercourse is desirable."[3]
Randolph's advocacy of unionism for blacks, however, was complicated by the exclusionary policies of most white unions. "Where unions refuse black workers admission into them," Randolph said, "the black workers should organize separate unions of their own; but where white unions are sufficiently enlightened to appreciate the menace of unorganized labor, white or black, to the march of industrial democracy, we recommend that the Negro workers combine with the white workers." All workers had identical interests in "more wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions"; interracial organizing would "increase their bargaining power" and defuse the threat of scabbing. All workers must organize "if labor would win its demands." Randolph said that blacks excluded from white unions "should organize their own unions and fight both the hostile labor unions and then hostile employers." Just as no sensible person would oppose writing because of its misuse for forgery, "it is folly for the Negro to fight labor organization because some white unions ignorantly ignore or oppose him."[4]
Although Randolph urged that black workers join whatever union controlled their industry, he had clear preferences among labor organizations. He castigated the AFL as a strikebreaking "Separation of Labor" that divided the working class by race and skill and by signing time contracts that prevented sympathy strikes. The AFL, he said, collaborated with the class enemy and endorsed anti-labor politicians. When the AFL pledged that it would recruit blacks, Randolph scornfully said that such resolutions were "not worth the paper they were written on" and that, in any event, the AFL could not protect its white members. Nevertheless, blacks should insist on equality within the AFL. Adumbrating his own strategy during the first lonely years of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Randolph urged that "Even if [blacks] don't get any support from anybody, they should ... carry the fight to the floor for recognition as the industrial equals of their white brothers. It is not sufficient merely for Negroes to condemn the white workers for their economic ills, for they are not altogether blameless themselves."[5]
As virtually every other black radical, Randolph favored the Industrial Workers of the World. "The IWW prohibit discrimination on account of race or color in the first clause of their constitution, and they carry it out in practice," he said. "The Negroes and the Industrial Workers of the World have interests not only in common, but interests that are identical." Both wwere unskilled and disfranchised and hence had no other option than "industrial action.... The Negro who is disfranchised must join other voteless workers. The Negro who is largely the unskilled worker in industry, must join that organization in which the workers are organized upon the basis of industry, thereby giving the skilled and unskilled equality of rights." The Wobblies rejected the color line "not as a sentimental virtue which they dole out with hypocritical unctuousness, but because enlightened self-interest" revealed that this was the only way they could achieve their goals. Such common interest was a more solid basis for cooperation than altruism or philanthropy.[6] In July 1919 the Messenger reprinted, in slightly altered form, William Haywood's lengthy and important appeal to workers of color from the March 10, 1917 Solidarity.[7] The Messenger also touted the IWW's Marine Transport Workers Union #8 (Philadelphia) as exemplifying "the ability of white and black people to work, live and conduct their common affairs side by side." At MTWU social affairs, "the workers also mingle, fraternize, dance, eat and play together." The Messenger also praised the Amalgamated Clothing Workers (ACW) and the Internaitonal Ladies Garment Workers Union (ILGWU) for their racial policies. (Both were Socialist dominated). Randolph believed that if blacks formed their own unions, agitated within the AFL, and joined egalitarian unions such as the IWW and the ILGWU (itself an AFL affiliate), they would pressure the much larger AFL into according blacks genuine equality.[8]
If these methods failed, black workers could scab white unions into submission. Ben Fletcher, the IWW's most famous black leader, said that "Negro Labor's foothold nearly everywhere in organized labor's domains, has been secured by scabbing them into defeat or into terms that provided for Negro inclusion in their ranks." Fletcher, contravening IWW policy, endorsed this tactic. Owen, embittered when a Socialist garment union rejected his brother's application for membership, exclaimed that capitalists and unions collaborated in keeping blacks out of most jobs, so that Negroes interpreted the closed shop as meaning "closed to Negroes." Owen declared that "the Negro quite sanely prefers a lower standard of living, in the open shop, to starvation, or no standard of living, as a result of the closed shop!" The capitalists therefore "have appealed to the Negro worker on the ground that white unions were the Negro's enemies. Proof was never lacking" in history or personal experience. "Consequently Negroes were and are ever ready to take the places of union strikers. They are coddled by the employers and repulsed by the unions." White capitalists were "patrons" and friends of the blacks while white workers were "competitors" and enemies. Scabbing, therefore, combined the joys of revenge with the motivation of economic advancement. Owen then stated "a truth which we have nowhere seen expressed in the radical and labor literature":
The white employers and capitalists have placed the Negro workers both into the industries, and consequently into the unions, while the white trade unions have kept the Negroes out of both the unions and the industries, so long as they could!..... The Negro worker may not be able to state the philosophy and the theories underlying the situation, but he is well aware of the facts.[9]
Because capitalists were themselves racist (and would not gratuitously offend their white workers), they would not hire blacks unless they worked for less than whites. As Owen said, "the employers would no doubt discharge the Negroes if they did join the union."[10] This obviously undercut unionism's appeal for black workers.
When the AFL remained staunchly white supremacist, and government terrorism (abetted by the AFL) destroyed the IWW, the Messenger increasingly advocated organized scabbing as a method of pressuring white labor. Citing the hotel industry, Randolph had previously asserted that blacks usually gained little by scabbing on white workers. Negro workers slaved for intolerable hours for starvation pay when white workers struck, and after the strike "the white workers are reinstalled, while the Negro worker is discarded to the industrial scrap heap to starve until the masters of the hotel industry need him again to help them keep milk from the babies of their white hotel wage slaves. The organized Negro press, church and leadership condone, connive at, and in fact, support this criminal practice." Later, however, the Friends of Negro Freedom, Randolph's civil rights organization, pledged that it would "not allow Negroes to be called in as strikebreakers, only to be thrown out when the strike is settled. If the union in question admits Negroes, the Friends of Negro Freedom will use its influence to stop Negroes from acting as strikebreakers. If Negroes are denied entrance to the unions, the Labor Union committee is instructed to organize the Negroes separately and make flawless contracts with the employers whereby the Negro workers cannot be discharged. In short, the settlement of such a strike must be a settlement with the Negro workers." Randolph emphasized that "taking the jobs of the white workers is absolutely justified wherever Negroes are denied entrance to the unions." The Messenger said that "white workers cannot lynch Negro workers, debar them from joining their unions, and expect them to show the spirit of cooperation when white workers are sorely pressed by the brutal hand of capital."[11]
Randolph's vision of interracial unionism, therefore, was undermined by white racism, the consequent black working-class hostility toward unions, the vulnerability of black workers to firing if they signed up, and the capitalist terrorism that made most white workers avoid unions. In addition, Randolph's pro-union stance encountered the studied hostility of the black elite. Randolph complained that African-American leaders reinforced the anti-union bias of the black working class out of both economic interest (they were bought and paid for by white capitalists) and class snobbery. "The beneficiaries of a social order strive through force or deception to secure the acquiescence and support of the victims of the social order," the Messenger lamented. In furtherance of this, white capitalists subsidized, controlled, and propagandized black newspapers, churches, schools, and social welfare institutions. "Hence, through ignorance or error the opposition of the Negro to the very movements which are calculated to achieve his economic [and] political emancipation, is being effected by big, hand-picked Negro leaders--and the plutocratic interests of this country." Owen warned black workers that "you cannot depend upon your leaders for this work [of unionization]. Your leaders have already been employed by those more able to pay them than you are."[12] The Messenger complained that
in church, school, and press, the Negro has been taught to love and respect the rich, but to regard with requisite suspicion the "poor whites" or the white workers. Unfortunately, the attitude of the white workers has not been calculated to disabuse their minds of this view. Thus the Negro workers have been deprived of the leadership of a radical or liberal Negro intelligentsia.
Negro college students "thought it a mark of great learning to be curt, snobbish and satirical on matters of labor. Like the vast majority of white students," they considered a classical education "as a badge of the lady and gentleman." They were therefore "indifferent to the facts and principles of economics, the science of production and distribution." The Messenger urged that "Young Negro men and women of education must resolve to cast their lot in the labor movement" and impart "vision and hope and intelligence to the wide Negro masses."[13]
To achieve this objective, Randolph and Owen boosted three organizations which promoted labor organization among Negroes: the National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unions Among Negroes (NAPLUAN), the National Brotherhood Association of America (NBA) and the Friends of Negro Freedom (FNF). Owen and Randolph headed NAPLUAN, which had an advisory board of white Socialist labor activists. In July 1918 the Messenger declared itself the organ of NAPLUAN. The logo of NAPLUAN featured the sturdy hands of a black and white worker clasping in solidarity; its motto was "Black and White Workers Unite." Randolph almost certainly wrote NAPLUAN's statement of philosophy, which declared that all workers had one common interest, achievable only by unionizing all toilers of both races. As "self-interest is the only principle upon which individuals or groups will act if they are sane," Negro workers excluded from unions would eagerly scab upon unionized workers. "The employing class recognize no race lines," NAPLUAN proclaimed. "They will exploit a white man as readily as a black man. They will exploit women as readily as men. They will even go to the extent of coining the labor, blood and suffering of children into dollars.... Organized labor cannot afford to ignore any labor factor of production which organized capital does not ignore.... No union man's standard of living is safe so long as there is a group of men and women who may be used as scabs and whose standard of living is lower." Interracial unions would prove that unions were class, not race, organizations, and would "convert a class of workers, which has been used by the capitalist class to defeat organized labor, into an ardent, class conscious, intelligent, militant group."[14]
The National Brotherhood of America, the Messenger said, was an all-black "Negro Federation of Labor." T.G. Pree of Virginia headed it. Pree, and the other founder R.T. Sims, were longstanding radicals; both had been IWW officials. Taking its inspiration from the United Hebrew Trades, the NBA was "composed of Negro unions of all kinds from Florida to New York--Negroes who have combined to exact justice both from the employers and from the labor unions." Randolph wrote or heavily influenced the NBA's platform, adopted at its convention in the District of Columbia in September 1919. This militant and wide-ranging program focused on the grievances of blacks rather than on specifically labor union concerns. It denounced racial discrimination within the labor movement and demanded the abolition of peonage, lynching, and segregation; demanded free immigration and the vote for women; castigated U.S. military intervention against Mexico and the blockade against the Soviet Union; and denounced the League of Nations as a "combination of white capitalist governments against the masses of working colored people all over the world." The Messenger ran a picture of delegates to the convention, more than thirty men representing over twenty trades. With recent AFL verbal overtures toward black workers in mind (promises that usually earned Randolph's scorn), it implausibly claimed that "it was the power of [the NBA], more than anything else, which drove the American Federation of Labor to adopt its changed profession toward Negro labor."[15] Randolph and Owen also organized the Friends of Negro Freedom, one of whose functions was organizing black workers against both exploiting capitalists and discriminatory unions.
