Chapter 7: THE MESSENGER CHALLENGES AFRO-AMERICAN VALUES AND INSTITUTIONS
Although Antonio Gramsci had not yet elaborated his concept of hegemony, American radicals of the 1910s and 1920s incessantly discussed the seemingly non-violent institutional and cultural mechanisms by which ruling groups persuaded their victims of the rightness and inevitability of their own oppression. Indeed, radical intellectuals and activists of all persuasions viewed overcoming ruling-class hegemony (which Randolph and other Messenger writers termed "slave psychology") as one of their central missions. Although Randolph, unlike Du Bois, searched for the social base for his program in the black (and white) working class, rather than the "talented tenth," he did posit a major role for intellectuals. Their role, he believed, consisted in overcoming the hegemony that the master class and master race exercised over the workers of both races. "The ruling class never stops with the labor and ballot of the worker," Randolph said; "it reaches out for his mind, his very soul." He recognized that "the beneficiaries of a social order strive through force or deception to secure the acquiescence and support of the victims of the social order." Dissipating these hegemonic influences was the task of radicals who discovered "the forces which determine human actions and human institutions" so that they could "direct human actions to socially constructive ends."[1] However, Messenger editors found that their counter-hegemonic project placed them at war with the major institutions and values that sustained Afro-American culture and identity.
The Messenger complained that the capitalists assiduously propagandized blacks, censoring and controlling their press, pulpits, and schools. "Through contributions to Negro schools, churches, and charitable institutions, [the capitalists] are impressing him with the idea that they are his real benefact[ors] and friends." The Negro, therefore, backed the capitalists in the class war: "Through ignorance or error the opposition of the Negro to the very movements which are calculated to achieve his economic, political emancipation, is being effected by big, hand-picked Negro leaders--and the plutocratic interests of this country.... This is why, unless the Negro workers are unionized and the Negro public educated as to the nature and aims of radical movements, the Negro constitutes a definite menace to radicalism in America." The AFL had ignored Negroes or actively opposed their entry into the unions and labor market; and the Negro "sees workingmen forming the mobs of the South and opposes unions on the grounds that workingmen lynch him." Furthermore, "no systematic effort has been made to arouse the interest and enlist the support of the Negro by radical labor and political organizations, with the exception, only recently, of the Socialist party in New York."[2]
Capitalist power, AFL racism, and radical neglect enormously complicated the African-American radical intellectual's task. "The Negro radical's task is doubly huge and difficult," Randolph said, entailing the education of the workers, radicals, and intellectuals of both races. Blacks "must learn to differentiate between white capitalists and white workers, as yet they only see white men against black men." (Elsewhere Randolph lamented that blacks did distinguish between white workers and white capitalists--in favor of the capitalists.) Randolph necessarily opposed the entire panoply of Afro-American institutions, leaders, and culture. The New Negro, he said, "is a Socialist upon the political field and a union man on the industrial field. While fighting the system of capitalism, and criticizing the social order, the New Negro mercilessly criticizes his own race, its leadership, its church."[3] This was hardly a formula for easy success.
George S. Schuyler, a regular Messenger columnist, presented what Randolph called "a basic analysis of economic determinism in the realm of politics" in his brilliant "Politics and the Negro." Schuyler said that productive relations "form the basis upon which are built up the laws, customs, morals and theology of any human group"; those with power of life and death over us become dominant. "All must bow to the owning class, for all must eat, sleep, and clothe their bodies. For this arrangement to continue, it must be considered just by the masses whose toil accumulates wealth for the owning class. The work of keeping the great majority loyal to the owning-class philosophy is entrusted to the judiciary, pedagogues, politicians, and theologians." These "political retainers of the ruling class" must eat, and hence sell themselves to the highest bidder. "Social and economic pressure, aided by the police power of the state, is generally sufficient to keep the number of dissenters at a safe minimum. A certain amount of criticism and reformism is allowed when the dominance of the owning-class and their intellectual police is firmly established, but the lid of repression is clamped down when any crisis impends." Then liberals either join in the witch-hunt, go to jail, or "hibernate until the country is safe for dissenters." Discontent was "given voice and organized by agitators [and] intellectual heretics descended by desertion or ousting from the ruling class." The master class allowed only tepid reforms except during times of crises such as wars; but the rulers disagreed within themselves and contested for control of the government. "The masses, drugged by the mental opiates administered to them from every side, are the pawns in the political contest for privilege.... Since the radical organizations with an intelligent program make only appeals to reason, their slow growth is easily understood." Politics was a charade of meaningless elections, bogus debate, and crowd-pleasing fanfare. "The masses feverishly await another opportunity to vote out one representative of business and vote in another."[4]
Schuyler noted that 2 percent of the American population owned 65 percent of the wealth, 33 percent owned 30 percent, and the bottom 65 percent owned 5 percent. Before an equitable redistribution of wealth was possible, the working class must organize industrially and politically as the capitalists did. Capitalist-induced racism, however, thwarted class unity. Schuyler believed that racial antagonism in America, if uncultivated, would dissipate as it largely had (he claimed) in South America. However, the competition between slave and free labor, and, after formal emancipation, the divisions between black and white workers fostered by the capitalists and their intellectual police and mercenaries, deliberately divided the workers. Only a united class could overthrow capitalism. "This work can only be done by the workers themselves," Schuyler said. "Those who have banished the owning-class philosophy from their minds."[5]