These organizations, founded at a time when depression and a capitalist and government anti-union offensive put even white labor on the defensive, achieved little, however. Sims later said that Randolph hoped that the NBA would boost the Messnger's circulation, and that Randolph's interest waned when he discovered that the NBA would drain, rather than augment, his magazine's treasury. In 1923 and 1924 the Messenger renewed its call for militant Negro labor organizing. "The problems of the Negro worker are increasing, not diminishing," it said. Negroes needed "the rigid discipline of self-government which only the union activities afford" and should organize a "United Negro Trades" modelled on the United Hebrew Trades and the Italian Chamber of Labor. Ben Fletcher, after recounting the vile record of the American labor movement, proclaimed that "Negro labor has a part to play also in changing this present day attitude of organized labor. It should organize a nation-wide movement to encourage, promote and protect its employment and general welfare" by both extorting justice from white labor unions and gaining entry into industries from which blacks were excluded. "To a large extent Negro Labor is responsible for this reprehensible exclusion, because of its failure to generate a force which when necessary could have rendered low the dragon head of Race prejudice, whenever and wherever it raised its head." Had blacks organized such an organization a generation ago, "the attitude of organized labor to the Negro would be just the reverse today."[16]
Randolph also advocated a massive political strike against brutal conditions in the South. Randolph asserted that the pivotal role of Southern blacks in producing cotton gave them the power to paralyze the South and, by extension, important sections of Northern industry. "Piteous appeals are of no avail," he said. "Positive demands enforced by the strike are the only things that count.... Not a sign of cotton can be raised without Negro labor." Randolph somewhat myopically claimed that "if Negroes formed a cotton workers union, to strike for more wages, shorter hours, and better conditions under which to work, it would arouse and frighten the South, North, and, too, foreign capitalists...." Randolph urged unionization of Southern black agricultural workers in the course of discussing armed self-defense against lynching and other forms of white terrorism. He regarded the strike as a potent weapon not only for labor's grievances, but against the racial oppressions of the blacks. "The power of such an organization [of Southern black workers] to paralyze Southern industry, will, by its very existence, strike fear into the heart of the South, forcing it to respect the rights, privileges and immunities of the Negro." However, the mass murder and torture of striking agricultural workers in Elaine, Arkansas (1919) amply demonstrated the fatuity of such proposals.[17]
A combination of black self-assertion and white enlightened self-interest, Randolph believed, would improve race relations within organized labor. He distrusted altruism and "benevolence" and placed his hope on self-interested struggle, probably because of black America's experience with white capitalist philanthropy and Randolph's own acquaintance with IWW literature, which stressed commonality of interest over moral sentiment. The Messenger, in fact, ignored the cultural components of a group's perceived self-interest in its focus on a narrow economic determinism. Correspondingly, it vastly overestimated the impact of rational argument. "White and black laborers must recognize their common interest in industry, in politics, in society, in peace," it said. "They should join hands not from any abstract altruistic motive, but for their mutual advantages. Neither should allow a horde of scabs and strike-breakers outside the union when it is possible to have them within the union. Besides, so long as the white dog and the black dog--laborers--fight over the bone, the third capitalist dog will surely run away with it." The Messenger said that "it is no use pleading for justice and fair play. Nobody acts upon those things. Organized labor is out to improve its standard of living. If keeping Negroes out of their unions will prevent that and that fact is demonstrated to them, they will throw race discrimination overboard. High wages, shorter hours of work and better working conditions are dearer to the white worker than snubbing the Negro."[18]
Experience demonstrated that such a recognition of common interests was not imminent, however. In 1920 Randolph said that he was not "overly optimistic" about imminent changes in white labor's attitude. "We simply realize that enlightened self-interest will dictate that the organized labor movement of America accord the Negro workers justice.... The logic of the class struggle will also force the black worker to go to the labor movement. For just as white and black capitalists will be forced to combine against black and white labor, black and white labor will be forced to combine against black and white capitalists."[19] Randolph insisted that as long as African Americans remained unorganized, they undermined the living standards of white Americans, even as they were themselves used as exploitable and disposable labor.
Randolph reminded his white and black readers that "those who dominate and control the government care nothing about a white man or a black man. They will starve white women as well as black women. They will coin the blood of white children into money as readily as they will that of black children. When either race rises to protest against exploitation or to adopt measures for relief or improvement, it will be crushed ruthlessly and relentlessly by our reactionary plutocrats." He said that "'Divide and Conquer' will always remain the slogan of the master class. The capitalists have no race, no nationality. The world is their country and to rob labor is their religion. When will black and white workers learn this? When will they wake up and stop fighting each other?"[20] Capitalists, he repeated, not only encouraged white racism, but heavily subsidized an entire array of African-American institutions--colleges, churches, newspapers, and social welfare organizations--to breed anti-union sentiments in black workers and black elites, and to train an anti-union cadre of black workers who could break white unions. The Messenger frequently pointed out that the KKK hated Catholics, Jews, labor unions, and radicals as well as blacks; it was the terrorist arm of capitalist reaction.
Randolph reminded his white readers that Southern racism not only impoverished whites in the South but, by fostering low-wage competition with Northern industry, debilitated Northern whites as well. He remained confident that "even the Southern white man will change when he is educated, and shown that the Bourbon, master class of the South keeps him in ignorance and poverty by playing race against race." Echoing IWW complaints, Randolph and Owen recognized that the capitalists profited by international animosities as well as domestic racism. Speaking of steel companies which produced cheap steel in India, the Messenger noted that capitalists "shift industry from place to place, wherever labor is cheapest.... The workers' only hope is to organize labor everywhere and of all colors." Owen linked the national and international migration of labor and machinery. "There are two forces which capital is adopting today," he said. Sometimes it moves the machinery or capital to the labor and raw materials. This is what generally happens as the result of imperialism in undeveloped countries.... The other method is to attract labor to the machinery, the raw materials and industry. That is what is going on in the case of the present large Negro migration."[21]
Randolph believed that African-American political activity was as necessary as participation in the labor movement. Aside from encouraging unionism among blacks, Randolph advocated African-American support for the Socialist party at the polls. Randolph's political views, however, like his pro-union stance, were shaped by his position as a black worker-intellectual. Randolph's Socialist party affiliation, his down-to-earth temperament which eschewed dogma and "impossibilism" in favor of immediate amelioration, and the heritage of the Washington-Du Bois controversy (Du Bois had convincingly equated black denigration of the franchise with craven surrender), ensured that he vigorously championed black political activity. However, his close reading of IWW literature, his position as a leader of a largely disfranchised race, and African-American disillusionment with past political achievements, all engendered doubts about the efficacy of the ballot and of government sponsored reform. As a result of these conflicts, Randolph, while unswerving in his support of political action, never evolved a fully consistent viewpoint on a subject that divided the IWW and the Socialist party.
Randolph usually argued that class voting, like class industrial organization, could achieve revolution by means of incremental reform. "Every time we can pull a brick out of the capitalist wall we are hastening its overthrow, speeding the day when it will topple over," he said. "Get women suffrage today. Strike to increase wages and shorten hours. Abolish child labor.... Don't refuse to strike these blows, because all cannot be gotten at once." Reforms, far from acting as a narcotic, spurred the working class to further effort; reformers dug capitalism's grave. "Here is the dilemma in which the high priests of capitalism find themselves. If labor's demands are not met, labor will revolt; if labor's demands are satisfied, it will still revolt. For the more labor gets, the more it wants, and the more it is able to secure. The law is: discontent increases with social improvement." Speaking of the Plumb Plan, which would have continued wartime government controls over the railroads, Randolph acknowledged that it did not "represent industrial democracy in the railway industry;" but he also asserted that "any proposal, the adoption of which, results in curtailment of profits and the recognition of the rights of labor, however little it might be, is a blow at the very foundation of government, law, and order.... Each step forward by labor, and each retreat by capital, emboldens and strengthens labor and weakens capital."[22] Capitalist hysteria over seemingly minor reforms was therefore rational.
The Socialist platform, Randolph said, eschewed "romance" in favor of "realism" and confronted the problems of the working class "scientifically and courageously." Immediate demands constituted "the only basis of working-class unity in aim and action. Political, social and economic ultimates don't touch the consciousness of the workers who are put to the task of winning a living from day to day." In a classic statement of the orthodox Socialist "dual arm" theory (somewhat radicalized to stress industrial over craft unions) Randolph said that "just as it was necessary for labor to form economic organizations--industrial unions--coextensive with the trusts, cartels, syndicates and monopolies of capital on the industrial field, so on the political field it is necessary for labor to form its political machine co-extensive with the political machine of labor's employers." The ballot was "the mightiest weapon of the ages."[23]
Randolph said that blacks should vote for the Socialist party because "politics should reflect the economic condition of a people." The Socialist party "represents the working people and 99 percent of Negroes are working people." The SP represented "both your interest as a race and your interests as a working man" and "has always, both in the United States and Europe, opposed all forms of race prejudice." Because those who fund a party control it, "a Socialist representative is the only one who has both the desire and the ability to represent the Negroes." During the 1917 mayoral contest in New York City, Randolph said that "Hillquit favors free food and free clothing for school children as a matter of right, and not as a matter of charity." He would fight for low food prices and low rents. Moreover, "Hillquit believes that the war is over the exploitation of the darker peoples--the stealing of their land and labor. He is the only candidate who dares to say so."[24] Randolph pointed out that the Socialist party nominated highly-qualified blacks for important state offices. He undoubtedly had himself and Owen in mind when he boasted that the SP was the only party that nominated students of social science for office. The November 1920 Messenger ran pictures of New York State Socialist party candidates; the five blacks included Randolph and Owen.
Only the Socialist party, Randolph declared, vigorously opposed racism in word and deed. In 1923 Randolph said that the Socialist and Farmer-Labor parties "would provide schools instead of battleships, for the people. They would abolish [all racial discrimination] because a working-class political party can have no motive or interest in oppressing any part of its own class...." Randolph insisted that a vote for the SP was not wasted even when the SP candidate could not win because a large Socialist tally would ensure that the capitalist parties would woo Negro voters. Negroes should sell their vote to the highest bidder as other groups did, rather than blindly voting Republican. In a statement as true today as in 1920 (except that the parties are reversed) Randolph said that "No one pays for a sure thing, but when one's position is uncertain, he immediately becomes a factor.... The Republican bosses know that the Negro is a Republican. The Democrats feel that they cannot get his vote, and the Republicans feel that nobody else but themselves can get it." Hence both parties ignored the blacks. "And why should they give us more? Negroes are known as sure things. You don't put bait on the line for fish which you have already caught. When Negroes turn to the Socialist party, they will get what they demand, and not before. For then the Republicans will grant them what they demand in order to get them back." When blacks voted Socialist, "the abolition of the jim-crow car, lynch law and disfranchisement would be a mere bagatelle" because the alternative to concessions was complete loss of governmental control by the capitalists. Both major parties were mere capitalist tools, and "Wall Street would not allow the South to continue in its brutal lynching, jim-crowing and disfranchising of Negroes if it thought that such practices were driving the Negro into the Socialist party and labor unions." Such concessions, rather than winning blacks back to the capitalist parties, would only further radicalize them.[25]
Although Randolph advocated the formation of all-black unions when white unions excluded blacks, he vehemently attacked the all-Negro Liberty party, formed in 1920 by William Bridges with the help of Randolph's old mentor, Hubert H. Harrison. Randolph labeled such an all-black party "political vaudeville" that "would have Negroes who can vote virtually disfranchise the entire race by voluntarily eliminating themselves from effective, intelligent and practical participation in politics." An African-American party could not win even if every black supported it. No other oppressed group had formed its own party. A race-based party would only justify whites in their own racially exclusive parties and "lend aid and comfort to the Vardamans, Hoke Smiths, [and] Watsons... in denying the Negro the right to vote." Even if Negroes could capture the government, this would not benefit the working-class majority because "political action is the reflex of economic interests."[26] A Negro government, like white supremacist ones, would perforce rule in the interests of the capitalist minority; it would be a class, not a race, government.
Although Randolph effusively praised the IWW, he called its anti-political stance "indefensible." In 1922, arguing for the Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill, Randolph said that "we make no fetish of the federal government. At best, governments stand for and do little where workers are concerned. They are instruments of class oppression. But until the workers capture state power, they must drive the capitalist state to adopt measures bringing them certain forms of economic, social and political relief. We know that the master class only adopt such measures either when they reap an advantage or fear the violent revolt of the workers. But the motive of the capitalist government is not so material when the relief is achieved."[27]
Randolph's own endorsement of political action, however, was sometimes modified by his recognition of the class nature of the state. "To the political scientist the government is in Wall Street, New York [and other capitalist linchpins].... The press, Congress and the courts represent simply the little boy on the knee of the ventriloquist." Speaking in the aftermath of a violently suppressed strike in 1922, the Messenger said that "the Federal like the State Government is an instrument of class oppression. It is wielded by the dominant class against the working class. This will ever be so, just so long as society is divided into propertied and propertyless classes." Randolph spoke of "the futility of [workers] expecting relief from a State owned and controlled by their bosses." Randolph vehemently criticized the government Railway Labor Board (RLB), which had ostensibly "helped" workers during the war when labor was scarce and unionization was therefore possible, but had predictably abandoned them when the capitalists were impregnable after the war (when jobs were scarce and workers vulnerable), thus destroying a unionization drive. "Governments only grant concessions to the exploited toilers when they are capable of taking them without the aid of government." (Sadly, Randolph forgot this lesson in 1927-8, when he led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to rely on the RLB's successor, with catastrophic results.) Randolph also criticized liberals who would "feed the workers and farmers well, so that they would do more and better work and farming," even while insisting that the toilers remain wage and soil slaves. "A good cattle raiser will feed his cow well, in order that she might give more and better milk. But a cow she ever remains." Randolph bitterly accused New York reform Democrat Al Smith of starving babies by his alliance with the milk trust.[28]
Randolph also complained that "the Constitution is a fetish in America. Even the Negroes who have suffered more from its hands than any other class in America, except, perhaps, labor, think that the Constitution is the citadel of all liberties, although it has afforded him only the liberty to be lynched, jim-crowed and disfranchised." The Constitution "is much more sacred than the lives of children and Negroes, because it protects property interests." In a statement as applicable to white workers as blacks, the Messenger said that Wall Street "is the economic master of America." Therefore, "the little political tea-pot tempests among Negroes, North, South, East, and West, in the old parties, amount to nothing. They do not affect the trend of anything in America. They do not remove a single economic, political or social evil or produce a single good. They are not only carrying on useless and valueless political vaudeville," but making blacks a laughing-stock.[29] These statements echo IWW pronouncements on the futility of political action.
To reconcile these contradictions, Randolph touted the symbolic benefits of reform won by working-class, or African-American, self-activity. Even if few real benefits followed, self-won victories encouraged black and working class activism and revealed that the existing order was not immutable. Randolph felt that although the Dyer Bill would not pass, and would not stop lynching even if it did, "anything that focuses public attention to lynching, helps." He praised the Socialist party for endorsing the bill. Randolph also endorsed a proposal for a Negro cabinet member, despite his prediction that such a member would probably be "the worst hat-in-hand Negro in the country. No other could secure an appointment from the present regime. He would be of no more value to Negroes than would a labor member of the cabinet be of value to labor as such." Still, Randolph said, blacks must demand equality with whites and not content themselves with the low-level patronage jobs to which they were confined.[30]
Randolph observed that "our present economic system practically nullifies the vote of the working white man," but blacks were excluded even from token political democracy. "It is a true saying that half loaves given to the common people prevent their taking measures to get the whole loaf," but blacks were denied even the half loaf. The Messenger agreed with white Socialist Congressman Meyer London, who said that "it is true that we [white workers] have not many rights, but what few we have gained [the Negro] is entitled to, and he is further entitled to fight side by side with us to achieve real freedom."[31]
Randolph's third class-based strategy for black liberation, as important as unionization and political participation, entailed a socialist internationalism that applied his analysis of domestic racial divisions to the world scene and described the role of colonialism in maintaining capitalism. This internationalism was part of a long African-American tradition. Indeed, Afro-American leaders have been among the most internationally minded of American dissidents. Prominent black abolitionists, W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael have mobilized world opinion against American racist injustices and recognized the connections between imperialism (European and American) and white supremacy at home. Randolph urged that "it is no more possible for Negroes in America to be indifferent to what takes place in Haiti, Egypt or Trinidad, than for New York Negroes to be indifferent to the fortunes of Negroes in Florida. The success of Negroes in one place encourages and emboldens Negroes in another.... The same is true of revolutions."[32]
Randolph understood the relationships between international black liberation and the working-class struggle as well as between black liberation at home and abroad. He criticized Garvey's race-based internationalism, Du Bois's theory that the white working class benefitted from imperialism, and Washington's alliance between poor blacks and white capitalists within the United States.