The Messenger also attacked the racial hegemony by which blacks considered themselves inferior to whites. "Slave psychology," generated by both cultural persuasion and economic pressure, was "a tendency of a race which is dubbed inferior to feel especially honored by the praise or the association of the allegedly superior race." In the United States, slave psychology had both class and racial origins; light skin was "a mark of the leisure class." Black children were taught to deify everything white. They were given white dolls, worshipped a white Christ, and taught to exalt white historical figures. Therefore, "the psychology of emulating [the] color and hair of white peoples or worshipping all their qualities, early formed by colored children and girls in particular, is the fault of the Negro parents themselves.... Real history must be taught--history of everybody. You cannot continue to teach children only of the virtues of white men, and only of the slavery of Negroes, and then expect them not to feel that white people are superior."[6]
Randolph and his cohorts faced formidable obstacles in their counter-hegemonic project. African Americans, as among the worst oppressed people in the United States, naturally sought refuge, solace, pride, and practical benefits in their indigenous institutions--churches, businesses, newspapers, fraternal societies, popular culture, and self-help organizations. Afro-American Socialists, however, like their white allies, forcefully attacked the entire infrastructure of their potential constituency, deeming most "Negro" organizations as instruments of both capitalist and white hegemony. The Messenger repeatedly attacked "the ignoramuses who edit most of the Negro papers, the pedagogical poltroons who teach history in most Negro colleges, the pygmy-minded preachers who infest many of the Negro churches, the political prostitutes who ply their trade for petty gain, the social work yeggmen who fatten off the bodies of human derelicts, the vast army of me-too-boss Negro leaders who bask in the beams of white financial bosses....." The Messenger at times heaped vituperation upon its opponents, as in its characterization of T. Thomas Fortune, an Afro-American with a distinguished, if erratic, career, who had decades previously advocated (and subsequently abandoned) a class-based alliance of white and black workers. "What we are urging the Negro young men and women to do, is bury the old crowd," the Messenger said. "They are dead, already, but like most dead bodies, when putrification sets in, disease germs emanate therefrom, more rapidly than during life. The chief fortune which Fortune will tender, both to the race and to himself, will be when the hand of death touches his tired body as it has long since touched his tired, inert and inactive brain."[7]
White radicals experienced scant success in their necessary countercultural enterprise; black radicals found even less. Afro-American radicals complained that blacks were even less accustomed than whites to viewing themselves as members of a self-conscious class, rather than in racial or ethnic terms. Blacks, oppressed far worse than white workers, naturally demanded equality with whites within existing structures, rather than a transformation of those structures themselves. Frederick Douglass's insight--that a slave with a bad master wants a good master, while a slave with a good master wants freedom--remained valid. Hence Randolph and Harrison justly complained that most black "radicals" were radical only concerning racial issues, and ignored the fundamental inequities of class society. They were, Randolph said, merely liberals. Furthermore, Harrison, Randolph, and other class-conscious black radicals also assailed white working-class institutions, particularly unions and popular culture. As Randolph complained, white supremacy was "preached by political, religious, and journalistic demagogues to the poor, ignorant whites."[8] This criticism did not resonate within a white working class markedly unreceptive to such critiques even from white radicals. The dual role of the radical black intellectual--preaching class, rather than race, consciousness to the workers of both races--remained a Sisyphean labor.
In his call for a cultural revolution within the black community, Randolph denounced all prominent Afro-American civil rights and educational organizations--including the NAACP, Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes, and the Urban League--as instruments of white dominion. "At the present time there is not a national organization alleged to be fighting in the interest of Negroes which is controlled, in any considerable degree, by Negroes," he complained. "On the contrary, their leading organizations are controlled by persons who are neither members of their class nor members of their race."[9]
Randolph stridently attacked the NAACP. The Messenger strongly praised some NAACP officials such as James Weldon Johnson, Robert Bagnall, and William Pickens (the latter two became Messenger contributors), and supported the organization's civil rights and anti-lynching campaigns. Nevertheless, it generally assailed the Association itself. The NAACP was "led, controlled, and dominated by a group who are neither Negroes nor working people, which renders it utterly impossible to articulate the aims of a group that are the victims of social, political and economic evils as a race, and as part of the great working people." Irish could not lead Jews nor Jews lead Irish; why should whites head an organization for blacks? Randolph charged that Du Bois was the only leader of an oppressed group who abjured revolution, thus repudiating America's founding document, the Declaration of Independence. "Every notable and worthwhile advance in human history has been achieved by revolution, either intellectual, political, or economic," the Messenger declared. Du Bois equated revolution with bloodshed, violence, and terror, when it meant the abolition of private property, "the causes of these things." Du Bois believed that white decency underlay black progress: "If this were true, it would simply indicate the utter hopelessness of the Negro."[10]