The liberation of Africa can only come by allying the Negro liberation movement with the movements for the liberation of all of the world's enslaved of all races, creeds, and colors. Imperialism is at the bottom of African bondage. Only the abolition of imperialism can free Africa.... First, the black workers in America and the West Indies must change their own social systems. They must raise the workers to power. The workers have no interest in holding colonies in subjection; for they reap no profits.... Negroes of the world must turn their faces toward the radical international labor and socialist forces of the world. For with the present stages of African economic, political, and social development, only a world-wide proletarian revolution can achieve her liberation.... Garveyism... will set back the clock of Negro progress by cutting the Negro workers away from the proletarian liberation movement... by setting them against instead of joining them with the white workers.[33]
The dirt-eating cracker in the South did not benefit from imperialism; nor did English or Japanese workers. Negroes oppressed others when they could. Therefore, "oppression is not racial... no particular race has absolutely clean hands." Those who profited from racism and capitalism were "dignified statesmen, liberal philanthropists, devout Churchmen and prominent social and political leaders. The freedom of Africa from alien exploitation, if that is what is meant by redeeming Africa, must comprehend a defeat of these men and all the moral and physical resources they control."[34]
While urging African Americans to ally themselves with the international white proletariat, Randolph demanded that the white workers reciprocate. Many of his ideas on this subject echoed Du Bois, whose prescient 1915 essay, "African Roots of the War" (discussed above) had warned of "armed national associations of labor and capital whose aim is the exploitation of the wealth of the world outside the European circle of nations.... Successful aggression in economic expansion calls for a close union between capital and labor at home." Capitalists defused revolutionary sentiment by dividing the workers according to skill and nationality as well as race. Militant workers who threatened capitalism were appeased with social welfare legislation and by "admitting to a share of the spoils of capital only the aristocracy of labor." Du Bois predicted that "war will come from the revolutionary revolt of the lower workers" of all races.[35]
Randolph similarly recognized the dangers posed by nationalistic co-optation of an aristocracy of labor pacified with spoils from national and racial imperialism. He also warned that complicity in imperialism would destroy white unions. In South Africa (as in the United States), white unions excluded blacks, thus driving blacks into the arms of European exploiters. This showed the fallacy of white-man's unionism, internationally as well as domestically. "The native Africans rallied to the support of the British and Dutch imperialists," Randolph said. "The black Senegalese have fought bravely to uphold French imperialism. The black citizens of America have crimsoned the soil of many a battlefield to protect and extend American imperialism. The white workers, too, have done no less. But the point is that black workers will swing toward the imperialists all the more if their white brothers continue to practice their narrow, bigoted, racial proletarian imperialism toward them. And what else in the name of God is there for them to do?"[36]
Harrison, Domingo, and Briggs severely criticized white Socialist movements for condoning the colonialisms of their respective nations' master classes. Randolph himself lamented that working people of all nations readily criticized the abuses of others while ignoring their own, thus distracting attention from domestic injustices. However, he insisted that such blindness was national rather than racial in character, and criticized Das, an Indian Socialist, who claimed the opposite. Das maintained that "Asians are convinced that racial antagonism is harbored by the white race and is as determining a factor as the economic." The pro-Soviet stance of British labor, Das said, stemmed not from international working-class solidarity but from labor's desire for a Russian alliance that would preserve the British empire. British labor "uses its economic power for countries outside the British empire. It does not use it for nations within that empire." Randolph, however, claimed that "Reforms and revolutions are always popular if they are far enough away.... Capitalism has fostered national conceit to such an extent that the workers do not like to criticize their own masters. It is so comforting to note that someone else has a worse boss."[37] Ignoring the English racialization of the Irish, Randolph cited Das's own example of Ireland to show that national conceit and the ubiquitousness of familiar evils rather than racism accounted for working-class acquiescence in imperialism.
Criticizing the racism of the international socialist movement, Randolph asked "What will the British, Dutch, French, Irish and American labor movements do about the black colonial labor problem?" With the possible exception of Russia, "they have done nothing definite." Each international labor organization must "present a definite, clearcut policy on this grave issue." Randolph urged that "the black workers in America and the West Indies should force a showdown by the labor movements of their respective countries on the black colonial labor problem." This would demonstrate whether the white unions were "so tied up with the fortunes of empire that they dare not take a hand in the colonial labor debacle" and foster the unity of workers of all races. "Only a genuine class struggle world labor movement can prevent the Black peasants and workers from becoming the counter-revolutionary white guard of international imperialism."[38] Owen lamented that capitalists, unlike workers, were true internationalists. "Their income is everywhere. Not so with labor. It has not yet worked out a method of international sharing in strikes. As a rule it engages in international scabbing."[39]
Randolph detested nationalism as inherently reactionary and thus unsuitable as a vehicle for revolution. Nationalist movements aided workers only by eliminating foreign rulers, "thereby throwing the class struggle in sharp relief" and helping workers "focus their attacks upon class despotism, which arises out of the economic system of capitalism, and not out of the fact of alien rule..... Nationalist, like racial and religious conflicts, cut across class lines and confuse the vision of the workers, making them susceptible to the intrigues and cunning of insincere and unscrupulous demagogues."[40]
Other black radicals, however--including Harrison, Domingo, McKay, and Briggs--perceived nationalisms among colonized peoples, including Garvey's Afro-centrism, as appropriate vehicles for proletarian revolution, and agitated within Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association for a systematic class analysis and program. This difference eventually caused a split between Randolph and the Socialist party on one hand, and the African Blood Brotherhood and the Communist party (with which Briggs, McKay, and Messenger contributor Lovett Fort-Whiteman affiliated), on the other. In 1920, however, Randolph published Domingo's optimistic declaration that Persia, India, and Armenia were combining Bolshevism with nationalism and "girding up their loins to do battle with alien and native exploiters alike." Domingo recognized that anti-imperialist revolution was not easy, and required ideas as well as arms; bullets should be "respected and feared, but ideas are the bête noir of those who prey upon ignorance." Capitalist imperialists knew that "the peals of church bells and the chants and prayers of hypocritical clergymen" rendered their violence more effective. Similarly, "the light-giving current of Bolshevism will pass over the conducting wires of Turkish, Syrian and Arabian nationalism until it reaches the better conductor of Mohammedanism which will challenge British, French and Belgian imperialism in the heart of tropical Africa." Bolshevism was "the greatest hope to the Negro race everywhere. For opposition to imperialism makes allies of all oppressed races and those who support Socialism in Russia and the rest of Europe, must, sooner or later, support Socialism in Asia and Africa."[41]
Extensive foreign-affairs coverage in the Messenger emphasized race-related developments. Discussing U.S. aggression against Hawaii, the Philippines, Haiti, and Panama, George Frazier Miller, a black Socialist clergyman, said that "because the virus of American prejudice follows the flag and the constitution, the black man in America should be always an ardent opponent of imperialism." The Messenger, alarmed that the U.S. coveted Mexican oil and resented Mexico's ultra-democratic constitution, warned African Americans that shedding their blood in a war against Mexico would only spread white supremacy. "With America's entrance into Mexico will also go its chief attribute, race prejudice," just as the American government had exported white racism to France. Mexico, the Messenger said, treated colored peoples better than did any portion of the United States. Randolph lamented that "no power can save Mexico from American capitalism except the American workers, and they are too backward and reactionary for the nonce."[42]
The Messenger touted James Weldon Johnson's Nation articles on U.S. atrocities in Haiti and declared that "the National City Bank in New York is the government of Haiti." Randolph warned that "the case of Haiti ought to be ample proof to the Negro[es] that they can not free their race in Africa or Haiti until they are able to secure a large measure of freedom for the workers, black and white, in America and England." Condemning U.S. outrages in Santo Domingo, it said that "American hands are incarnate with the blood of her black citizens at home and subjects abroad. Least of all the World Powers, can she moralize about international justice." Similarly, the people of the Virgin Islands "were not conquered, but purchased by a treaty." Although their lives were devastated by inappropriate American laws, constitutional rights did not apply there. Considering Southern barbarities, U.S. pretensions of maintaining law and order were a cruel mockery. American diplomats pretended sympathy for oppressed peoples abroad while other Americans burned America citizens alive "at their very doors." But "it is not a question of race or color; it is a question of sugar, tobacco, oil--the raw material needed by industrial capitalists."[43]
The Messenger recognized the connection between corporate loans and U.S. military actions. "The Four Power loan [to China] will be supported by the armies and navies of the several nations," Randolph asserted. Discussing Africa, he said that "the investment bankers send millions of dollars into these undeveloped countries, 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." Nor could third-world peoples remain outside the international capitalist economy: "No small nation can accept a loan from one of the great powers, and remain independent, and when the small countries, rich in raw material, desired by the great Powers, refuse to borrow, then they, like a lamb before a lion, are gobbled up."[44]
The Messenger opposed American imperialism not only for sacrificing workers' and blacks' lives for capitalist profits, and not only for extending U.S. racism, but also for militarizing society and encouraging the suppression of dissent. Capitalists must crush opposition to avoid "revolt among those who comprise the armies and navies which act as collecting agencies for the American investors at home and abroad.... Territories unjustly governed, inequitably exploited, must repeatedly be conquered." Demonstrating the congruence of his domestic and international analyses and programs, Randolph, for similar reasons, hailed the Boston Police Strike of 1919. Recognition by police that they were merely workers was "the beginning of the end. For when one part of the working class which is used to hold down the large masses of the workers, strikes--then truly the end of capitalism is at hand. Since without the police, the militia, and the regular army, the ruling class is powerless and impotent." Capital "knows that the police will not beat up other strikers when they recognize that they are all members of the same group--simply plain working men exploited, underpaid, overworked and overcharged.... The fear of the policeman's strike was that there might be no instrument of lawlessness and disorder to carry out the whims and wishes of capital."[45]