Randolph believed that the Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided a scientific alternative to vapid philanthropy as the mechanism of social change. "Labor like capital is utilitarian, egoistic, selfish," he said. "It is well that we understand this philosophy." But Du Bois's education was classical and literary rather than modern and scientific; it predisposed him toward philosophical idealism--toward ideas rather than action, persuasion rather than struggle. According to Randolph, Afro-America's most prominent sociologist was not a social scientist but a man of letters. Further, he was a political opportunist and a defender of strikebreakers. Randolph compared Du Bois's infamous "Close Ranks" editorial to Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" speech, condemned Du Bois's support for the segregated officers training school at Des Moines, and complained that Du Bois and his crowd had demanded no white concessions for black wartime loyalty. Randolph argued that Germany was more democratic than the United States in its suffrage laws and in its lack of Jim Crow; Du Bois could attend the Kaiser's universities but not Woodrow Wilson's Princeton. The Messenger complained that Du Bois sometimes condoned segregation, and accused Du Bois of cowardice for refusing to publish an incendiary poem by Archibald Grimke which the Messenger printed without suffering anything more than "a little bluster by the Department of Justice and the Senate." Randolph also accused Du Bois of censoring news about radical African Americans even when mainstream white publications discussed them. The Crisis ignored Randolph's own campaign for New York Secretary of State in 1922, when he ran thirty thousand votes ahead of the SP's gubernatorial candidate. The Crisis, Randolph concluded, was not really a "record of the darker races" as it claimed.[11]
William N. Colson, a regular Messenger contributor, praised Du Bois as a poet who gave "genuine expression to the spiritual strivings of those who lived within the Veil," but denied that he was a scientific thinker. Rather, he was "a romanticist of a higher order. Mystic, passionate, free spirited, even his more serious essays are never mere prose." However, he "has not always comprehended the mind and aspirations of the man furthest down." His fundamental thesis that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line" contradicted his own occasional insight that the maldistribution of wealth was a more fundamental oppression. Colson asserted that Du Bois argued for the Negro's right to justice by citing his contributions; this, however, undermined the essential idea that freedom and justice were rights. Colson asserted that Du Bois was a philosophical idealist who "often mistakes the effect for the cause, as he does when he lays the ground for the new order on the basis of a moral system" instead of acknowledging that "ethical principles are merely the outgrowths of the social system" rather than its base.[12]
When Du Bois said that blacks "are not by nature traitors," the Messenger retorted that "the vice of being traitorous depends entirely upon what one is traitorous to. Treason of a slave to his master is a virtue. Loyalty of a slave to his master is a vice. Liberty and justice have advanced in the world in proportion as people have been traitorous to their tyrants and oppressors." Blacks, therefore, must commit treason against the entire apparatus of white supremacy. Du Bois was also criticized for lacking intelligence, courage, and independence. "He has not had modern training in economics and sociology and his knowledge of political science has not proceeded in economics beyond Adam Smith, and in sociology beyond Auguste Comte. He is essentially a classicist. His emphasis is placed upon music, Latin, Greek, French, and trigonometry, to the disparagement of economics and sociology--the business of getting a living and improving the standard of living."[13]
Randolph's critique of Du Bois paled before his attack on Robert Moton, Washington's successor as head of the Tuskegee Institute, as both ignorant and venal. "The leader of Tuskegee is set up and considered by the white ruling class as a leader of the Negro," he said. Moton told blacks to get more work, but was silent about higher wages and better conditions because "those who hire Moton cannot get big profits if they pay Negro or white workers high wages. The profits of the trustees of Tuskegee depend upon the low wages paid to Negro workers and white workers.... Tuskegee is a scab factory for producing a sufficient supply of Negro scab labor, so as to inculcate race prejudice between whites and blacks, break the strikes which occur and to instill in the minds of Negro young men and women the spirit of sycophancy and servility.... [Moton] must be a me-too-boss, hat-in-hand nigger to please the Southern white folks." At the orders of his white backers Moton exhorted African-American troops in Europe to be "modest and unassuming" when they returned, when "a real leader would have urged them to be arrogant, bold, assuming, uncompromising, courageous and manly."[14]
Although the Messenger occasionally praised the National Urban League (NUL) and some of its officials, it generally excoriated the NUL as well as the NAACP and Tuskegee. After describing the financial backers of the NUL and asserting that those who finance an institution control it, the Messenger concluded that the NUL's work was "largely the collection of scabs for the industrial magnates and capitalists in those cities who finance the League.... Truly the National Urban League is more completely dominated by capital than any other organization among Negroes. It is the Booker Washington's northern and western propaganda tool. It is the northern clearing house of the Major Moton idea.... The Urban League is an organization of, for, and by capital. The Negro race is a race of workers--of laborers. The interests of labor and capital are opposed. Therefore the capitalist Urban League cannot represent the working-class Negro race." Randolph also criticized progressive white backers of the Urban League for patronizing blacks. Roger Baldwin (founder of the American Civil Liberties Union) and other liberals supported the Urban League despite its organized scabbing, its support for the militaristic Boy Scouts, and its use of its office as a military recruitment center--activities they would not have countenanced in any white organization. Such liberals and radicals "are ready to permit a little leeway for the Negro. They will tolerate in him what would not be brooked among whites. They feel that the rule should not be applied with strict rigidity to a group which has been so oppressed, denied so much opportunity in the race of life."[15] Such indulgence, Randolph said, debilitated the interracial struggle for a new world.