Randolph's racialized working-class internationalism was also manifest in the Messenger's insistence that blacks make lynching an international scandal. The Messenger declared that the U.S. government was embarrassed by the public discussion even of segregation, much less lynching, because both practices undermined its unctuous pretensions to liberty, justice, and order. Perhaps influenced by Ida Wells-Barnett's previous international campaign against lynching, the Messenger declared that lynching was not a merely domestic question. "Neither the Jews nor the Irish have stood by any such foolhardy program"; instead, they had utilized international public opinion in their battles for freedom. "The problems of the Negroes should be presented to every nation in the world," and U.S. conduct, "a rape on decency," exposed. "When lynching gets to be an international question, it will be the beginning of the end." The abolitionists had appealed for international support in their campaign against slavery; both the American Revolution and the Civil War were decided in large part by the actions of foreign nations. "Carry the Negro problem out of the United States at the same time you present it in the United States. The mere fact that the country does not want the Negro problem carried to Europe is strong evidence that it ought to be carried there."[46]
Randolph strongly condemned Japan, the only non-white nation which was flexing its muscles in the international arena, when it threatened the Soviet Union. The Western imperialist powers, although fearing Japanese competition, feared the Soviet Union even more, and hence encouraged Japanese designs in Siberia. "We admonish the Negroes not to be appealed to on the ground of color," Randolph said; rather, they should support democratic forces of all colors throughout the world. "Japan, though a nation of color, will fight Socialism as savagely as any other nation.... Japan will use the color issue, however, to stir up prejudice against the white nations, and the white nations will do the same against Japan.... Japan does not want Asia for the Asiatics. She wants Asia for Japan." The Messenger warned that "the smug and oily Japanese diplomats are no different" from those of other capitalist-imperialist powers. Japan's rulers "care nothing for even the Japanese people," horribly exploited and abused other Asians, and distracted attention from their own depredations at home and abroad by shedding crocodile tears about white racism. "The real conflict is commercial and industrial," not racial.[47]
Randolph, however, sardonically noted the discrepancy between American responses to Japan and its own and its allies' actions. In 1917 he said that China, not Japan, should be awarded Kiao Chau, and predicted that Japanese occupation "may be productive of a world war with only the difference that it is carried on upon a different continent." But in 1920 he pointed to the difference between U.S. conduct and its demands upon Japan. "Witness the hysteria caused by the awarding of Shantung to Japan," he said. "We drove Spain out of the Philippines and kept what we took. Japan drove Germany out of Shantung and kept what she took. The two cases are exactly the same, one set of usurpers merely ousting another set of usurpers in both instances. We have no more right in the Philippines than Japan has in Shantung." Japan emulated the United States and sought "a Monroe Doctrine of the Far East." In November 1920 the Messenger noted that "three great oil, coal and iron owning nations, then, stand face to face, fearful of each other and hating each other."[48] The United States, it predicted, would fight Japan rather than England for oil because the U.S. could not incite race hatred against England. (This, however, accorded more importance to racism as a system of practice and belief partly independent of capitalism, than Randolph usually conceded.) When Japan condemned the U.S. practice of lynching, the Messenger, in a remarkable and prescient editorial, said that
While we are pleased to see foreign criticism of American atrocities, and we regard it as very wholesome for another nation to hold up to scorn the vices of the United States--we are nevertheless aware of the implications of the new Japanese attitude.
Under normal conditions the international thieves maintain a code of honor (or dishonor) whereby no official criticism of the other is permitted. Especially rigid is this rule with respect to the treatment of colonies, classes or races by the ruling capitalist government or empire.... lest the other might expose the criticizer as being "not without sin" itself.
When the international thieves begin this kind of thing--it means war!....
War today means preparedness--preparedness not only in munitions, but preparedness in popular opinion. The Japanese people must be made to believe that America aims to subjugate them, segregate them, lynch and burn them because they are colored. Nor is it difficult with such a concrete case as the burning at the stake in broad day light of a Negro citizen![49]
Japanese anti-lynching propaganda would instill hatred of the United States among the Japanese population and, the masters of Nippon hoped, undermine the patriotism of African Americans, who, as the poorest group of Americans, "will be the front line trench men against Japan in the case of war."[50]
The Messenger also attacked American domestic anti-Japanese racism. In late 1920 it noted that with elections approaching, "the Japanese question in America is approaching the boiling point." Slander and irrationality characterized U.S. culture, which seemingly required a scapegoat. The American population was hysterical about Reds in the North, Negroes in the South, and Japanese in the West. The immigration law of 1924 which banned Japanese immigration was, the Messenger asserted, an affront "which no people who are fit to live, will accept or tolerate."[51]
For reasons of both race and class, Randolph strongly supported the Bolshevik Revolution, "the most significant experiment in the international laboratory of world politics, sociology, and economics." He attacked Woodrow Wilson's unconstitutional war against the Soviet Union and called the Hoover relief mission "a form of counter-revolution via the stomach." In 1922, when Emma Goldman denounced Bolshevik tyranny, the Messenger asserted that "we need not take her ravings against Soviet Russia seriously" because she, as an anarchist, opposed all government. He viewed the New Economic Policy as a necessary consolidation of the Revolution's gains, but worried that it might erode socialism. Randolph also hailed the success of the Bolsheviks in stamping out anti-Jewish pogroms, "little different from the mob violence and lynching perpetrated upon Negroes," as demonstrating that anti-Semitic violence originated in capitalist exploitation and manipulation. Randolph blamed pogroms on "the capitalists and reactionaries" upset at Jewish radicalism and asserted that "the Jewish people have been fairer and squarer in their treatment of Negroes, than any other people in the world."[52] In 1923 Randolph noted that persecutions and massacres of Jews were on the rise in much of Europe outside the Soviet Union and decried the activities of "Hittler" in Germany.
Randolph's ecumenical internationalism encompassed everyone, not merely blacks and Jews. Randolph vigorously supported the cause of the Irish, a people not known (in the United States) for their progressive racial views. The Messenger also denounced British atrocities in India, including the massacre of civilians by aircraft, machine guns, and tanks. It blamed English rule for a famine that killed thirty-two million people in a single year, even while Britain exported wheat and rice from India "for the maintenance of the English army and the manufacture of liquor to keep Europe intoxicated." It praised Gandhi (although Randolph viewed him as a mere nationalist) and advocated that Southern blacks adopt his "spinning wheel" method of economic self-sufficiency. It favored independence for India and denounced U.S. efforts to deport Indian political activists to torture and death at the hands of the British authorities.[53]
Vehemently opposing what he termed the "League of White Nations" as a counter-revolutionary conspiracy that would plunder workers and peoples of color throughout the world, Randolph satirized the League's attitude as implying that "there must be no more Belgiums. There may be Congo massacres of innocent Africans by Belgians, though. There may be Memphis and Waco (Texas) burnings of Negroes."[54] Owen, in a detailed analysis of the charter of the League of Nations, called the organization "a league of white capitalist governments against the peoples of all the nations. The object of its members is to suppress and exploit white, black and brown working men, women and children everywhere, of every nationality, religion, race or color. It is the Capitalist International suavely and subtly set forth in saccharine language.... [and] a living challenge of capitalist internationalism against working-class internationalism." Owen lamented that although the population of the Congo had fallen from twenty million to eight million under Belgian rule, it was to remain in European hands. Other nations were promised eventual freedom "when they have reached a certain stage. That stage we understand is their willingness to maintain capitalist and bourgeois governments for themselves. If they desire to be democratic or Bolshevistic, it is a conclusive presumption that they are not prepared for self-government!" The provisions regarding equal opportunities for trade meant "equal opportunity [for Britain, France, the United States, and Italy] to rob the natives of their land and labor.... This is the real motive power behind the whole League of Nations idea." The League or its members would "break and suppress strikes" and "terrorize the workers" much as the national guard did in the United States.[55]
In addition to the working-class strategies of unionization, Socialist voting, and internationalism, Randolph advocated strictly racial forms of mass action. The Messenger urged black self-defense against white violence, black tenants' leagues and consumer cooperatives, and the boycotting and picketing of segregated schools and of racist businesses, landlords, and films. Randolph and Owen also demanded full social equality, including the right of intermarriage.
The anti-black pogroms of the war era, starting with the East St. Louis massacre of 1917, soon turned into "race riots" characterized by black self-defense. Differentiating lynchings and pogroms, where blacks remained passive victims, from race riots, where blacks fought back, Owen said that "hereafter Race Riots will, as they ought, be the order of the day. Negroes are going to make their dying a costly investment. No bands will be played. No women and children will be peddling souvenirs. The picnic phase of Negro lynching is drawing to a close.... Fire is the impartial force of nature which knows no race or color line. It will burn a white man's house just as readily and quickly as a Negro's house...."[56]
The Messenger extolled black resistance for a variety of reasons, predicting that as Afro-Americans had gone thousands of miles to fight the foreign Hun, so they would "enforce the laws which American Huns are trampling in the dust." The Messenger stressed that self-defense against violent attack was both legal and universally acknowledged as justified, but added that "we stand by the law, when the law stands by us, and when the law does not stand by us, we stand by such principles as those of Gabriel, Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, and John Brown."[57] The Messenger occasionally approved the execution of Negro "leaders" who counseled surrender, and of white policemen who stood idly by while blacks were assaulted.
The Messenger reprinted Mckay's incendiary poem "If We Must Die" and touted "the curative values inherent in mass action, revolvers and other lethal devices when applied to social diseases." It declared that "the Negro must develop the will to resist, to sacrifice his life in protection of his children, his wife, his mother and sister, his home and his right to live like any other man.... It is far nobler to perish fighting back than to be driven, hunted and murdered like rats by Southern barbarians." Blacks confronted "not a choice between life and death, but a choice between dying, fighting for your home and family, and being stamped to death, lynched and ground into a red mush of mud like cringing craven curs."[58]
More often, however, the Messenger argued that active self-defense would discourage white violence and save black lives. "The appeal to the conscience of the South has been long and futile...." it said. "The black man has no rights which will be respected unless the black man enforces that respect." The Messenger noted many instances where black self-defense had intimidated cowardly white mobs, and asserted that "Chicago would have been another East St. Louis except for the Negroes stopping the rioters." The Chicago riot "will make the future relations between the races decidedly better" because white friends would see the danger posed to the social fabric by white violence, and white racists would fear and respect blacks. White governments would forestall black armed self-defense by defending Negroes themselves. In 1920 the governor of Kentucky stopped a lynch mob with bullets; in 1923 Oklahoma's governor declared martial law to suppress the KKK and urged citizens to kill in self-defense, promising to pardon anyone convicted as a result of such self-protection. The Messenger attributed these actions to black militancy: blacks would stop the lynchers if the government did not, and the ensuing disorder would cause a flight of capital and labor from the afflicted area. The Messenger said that "the march of progress has been chiefly marked by a disregard of the law and order of every age" and that "the New Negro of both sexes has resolved to make America a fit place for himself to live in, or else we shall make it an unfit hell hole for anybody to live in." In Northern cities, throughout the South, and on the West Coast, it said, many police officers were virulently racist (often enough members of the KKK), so blacks could not depend upon official protection. Not only Negroes, but Jews, Catholics, foreigners, and union members "must be well armed, must shoot to kill any one who encroaches upon their lives."[59]
Despite his doubts about official protection, however, Owen did believe that blacks could enlist the capitalist state in defense of their rights. The class interests of the ruling minority, he said, would trump the racist inclinations of ruling-class and working-class whites alike. Active self-defense and retaliatory violence would lead to much greater losses of life and property, which would lessen property values and inhibit investment in the South. Northern industrial capitalism, which had overthrown Southern feudalism during the Civil War, was now invading the South itself. "If life and property become too insecure, labor will not remain in the South, and of course capital will not invest, which means no development," Owen said. Capitalists, including life and fire insurance companies, "can get Congress busy, not only in passing but enforcing a federal law against lynching, against destruction of property or anything of that type, within a few hours. They can do in a minute what all of us, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People included, would take half a century to do." Similarly, Randolph predicted that black Northern migration would improve the conditions of Southern blacks because Southern whites would modify their racism to retain black laborers. "Profits are dearer to Southern plutocrats than are mobocrats," he asserted.[60]
Owen recognized that armed black self-defense would alarm the majority of whites who condoned anti-black terrorism while taking no direct part in it. "Race riots will arouse the inert, lethargic, sleepy, indolent neutral who usually takes no risks himself, but nevertheless doesn't care who kills the 'nigger.' Walking along, rather innocently, some Negro sniper will shift him into another world one of these race riot days. He constitutes the great bulk of the so-called best white Southerners which never lynches, but just acquiesces and fails to restrain those who do." Owen might have added--as the Messenger often noted--that those "best" whites actively encouraged lynching by fostering segregation, peonage, disfranchisement, and other badges of Negro inferiority.[61]
Though the Messenger said that black policemen would lessen violence by quickly arresting white terrorists, Randolph and Owen realized that systematic change was imperative. Black policemen would brutalize Afro-American prisoners as much as would white ones, just as white police maltreated white suspects. "Nor is the reason far to find. Negroes, like whites, desire advancement. If they are in a system which rewards brutality and penalizes gentleness--then naturally they will, like the whites, follow the course which leads to advancement." The Messenger warmly defended Luther Boddy, a black suspect who, fearing a repetition of the savage beatings he had previously suffered at the hands of the police, killed two detectives while in custody. Boddy was "just a young man who has been unfortunate in life. He has been made a criminal by the police, to a great extent."[62]
Organized self-defense by "Race Defense Legions," recruited especially from among ex-soldiers, were warranted. "Under no circumstances should you Southern Negroes surrender your arms," the Messenger exhorted. "Do not get excited, but face your work with cold resolution." Northern blacks should help their Southern brethren defend themselves. The Messenger also demanded that black communities organize the systematic, professional legal defense of those placed on trial for defending themselves against white violence. It demanded pardons for the surviving Houston "martyrs to racial self-respect, manhood and decency," who had killed white attackers. Even if legally guilty, they were justified because of "the provocation, abuse, insult and calumny heaped upon them in the hell-hole of Texas."[63]
For the Messenger, black self-defense was a metaphor for social revolution itself. Only revolution could overthrow racism by abolishing the deadly competition between the races. Law and order need not imply freedom or justice; rather, "the march of progress has been chiefly marked by a disregard of the law and order of every age." Owen said that "today we are on the threshold of a new revolution--the revolution from capitalism to socialism. With it may come the shedding of blood just as the revolution from slavery to capitalism in the United States was accompanied by the mass murder of the Civil War. Whatever the condition of transition, the labor and Socialist movement is making every effort for peace." The same was true of African Americans fighting white oppression. "We are pacific only on matters which can be settled peacefully," the Messenger said.[64]
When black lives were not immediately at stake--and sometimes when they were--Randolph advocated that African Americans fight discrimination by means of boycotts, picketing, rent strikes, and consumer cooperatives. "A blow in the pocketbook is sometimes as effective as a bullet in the belly," the Messenger proclaimed. Blacks could use bullets and boycotts simultaneously. "It is not a wise policy to supply your enemy with a club to beat you down with," the Messenger said. "And what can be a greater weapon in the hands of your enemy than your own hard dollars? With your dollars he sends his children to colleges, while yours are in the cotton fields." Randolph said that "when race prejudice ceases to pay, it will be thrown aside.... Negroes can make race prejudice a liability with the boycott." Randolph cited as evidence the boycott of a major Jacksonville insurance company in 1920 because one of its agents had led a lynch mob. Crippled by the boycott, the company begged for black patronage, hired black agents, and bade its white agents treat their black customers with respect.[65]
Three years later, the Messenger praised the black parents of Springfield, Ohio, who blocked a proposed segregated school by a boycott, mass picketing, a willingness to accept arrest, and a court challenge. "The real men and women of Springfield have set an example worthy of emulation in all sections of the country where efforts are made to inaugurate separate Negro schools. Fight the effort to death. Fight Negro preachers, politicians, editors, anybody and everybody--black or white--who attempts to impose a badge of inferiority upon your children." The Messenger heartily endorsed an NAACP picketing of D.W. Griffith's racist film, Birth of a Nation: "This modern method of fighting race prejudice... is far more effective than the bourgeois, respectable and dilettante, but futile plan of dispatching notes to mayors and governors." The Messenger hailed "this trend toward a methodology of power--mass action." Randolph's Friends of Negro Freedom had a boycott committee that would publish an "unfair" list of businessmen who abused or overcharged blacks, and would boycott and picket theatrical productions that stigmatized them. Randolph also advocated rent strikes, recognizing that, although tenants would save little money before they were evicted, such strikes were a way to publicize substandard housing and rent gouging. The Friends of Negro Freedom had a Tenants' Committee, from which landlords and real estate agents were excluded.[66]
George Schuyler, a satirist and political commentator who had his own column in the Messenger by 1923, likewise said that consumer spending constituted "the economic ballot." Many blacks despaired of effecting change through occasional voting, but in their spending habits "they can vote every day in the year. They can also be sure that their vote will be counted and respected. This vote, this daily ballot, is an economic one--the dollar bill. The cash register is the ballot box.... The economic ballot is not a cure-all, but it is a cure-most.... There is no use complaining when such power resides in your hands every day of the year," and is perforce used, whether consciously and intelligently or not.[67]