In general, the Messenger complained that the so-called "leaders" of the Afro-Americans were the worst leaders of any group. However, it thundered, "the New Crowd is uncompromising. Its tactics are not defensive but offensive. It would not send notes after a Negro is lynched. It would not appeal to white leaders. It would appeal to the plain working people everywhere.... To this end the New Crowd would form an alliance with white radicals such as the IWW, the Socialists, and the Non-Partisan League, to build a new society--a society of equals, without class, race, caste, or religious distinctions."[16]
The liberal arts institutions that trained many black leaders also evoked criticism from the Messenger. Washington had criticized liberal education as a diversion from the necessary business of earning a living; Randolph criticized it as obstructing the African-American quest for a free society. Just as Du Bois criticized the manual training favored by Washington, Randolph lambasted the traditional liberal arts curriculum as breeding complacency and subserviency. Negro colleges and universities were "dominated by an invisible government," the Messenger said, "an interlocking directorate, which controls the curricula, shapes the policy, and suppresses academic freedom even more ruthlessly than in white colleges and universities." This made "intellectual puppets of the student and intellectual prostitutes of the teacher." Lincoln University banned African Americans from positions as teachers or administrators; Howard University was controlled by whites who suppressed academic freedom; Howard's dean, Kelly Miller, learned Greek, Latin, and the Bible rather than worthwhile sciences. White capitalists, the Messenger complained, controlled almost all black schools at all levels. "This is as true of the white schools as it is of the colored schools.... [The capitalists] have bought and paid for Yale and Columbia as truly as they have bought and paid for Howard and Fisk."[17] African Americans, however, suffered from both capitalist and white control--from an exploiting class and an oppressing race.
The Messenger viewed the plutocratic Republican party as second only to supposedly black institutions as an instrument of Afro-American oppression. African-American Socialists confronted an almost unanimous black loyalty to the party of Lincoln and Emancipation. This loyalty was partly based on historical realities--the Republicans were somewhat preferable to the Democrats, who often publicly condoned lynching and sometimes even advocated the extermination of blacks. However, it stemmed even more from the understandable desire, common among oppressed groups, to feel somehow part of the mainstream, to feel that they have friends in high places. Unfortunately, this often results in identification with the oppressors. Black Socialists, however, denounced the Republican party's abandonment of blacks and stressed that the Republicans had never sincerely favored African-American rights. "Lincoln was the tool of a class that required wage slaves instead of chattel-slaves," Randolph said. Industrialization and a new form of capitalism had rendered slavery obsolete; it would have perished even without Lincoln and civil war. Lincoln only nominally freed the slaves, turning them over to the tender mercies of their former owners. In a remarkable series on the Ku Klux Klan, J.A. Rogers asserted that blacks received the vote during Reconstruction as an alternative to military rule and as a mechanism for Republican dominance, not because of any Republican solicitousness for blacks.[18]
The Messenger described the vast deterioration in the condition of blacks under Republican rule. Republican administrations had acquiesced in Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement, peonage, and convict labor in the South and, after disfranchisement was an accomplished fact, abandoned even their token concern for blacks. The Messenger castigated the records of Taft and Harding on racial issues and pointed out that Congressional Republicans collaborated with the Democrats to kill the Dyer anti-lynching bill and a proposed ban on Jim Crow railroad cars in interstate travel. Theodore Roosevelt's meal with Booker T. Washington in the White House, widely praised by blacks, was a purely symbolic gesture which did not raise wages, reduce rents, or lower the cost of living. "We did not regard it as of any value whatever. On the contrary, it had a pernicious effect in lulling Negroes into a false sense of security." Conditions for blacks markedly deteriorated during Roosevelt's administration, the Messenger said. It also asserted that Roosevelt, as New York's police commissioner, had tried to introduce a special weapon for use on striking workers--a club with spikes, which could be released by pushing a button, to lacerate the flesh.[19]
The Messenger positively gloated at glaring Republican betrayals of blacks, believing that these would wean the black masses from their slavish devotion to the GOP. When the Republicans overwhelmingly upheld the Jim Crow car, the Messenger was "glad to see it. It will teach the gullible, credulous, ignorant Negroes a lesson." When Harding failed to appoint a Negro to the traditionally-black post of Registrar of the Treasury, the Messenger said that "we congratulate Mr. Harding on his wallop to the jaw of the old crowd Negro politician. This will pull more Negroes from the GOP than tons of arguments made by the Messenger ever could.... We are just suffocated with delight; for the radicals could not hope for anything better."[20] When some black leaders advocated support for the Democrats in the North, Randolph pointed out that this would only further empower the lynch-law Southern Bourbons who controlled the party.
Randolph criticized black Republican leaders even more harshly than the white plutocrats who controlled the party and the "insincere, designing and hypocritical white Republican politicians" who doled out the jobs. Occasional appointments of "little Negro peanut politicians" to symbolic posts was "political chloroform" that "has made the Negro indifferent, apathetic and unconcerned about elective representation." Such blacks "identified their own selfish interests with that of the masses of toiling blacks who they betrayed," and were "the worst enemies of the race." To represent a constituency, Randolph stated, a politician must have the same interests as that constituency, the intelligence and knowledge to perceive those interests, and the independence from monied interests to pursue them. (This latter criterion entailed a politician's direct dependence upon his constituency for his office). Black Republican officials, ignorant, venal, and controlled by the whites who appointed them, qualified on none of these counts. "The Negroes have not given their leaders their places and consequently they cannot control them," the Messenger said. The practice "of appointing members of the servant-class to positions in the government or to places of race leadership, has been uniformly adopted by the ruling class in all parts of the world." These traitors became the worst oppressors of their own group, as the experiences of Ireland and India attested. "The jobs given these Negro leaders are but little more than bribes for race treason. They are the compensation to leaders for the betrayal of the colored masses. Sleek, fat, pot-bellied Negro politicians have been trafficking for a half century in the sweat and blood and tears of toiling Negro washer women, cotton pickers, miners, mill and factory hands. They have not fought for decent legislation, fair administration of the laws, education, sanitation, good wages, reasonable prices--or anything for the Negro masses."[21] Randolph acknowledged that the same could be said of white politicians, who prated about the common man and served the plutocrats; Afro-American politicians, however, were the servants of the white servants of capital.
If the radical assault on the Republican party constituted an attack on the self-image and identities of many blacks, the Messenger's contempt for the black church was even more inflammatory. Nothing, in fact, indicated the chasm separating Randolph and his cohorts from the black masses as much as their conflicting attitudes toward the black church, routinely included in Randolph's list of vicious institutions that inculcated false consciousness. White radicals, of course, faced the same problem. Religion was often a bedrock of personal and community identity for working Americans, transfused with ethnic, moral, and family ideals; yet it was for that very reason also a bastion of conservatism and of class, racial, and gender oppression. Attacks on religion, however necessary, greatly alienated most workers. While many Socialist writers severely attacked religion, the SP itself, much to the disgust of Wobblies and anarchists, officially proclaimed that faith was a purely personal matter of no concern to the party. For blacks, of course, the church was even more important than for ethnic Americans because it was a vital institution under slavery, giving African Americans a semblance of limited autonomy and voicing surreptitious protest in language that whites could not suppress.
Historians have long debated the relative importance of accommodation and resistance for the black church, both in slavery and freedom; but Randolph and his editors thought the issue settled. "In the Negro church, the ministers are largely ignorant, venal, or controlled," Randolph said. "The church is usually the tool of the ruling class. It is mental chloroform" which creates "apathy, lethargy, inertia--contentment with one's lot." Ministers "center the attention of the people on spiritual things, on eternal things, in order that the ruling class might have control of the material things. The leadership of the church, on the whole, was and is crassly economic.... No institution, no matter how abominable, will be without the support of some clergy, if somebody will pay the clergy." Black ministers preached ancient and discredited superstitions and worried about nonsense, such as Jonah in the belly of the whale, while ignoring real issues; they were "ignorant of the modern problems of capital and labor" and "disinterested in unionism." In a major article analyzing the reasons for black conservatism, frequent Messenger contributor Ernest McKinney said that under slavery "the Negro developed an inferiority complex similar to that of women in relation to men. The security of the master class was in large measure dependent on slave docility. The white preacher talked to the slave and emphasized the inevitableness of his status. The slave preacher unconsciously encouraged humility and docility by laying great stress of the rewards that were laid up in Heaven for the righteous.... The slave was kept in childhood mentally and was expected to behave like a child." The Christian doctrine of non-resistance was "a ruse to keep a race in subjection at very little cost to the stronger race."[22]
Randolph called for a thoroughgoing, secular reformation of the church. The ministry "needs less Bible and more economics, history, sociology and physical science," he said. The church "must become an open educational forum where problems of hygiene, labor, government, racial relationships, national and international questions are discussed by specialists" and as centers for cooperative stores. "The New Negro demands a new church--a church that is the center of his social, economic and political hopes and striving."[23] (Randolph's wish was partially realized in the 1950s and 1960s, when many black churches, however orthodox in theology, fostered Civil Rights activism.)