The Messenger viewed the consumer cooperative, "organizing the economic power of the workers at the point of consumption," as the ultimate form of boycott. Blacks, exploited more viciously than whites both as workers and as consumers--they were paid less than whites and charged more for rent and other necessities--would especially benefit from cooperatives. Black-owned cooperatives would save money, keep precious funds within the community, and employ educated blacks disdained by white businesses; they would both cultivate black leadership and train the black masses in the democratic administration of their own affairs. Randolph stressed that black cooperatives were based on both race and class because black consumers and tenants "are exploited as much by Negroes as they are by whites." Randolph hoped that cooperatives would finance their own halls, schools, and libraries with some of their savings.[68]
Randolph's most incendiary cause (in the eyes of homicidal, sexually insecure whites) was social equality, including intermarriage. "The acceptance of laws against intermarriage is tantamount to the acceptance of the stigma of inferiority," the Messenger said. Randolph argued for the right of intermarriage on the grounds of individual rights: "We favor intermarriage between any sane, grown persons who desire to marry--whatever their race or color." He also claimed that "society is the beneficiary of race miscegenation" because interbreeding improved the stock. At any rate, "race purity is both a myth and without any value. There is no pure race in the world."[69]
Randolph and Owen recognized that whites did not truly oppose miscegenation if it was done on their terms--white men and black women, often underwritten by coercion or rape. (Similarly, despite all the hysteria about close association of the races, racist whites would live in close proximity to and intimacy with blacks, as long as the latter were slaves or servants.) Laws against intermarriage, in fact, encouraged white male depredations on black females even as they incited the lynching of black males. White men used their economic, legal, and physical power to impose themselves upon black women, but the laws against intermarriage freed them of all responsibility for their offspring and their black consorts. White men could therefore abuse black women and abandon their children with impunity. J.A. Rogers, who also wrote for Garvey's Negro World, claimed that "intermixture is going on perhaps as much as in the days of slavery" and that a large proportion of white men who did business in black neighborhoods kept black mistresses. Essentializing a feminine trait associated with socially imposed economic dependence, Rogers said that "Since race intermixture is going on, and since it is likely to go on as it is the nature of women, regardless of race or class, to look up to and seek the favor of the men with the superior power and wealth, the Negro will have to choose between bastardy and agitation for a law making marriage among all citizens legal." Randolph and Owen sardonically noted that "as for social equality, there are about five million mulattoes in the United States. This is a product of semi-social equality. It shows that social equality galore exists after dark, and we warn you that we expect to have social equality in the day as well as after dark." Legalizing intermarriage, of course, would allow, rather than compel, interracial unions. "Inasmuch as no law requires any woman under any circumstances to marry a man whom she does not will or want to marry, these laws narrow themselves down to the prevention of white woman marrying colored men whom they desire to marry."[70]
In September 1922 the Messenger tacitly endorsed violence against white men who debauched black women, reprinting, as the "month's best editorial," a piece from the Pittsburgh American. (Randolph probably reprinted it tongue in cheek, because of its exposure of white male hypocrisy. Its implicit view of women as trophies reflecting male status, and its assumption that some women deserved no respect, contradicted Randolph's moderate feminist views.) "Spurious Social Equality" said that black men should treat white men who consorted with black women just as white men treated black men who associated with white women. Black men must abolish the double standard. "They should be as solicitous about Negro women as white men are about white women when they consort with a man of the other race.... If Negro women are to be debauched in white clubs by white men we demand the right to debauch white women in Negro clubs.... There can be no social relation between white men and colored women that cannot exist between Negro men and white women. We must insist on this and be prepared to enforce it. We must do away with these infamous practices born of slavery. White men, as a rule, have no respect for the best Negro women. They have got to be made to respect them."[71]
Randolph, Owen, and the Messenger, therefore, propounded a distinct form of Socialism, universal and yet specifically addressing racial concerns in a manner which (they hoped) would unite workers of all races throughout the world. In common with white Socialist publications, the Messenger advocated unionism, voting, and internationalism, albeit with a distinctive emphasis which focused on specific oppressions afflicting Afro-Americans and their implications for white workers. It also explicitly advocated strictly racial forms of mass action largely ignored by the white Socialist press. However, Randolph and his cohorts understood the resistance their message would encounter among Afro-Americans and whites of all classes.
Notes:
[1] "Should Black Workers Join White Unions," TM, September 1920; "The Negro Radicals," TM, October 1919; "The Miners' Strike and the Negro," TM, February 1920.
[2] "Strike Influenza," TM, December 1919; "Strikes," TM, July 1923. In the former article Randolph declared that "England will arrive at a peaceful new order, while America will reach it through blood and tears simply because American capital is the most hidebound, reactionary, archaic, narrow and visionless of any similar group in the world--Japan not excepted." See also "The High Cost of Living," TM, September 1919.
[3] Newsome, "The Negro Woman in the Trade Union Movement," TM, July 1923; "Our Contributors," TM, July 1923. Ms. Newsome worked for the Amalgamated Clothing Workers. In "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," TM, March 1919, Randolph and Owen said "We cannot work side by side in factory, field and office and then maintain that we cannot sit side by side in restaurant, theatre, and public conveyance."
[4] "Reasons Why White and Black Workers Should Combine in Labor Unions," TM, July 1918, reprinted as part of "The Negro and the New Social Order," TM, March 1919; APR, "The New Negro: What Is He?," TM, August 1920; "Railway Clerks for Russian Recognition," TM, June 1922.
[5] "Railway Clerks for Russian Recognition, TM, June 1922; "Organized Labor and Negro Workers," TM, March 1920; "The New Negro--What is He?" TM, August 1920; "Unionism of Negro Workers," October 1919; "The A.F. of L.'s Convention," TM, December 1924.
[6] "Unionization of Negro Workers," TM, October 1919; "The Negro Radicals," TM, October 1919.
[7] "Negro Workers: The AFL or IWW," TM, July 1919. The Messenger added four paragraphs to the beginning, but otherwise left the article unchanged, including its passing reference to the IWW's having been founded "twelve years ago," appropriate for 1917 but not 1919. Strangely, the Messenger did not credit Haywood with authorship. Haywood had assumed the persona of a black worker in writing the article, so that the Messenger could print it as if it had been written by one of the editors. Although the article is not in Randolph's style, the fact that Haywood spoke as if he were a black worker raises the possibility that Randolph or some other African American (perhaps Harrison) actually wrote it.
[8] "The Forum of Local 8," TM, August 1921; "The Task of Local 8--The Marine Transport Workers of Philadelphia," TM, October 1921.
[9] Fletcher, "The Negro and Organized Labor," TM, July 1923; CO, "White Supremacy in Organized Labor," TM, September 1923. In fact, the Messenger had stated this idea on numerous occasions in the past, as in "Messenger Work Bears Fruit," April 1922, or "Australia to Give Up the Color Line," August 1922.
[10] CO, "White Supremacy in Organized Labor," TM, September 1923.
[11] "The Negro Hotel Worker," TM, November 1920; "The Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, June 1922; "The Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, July 1922; "Sending 5,000 Negro Miners to Break the German Miners' Strike," TM, April 1923; Fletcher, "The Negro and Organized Labor," TM, July 1923.
[12] "The Negro--A Menace to Radicalism," TM, May-June 1919; CO, "Labor Leaders and Negro Leaders in Council," TM, July 1918.
[13] "Negro Labor Organizers," TM, June 1923.
[14] "Reasons Why White and Black Workers Should Combine in Labor Unions," TM, July 1918; "The Negro and the New Social Order," TM, March 1919.
[15] "Report of the Resolutions Committee of the National Brotherhood Workers of America," TM, December 1919; "The National Brotherhood Association," TM, August 1919; Spero and Harris, The Black Worker, 118-119, 395.
[16] "A United Negro Trades," TM, July 1923; Fletcher, "The Negro and Organized Labor," July 1923; Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 118-119, 395.
[17] "Strikes," TM, September 1919 (this was just before the Elaine massacre); "Organized Labor and Negro Workers," TM, March 1920; "Why and How to Stop Negroes From Being Driven Out of the South," TM, August 1920.
[18] Summary of the APR and CO pamphlet, "The Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races," TM November 1917; "Migration Will Stop Lynching in the South," TM August 1923.
[19] "Migration Will Stop Lynching in the South," TM, August 1923; "Should Black Workers Join White Unions?," TM, September 1920; "Letter to the People's Council," TM, November 1917.
[20] "The Deportation of Agitators," TM, March 1919; "The Fight of the Negro Worker," TM, August 1920.
[21] "Propaganda," TM, February 1920; "Where Labor is Cheap," TM, June 1922; CO, "White Supremacy and Organized Labor," TM, September 1923.
[22] "The Right and Left Wing Interpreted," TM, May-June 1919; "The High Cost of Living," TM, September 1919; "The Plumb Plan," TM, October 1919.
[23] "The New York Campaign," TM, November 1921; "Chicago Political Labor Conference," TM, March 1922; "The Passing of the Republican and Democratic Parties," TM, April-May 1920; "The Independent Political Council," TM, November 1917.
[24] "Negro Mass Movement," TM, May-June 1919; "Who Shall Be Mayor?," TM, November 1917; "The Negro in Politics," TM, July 1918; "Should Negroes Be Socialists?," TM, October 1920; "Who's Who: Assemblyman E.A. Johnson," TM, July 1919.
[25] APR, "American Politics," TM, February 1923; "Who's Who: Professor Harry H. Jones," TM, April-May 1920; "Republicans and the Jim-Crow Car," TM, February 1920; "Debs and the Negro," TM, November 1920; "Why Negro Republicans Should Vote the Socialist Ticket," TM, November 1920.
[26] "The Liberty Party," TM, November 1920; "A Negro Party," TM, October 1920; "The Garvey Movement: A Promise or a Menace," TM, December 1920.