The black press was a further target of Randolph's criticism. "Negro newspapers seldom publish anything about men who are useful to the race," the Messenger said. "Some parasite, ecclesiastical poltroon, sacerdotal tax gatherer, political fakir or business exploiter will have his name in the papers," but the black press ignored prominent black IWW leader Ben Fletcher and opposed a miners' strike that benefited hundreds of thousands of Negroes. "On the whole, Negro papers are little campaign sheets for the Republican Party.... The editors, too, are generally near the poverty line. Hence a hundred dollar bill has considerable force in swerving journalistic opinion among Negroes."[24]
As a Socialist who favored interracial working-class unity, Randolph also opposed black capitalism, which Washington and Garvey saw as a remedy for black oppression. (Washington's National Negro Business League was among his most formidable legacies.) While admitting that the problems of black businessmen stemmed partly from lack of credit and the competition of chain stores, he excoriated black capitalists who "will charge you the highest prices and pay [their] employees the lowest wages just like anybody else." He criticized "buy black" campaigns and asserted that many black businessmen were incompetent, gave poor value and service, and relied on race loyalty. The black businessman "forgets that a Negro consumer does not buy the business man's color. He cannot consume that.... Race loyalty operates very infrequently in the business world" and was "usually employed by the self-seeking, at the expense of the race." Randolph said that patronizing black-owned businesses out of race loyalty was "the rankest and worst form of race disloyalty" because it benefited a few businessmen (who often distanced themselves from their less wealthy brethren) while impoverishing the black masses and imbuing them with false consciousness. Randolph advised black customers to buy where the prices and service were best. He eschewed "buy black" campaigns and hostility towards white businesses not only out of principle but because such practices would justify racist white behavior. "Segregation in business is objectionable just as it is in other lines," he proclaimed. "It limits the Negro business man's market too much... [and] when given a monopoly he tends to exploit." Jews sought the business of everyone; racist whites in Western states bought meats even from the detested Japanese when their price and service were best. Randolph advised that black (and white) employees of black-owned businesses unionize and strike for higher wages. Although Negro businesses provided jobs for a handful of educated blacks, Randolph concluded that "we anticipate no great change in the conditions of the broad mass of working Negroes through a few successful businessmen."[25]
The Messenger also condemned the hegemonic effects of American popular culture. Some of this indictment paralleled white radical denunciations of mass commercial culture as a degrading and trivial distraction from the class struggle. For example, while demanding black admission to the major leagues, the Messenger complained that more blacks watched baseball games than voted. Lamenting the popularity of Charlie Chaplin, it asserted that both whites and blacks were "too addicted to fun." Noting that fifty million Americans attended the movies each week, and that new developments in politics, science, and religion were increasingly molding public opinion through that medium, Randolph declared that "most of the motion pictures are against the public interest.... The rule of the stage will be: What pays and propagates, at the same time, in the interests of the owners of the stage and the country will be shown, and nothing else." He endorsed the Labor Film Service, which would "get the truth about labor before the public" and hoped that it would "present the achievements and struggles of the Negro truly, free from the general buffoonery and stigma which usually are attached to capitalist productions in which the Negro appears." The Messenger, alienating its proposed urban working-class constituency of both races, endorsed Prohibition on the grounds that alcohol bred crime and political corruption and distracted workers from their miseries. Alcohol constituted "the bulwark of Tammany Hall.... The corruption of the Negro vote has been through the use of liquor plentifully served."[26]
Deprecating almost every distinctively African-American form of popular culture, including music, the Messenger complained that white money and patronage "has well-nigh killed the soul of our people" by confining black musicians to "typical Negro music," thus imposing an artistic segregation inflicted upon no other group. The Friends of Negro Freedom condemned the "defamation and stigmatization of Negroes on the stage, screen, and in music, through Negro quartettes and jubilee singers." Randolph said that "so-called American Negro music, such as plantation songs and old spirituals, sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Hampton and Tuskegee Quartettes, has been more funny than musical. Besides, it has served to instill the spirit of servility into Negro youths. Capitalists contribute large sums of money to these institutions, because they know that if they can get the black and white workers to singing slave songs, they can more successfully rob them, for they cannot think about their own interests." Another Messenger writer complained that jazz "deplorably cheapens our instincts and corrupts the true spirit of music. Jazz is essentially a capitalistic production, it steals its melodies from all sources, the Masters, the Negroes, the Orient, with naive greed and unconcern, then proceeds to ruin them. It is as noisy and rapacious as the system that creates it." The article added, however, that "Broadway jazz must not be confused with Negro Folk Music, the only real music America has yet produced." Floyd J. Calvin said that Negro folk songs "are all quite crude, and to the later generation, perhaps meaningless and absurd"; he advocated their preservation only because "they are a part of our history." Calvin feared that "whatever criticism falls their way is to be shared by the Race as a whole."[27]
Although Owen praised cabarets as fostering racial egalitarianism and ragtime for expressing "primitive natural love," Messenger contributors more often preferred classical music. The cover of the October 1921 issue featured pianist Helen Hagan, acclaimed as expressing, far more than ragtime or the jubilee singers, the potential of African-American music. Similarly, the Black Swan Phonograph Company frequently advertised in the Messenger and attacked the shibboleth that "colored people don't want classical music." Endorsing the quaint middle-class notion that music could shape character, the Messenger lamented that European workers hummed tunes from operas, "cultured food," whereas blacks hummed that "musical pablum," the blues. Poverty was no excuse, for a cheap seat at the opera cost less than swilling drinks at a cabaret. "In the opera houses there is music, light, colorful life, culture, poetry, art--all those warm and finer influences which throw a beautiful, irresistible charm over human life. In the cabaret there is loud, boisterous, cheap, tawdry, unmusical music.... On the whole there is little that is uplifting." The opera patron was "elevated by the drama, music, and scenery... he brings away something worthwhile." The denizen of the smoke-filled cabaret, on the other hand, "gets jaded, exhausted by the monotony and noise, finally returning to his home physically, mentally and financially depleted." The Messenger concluded that "a race that hums operas will stay ahead of a race that simply hums the 'blues'." In a similar vein, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the Messenger's first drama editor, praised the Lincoln Theatre for installing an organ, which would spur a "much-needed elevation of musical taste in Harlem" and play "a creditable part in the cultivation of good taste and refined feeling in our community."[28]
The low-brow dramatic tastes of most blacks drew the ire of the Messenger. The Afro-American, it complained, preferred laughs and girls to thought and considered the drama a diversion from work rather than as a serious vehicle for critiquing and improving life. "Give him first rate drama and he thinks the box office is trying to get something for nothing," Calvin lamented. Randolph similarly complained that "the Negro on the stage has been a most effective instrument in degrading, stigmatizing and debasing his race. He has there been portrayed as a clown, menial and sycophant. Bert Williams, for instance, probably the best paid Negro actor in the world, has been engaged for a decade in lowering the Negro in the eyes of the country--not that he intends to do so, but because that is the condition of getting his pay. Those who see Bert on the stage shooting crap and drinking liquor get to believe that this is the Negroes' chief avocation or sport. But this makes no difference for the actor. He gets paid for this."[29]
The Messenger often criticized Williams, even while acknowledging his unhappiness that he was never offered the dignified parts he deserved. White control of the theatre ensured that he "rendered a disservice to black people." Williams routinely performed in theatres that, assuming and reinforcing Afro-American inferiority, segregated or excluded blacks. Williams "was a facile instrument of this insidious cult. At the end, he lamented his failure to be considered and acclaimed as a whole, full-orbed man on the American stage and yet his life's work rendered it possible for the Negro actor to be received as a half-man only." The Messenger continued:
It is a matter of general opinion that Broadway will not countenance the Negro in a serious, dignified, classical drama. Theatre-going white America will only respond favorably to Negro clowns, buffoons, funny-men, that kind of acting that stamps him as an inferior. Modern capitalist America won't have it otherwise. The church, press, theatre, novel, film, all sedulously preach the doctrine of Negro inferiority, and with a tragic naivete, silhouetted against a grim, and uncanny economic determinism, Negroes preach it, too. But history teaches that the oppressed have always acquiesced in and defended their own oppression. Hence black geniuses must be strangled, art sacrificed to the blear-eyed gangrenous monster of race hate spewed up by a rotten and rotting social order. Such was the unhappy fate of Mr. Williams, entangled in the cruel web of a sodden and sordid commercial art world, without assurance or hope of realizing [his] dream and passion for creative work. In his heart there welled up a bitter revulsion against his many plaudits from a [racist] white world....
His was the ignoble lot of dragging his people through the flotsam and jetsam of art to the derisive and vulgar hand-clapping of race prejudiced America. His fun-making, of course, was what they wanted, the lowest form of intellection. They delight in visualizing a race of court-jesters. Such people don't demand social equality or organize their labor power for economic betterment. They are content to make the world laugh; they are not concerned about making it think.... Such is the reason for white capitalist America's flattering [of] Bert Williams.[30]
The Messenger guardedly praised Charles Gilpin's performance in The Emperor Jones: Gilpin "faced a Broadway audience as a straight, full-fledged dramatist" and "challenge[d] subtly behind the lines of his art." The play itself, although "not flattering to the Negro race," was "the necessary intermediate step."[31]
Some Messenger writers called for a more racial theatre, while others extolled the drama's universality. While favoring the productions of contemporary white playwrights at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre, Messenger contributing editor Lovett Fort-Whiteman also demanded that blacks "must see our society reflected upon the American stage even if we have to call a mass meeting of Harlem's theatre-goers and effect a boycott of the Lincoln Theatre." Later, however, he ascribed the black community's alleged lack of interest in serious theatre to those who believed "that drama, the flowered sentiments and emotions of a social group, and growing out of its history, tradition, and group experience, is a thing that can be transplanted and fastened on the feelings of any other group regardless of that group's history, tradition, and outlook." Fort-Whiteman called for a black theatre that would embody "the Negro's spiritual sufferings, aspirations, and withal his rich, colorful imagination and warmth of soul" and said that "Negro tradition and history are as yet an untouched field for the creative artist."[32]
Another Messenger critic asserted that any national or racial community could best interpret and appreciate plays by its own group; Norwegian actors best performed Ibsen's plays. Whites, however, would boycott the authentic depiction of black life and stifle any African-American efforts in that direction. Afro-American scholar Abram Harris, on the other hand, echoed Randolph's complaints about music, upheld the universality of great art, and asserted that black theatrical companies should perform world classics without regard to color. Any well-trained actor of any race could depict the life of any other race. "Our inability to witness a dramatic performance by Negroes without reference to the societary meaning of color is no fault of the artist," he said. All cultures were hybrid creations of many peoples; "the great works of Shakespeare, Moliere and others are not the indisputable heritage of the white man," forbidden to other peoples.[33]