[27] "The Passing of the Republican and Democratic Parties," TM, April-May 1920; "Again the Dyer Bill," TM, May 1922. The IWW opposed electioneering and voting as useless or worse, and viewed political parties as instruments of capitalist hegemony. Ironically, the failure of the Dyer Anti-Lynching bill, which never became law, helps validate this view.
[28] "NAACP Political Logic," TM, November 1920; "The Labor World," TM, June 1922; "Wages Reductions," TM, August 1922; "Who's Who: La Follette," TM, September 1920; "Du Bois and the Crisis," TM, September 1919; "The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill," TM, January 1922; "U.S. Supreme Court Declares Child Labor Law Unconstitutional," TM, August 1922; "Lilly-Whitism," TM, August 1920.
[29] "NAACP Political Logic," TM, November 1920; "The Labor World," TM, June 1922; "Wages Reductions," TM, August 1922; "Who's Who: La Follette," TM, September 1920; "Du Bois and the Crisis," TM, September 1919; "The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill," TM, January 1922; "U.S. Supreme Court Declares Child Labor Law Unconstitutional," TM, August 1922; "Lilly-Whitism," TM, August 1920.
[30] "The Dyer Anti-Lynching Bill," TM, January 1922; "Messenger Work Bears Fruit," TM, April 1922.
[31] "Negro Elective Representation," TM, November 1917; "Meyer London Demands Justice for the Negro," TM, February 1922.
[32] APR, "Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, April-May 1920.
[33] APR, "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922.
[34] "Africa for the Africans," TM, September 1920.
[35] DB, "The African Roots of the War," Atlantic Monthly, May 1915, as reprinted in Philip S. Foner, W.E.B. Du Bois Speaks: Speeches and Addresses, 1890-1919 (New York, 1970), 244-257.
[36] APR, "Revolt in South Africa," TM, March 1922.
[37] APR, "National Paradoxes," TM, October 1920.
[38] "Revolt in South Africa," TM, March 1922.
[39] CO, "International Scabbing," TM, December 1922.
[40] APR, "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922.
[41] Domingo, "Will Bolshevism Free America?," TM, September 1920.
[42] Miller, "Uncle Sam No Land Grabber (?)," TM, May-June 1919; "Why Negroes Should Be Interested in Mexico," TM, July 1919; "The Mexican Revolution," TM, August 1920.
[43] "Haiti," TM, October 1920; "Haiti," TM, March 1922; "Santo Domingo Protests," TM, August 1921; "The Virgin Islands," TM, February 1923; "Americanism," TM, September 1920.
[44] "Four Power Loan and China," TM, August 1920; "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, February 1923; APR, "Black Zionism," TM, January 1922.
[45] "A Republic on the Imperial Highway," TM, October 1921; "Strikes," September 1919; "Wilson Congratulates Coolidge," TM, February 1920.
[46] "Lynching a Domestic Question," TM, July 1919; "Internationalism," TM, August 1919.
[47] "Japan and the Far East," TM, July 1918; "Trend of the Times," TM, March 1919; "Japan and the Race Issue, TM, May June 1919.
[48] APR and CO,"Terms of the Peace and the Darker Races" (New York, 1917); "Americanism," TM, September 1920; "Four Power Loan and China," TM, August 1920; "The Japanese Problem," TM, November 1920.
[49] "Japan on American Lynching," TM, August 1921.
[50] ibid.
[51] "The Japanese Problem," TM, November 1920; "Japan," June 1924.
[52] "Get Out of Russia!," TM, March 1919; "Hoover and Relief for Soviet Russia," TM, September 1921; "Emma Goldman on Bolshevism," TM, April 1922; "Jewish Pogroms," TM, July 1919.
See also "The Cloakmakers Strike" (TM, December 1921): "The Jews are the freest of all from race and color prejudice. They have more successfully resisted American race and color prejudice than any national or racial group in the country." In "Harvard University and Racial Discrimination" (August 1922), the Messenger complained that President Lowell had instituted quotas for Jews and segregation for blacks. "Fortunately, however, crimes and evils, first visited upon one people, eventually spread to others. It is like a disease; the Negro has it today, the white man tomorrow. It knows no race or color line. We have no prejudice against Jews, but we are glad to see them being excluded along with the Negro" because this mobilized them against oppression. Jews had money but few numbers; blacks had numbers but little money. An alliance between the two groups was therefore helpful.
The Messenger often made this same point about whites in general, and sardonically rejoiced when whites suffered evils previously confined to blacks because this caused the whites to suddenly take an interest in those evils. "The Deportation of Agitators" (TM, March 1919), used the lynching of Leo Frank and the Bisbee deportations as examples of atrocities that evoked white concern. The lynching of Robert Prager during World War I was another example. In January 1923 ("Civil Liberties Passing"), the Messenger described lynchings, tar-and-featherings, floggings, and mob deportations, many of which victimized whites. "We are simply overjoyed to see the lesson brought home to all races," it said. In February 1923 ("Lynching Labor"), the Messenger repeated the disease analogy and said that "so long as only Negroes fell before the vicious and brutal fury of the mob, the conscience of white America was not aroused." In May 1923 the Messenger ("Peonage in Florida"), described the death of white Martin Tabert in a Florida peonage farm.
[53] "Civil War in Germany," TM, October 1923; "Deportation of Hindu Political Refugees," TM, March 1920; "Gandhi and Non-Violent Resistance," TM, May 1922.
[54] "Peace Conference," TM, March 1919; See also "The League of Nations," November 1920.
[55] Ironically, Randolph himself said that "the fact that we desire 'Africa for the Africans' does not imply that we recognize the ability of the Africans to assume the responsibilities and duties of a sovereign nation, at the present." Randolph compared Africans to boys who, although now still children, would some day become men. This was not due to any racial inferiority, however: "Numberless causes are responsible for the backwardness and unprogressiveness of Africa." "The Only Way to Redeem Africa," TM, November 1922. Randolph used this argument against Garvey, and also said that "Africa is a continent, not a nation" and consisted of many religions and groups.
[56] CO, "Peonage, Riots, and Lynching," TM, August 1921.
[57] "How to Stop Lynching," TM, August 1919; "Our Mr. Fortune," TM, July 1919.
[58] "If We Must Die," TM, September 1919; "The New Migration," TM, April 1923.
[59] "How to Stop Lynching," TM, August 1919; "Negro Leaders Compromise as Usual," TM, September 1919; "A Report on the Chicago Race Riot by an Eye-Witness," TM, September 1919; "Law and Order. In Whose Interest?," TM, October 1919; "KKK Reorganizing," TM, November 1920; "The Ku Klux Klan: How to Fight It," TM, November 1921.
[60] CO, "Peonage, Riots, and Lynching," TM, August 1921; APR, "A New Negro Labor Exodus North," TM, March 1923. Ellis (Surveillance, 19-20) and Jordan (Newspapers, 101), claim that migration North did improve the conditions of blacks who remained in the South, at least marginally.
[61] CO, "Peonage, Riots, and Lynching," TM, August 1921. Ernest McKinney said that "the mob uses a direct method and lynches while the other, refraining from and deprecating violence, incites to violence by practicing segregation and discrimination." McKinney, A Vanishing Conservatism," TM, October 1924.
[62] "Who's Who. Luther Boddy," TM, February 1922. The Messenger added that "more than casual attention must be given to an alleged murderer who, when asked what he desired to read, called for Milton's Paradise Lost."
[63] "How to Stop Lynching," TM, August 1919; "The Houston Martyrs," TM, December 1923.
[64] "Du Bois on Revolution," TM, September 1921; "How to Stop Lynching," TM, August 1919.
[65] "The New Migration," TM, April 1923; "Jacksonville Negroes Boycott Big White Insurance Company," TM, March 1920. White agents now took their hats off when in African-American homes, and called their black customers "Mr." and "Mrs."
[66] "Springfield, Ohio," TM, February 1923; "Picketing and the NAACP," TM, July 1921; "The Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, August 1922. The Tenants' Committee would also educate the tenants recently arrived from the rural South: "Raising their aesthetic and property-preservation tastes is rightly a part of the work of the tenants' league."
[67] GSS, "The Economic Ballot," TM, September 1923.
[68] "Cooperation," TM, October 1920; "Negro to Organize Tenants and Cooperative League," TM, January 1918.
[69] "The New Negro--What Is He?," TM, August 1920; APR and CO, "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," TM, March 1919. Randolph and Owen also claimed that the purity or near-purity of the Native Americans might account for their near extermination. (To the extent that the geographic and hence genetic isolation of New World peoples rendered them defenseless against European diseases, this is in a sense partly accurate.)
[70] Rogers, "Critical Excursions and Reflections," TM, June 1924; APR and CO, "The Negro and the New Social Order: Reconstruction Program of the American Negro," TM, March 1919; CO, "Harding at Birmingham," TM, December 1921. Ironically, because both Rogers and Owen assumed that women were attracted to richer and more powerful males--Owen attributed this partly to the sexual initiative of the male and partly to the slave psychology of the oppressed females--the economic status of black males in racist America would not have made them attractive to white females. Owen asserted that prohibition creates desire, thus drawing white women and black men together; but he failed to notice that this attraction would disappear if such unions were legally and socially acceptable.
[71] "Month's Best Editorial: Spurious Social Equality," reprinted in the Messenger, September 1922. Garvey, as will be discussed below, also praised black men who assaulted whites who consorted with black women.