Randolph's criticisms of mass popular culture posed a dilemma that he shared with white radicals: could the consumers (and partial creators) of such culture emancipate themselves from capitalist hegemony and establish a free and just society? Randolph saw black intellectuals such as the Messenger group as intermediaries between the black and white working classes, rather than as an independent social force in their own right. Capitalist and white racist hegemony created a need for an intelligentsia that would dispel plutocratic and racist illusions, yet only the masses of workers could liberate themselves. Noting the massive use of propaganda by all sides during the Great War, Randolph asserted that "all oppressed groups must employ it in order to counteract the influence of propaganda employed against them."[34]
But Randolph placed his hopes in the white and black working classes not because of their actual behavior or mentality, but because of his belief in a "vulgar Marxist" version of economic determinism. Both groups of workers, he believed, would eventually perceive their own common self-interest and act upon it. His hopes were not based upon any empirical observations of the actually existing white or black working class, which he, despite his protestations, disdained. "The American working class is the most backward, ignorant, disorganized, reactionary and patriotic laborer in the world," he observed, noting that "almost everything of value in America has come from abroad."[35]
Randolph certainly did not romanticize the black working class. Southern "peasants"--tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers, white and black--were "illiterate, morally depraved and physically broken," and hence, by implication, incapable of meaningful resistance.[36] Randolph denied that rural blacks could migrate North "from the ignorant, backward South, where even white people are 'far behind the times,' and step right into a new heaven." Randolph believed that recent migrants from the rural South needed the guidance of educated Northern blacks; the Friends of Negro Freedom's Tenants League would raise "the aesthetic and property preservation tastes" of the new arrivals, who often ignorantly and carelessly destroyed their tenements. Randolph also lamented the lack of the capitalist work ethic among blacks: "Negro workers must become more efficient. This is necessary both to hold their jobs as well as to enter the unions. They must also be less disposed to lay off on pay day until they have used up their wages in having a costly and empty good time." Such frivolity would obviously cripple radical organizing. Randolph also acknowledged "the crass immorality, indecency and vice which are seen in our communities," even while blaming them on exploitation, oppression and poverty. He asserted that "as a group we are too sentimental and credulous. We are loath to judge Negroes by universal standards. We want to change the multiplication tables for the benefit of Negro incompetents."[37]
The Messenger, then, while insisting on working-class revolution, was itself the organ of worker-intellectuals fighting the demoralization and the capitalist and white supremacist hegemony that afflicted most workers of all races. Indeed, Randolph's "revolution of rising expectations" theme (that dissatisfaction increases with improvement rather than with immiseration) led inexorably to the thesis that the "rage of a privileged class" would fire racial rebellion. Angelina Grimké (ironically echoing white racist fears of educated blacks) asserted that "it is much harder for the educated Negro to bear his fate because his demands have increased--his hopes reach higher and so his capacity for pain has multiplied as his desires are unfulfilled.... Fine, strong, intelligent Negroes are leaving the schools and colleges of America" and encountering "prejudice, insult, closed opportunities, denial of rights and a veritable hell for both body and soul." Owen, describing those allegedly most responsible for black resistance during the Tulsa riot, exalted "the fine intellectual specimen of Negro manhood, the group which, as a result of its education, success and social triumph, is the constant butt of attack from the whites because it is a competitor. Again, it has to carry the burdens of the race on its back because it is more conscious of proscriptions, foresees more clearly the wanton narrowing of opportunity and, pricked with a thousand civilized desires, growing more intense and extensive, feels most keenly the burden of being a black thing in America.... They are recognized as leaders; they are looked up to by the others; upon them is the responsibility for advice, for guidance."[38]
Long-time Socialist minister George Frazier Miller, in sharp contrast to Owen, claimed that educated and cultivated blacks did not resist during the pogroms, and ascribed their pusillanimity to the spirit of retirement superinduced by culture. That training which brings one to an appreciation of, and abidance in, the delicate features of refinement causes a recoiling with a shudder from the coarser displays of life: the higher the culture the more revolting become the coarser indulgences of the day.... [and] the greater becomes the spirit of insistence upon the maintenance of the dignity of the gentleman; and mixing in a street broil or riot is regarded as out of harmony with, and wholly destructive of, the genius of noble manhood and of the modesty becoming womanhood.... So, he says: I would lose caste to mix in a street broil, and rowdyism is incompatible with my station in life: such indulgence would inevitably result in my expulsion from my social group.[39]
Culture, therefore, often generated acquiescence in oppression and evil, in which case "culture itself becomes an offense [and] a contributory element to degradation." In that case, and "in the face of the demands for self-protection, [a person] could wish himself a ruffian, and could sorrow that culture in him had ever conduced to the subordination of the native disposition to proper assertiveness and self-preservation." Miller concluded that blacks must transcend the "soothing and deceitful voice of a culture (?) that lulls to inactivity and timidity when the stern voice of duty calls to resolute action."[40] Aside from "the soldiers recently returned from the field of battle, whose spirits are still vibrating with the spirit of militarism," blacks could depend "for the safeguarding of our homes and the lives of those who are dear to us" only upon "the man we call uncouth--the man unaccustomed to the exactions of the drawing room and the etiquette of the social board." Miller continued:
The social value of these uncultured is beyond estimate, and we of the "cultured" folk owe them a large debt of gratitude for their splendid and cherished service in the conflicts into which they were recently drawn by their economic antagonists, their political and social oppressors.... The determination.... to redress every grievance, to take reprisals upon assault, to defend one's rights at every angle, and one's life to the utmost, is more highly to be prized than a thorough knowledge of all that Aeschylus or Euripides ever wrote. I would rather be a crack shot when shooting is needed than be the most finished Homeric scholar in the land.[41]
At times Owen also found hope in the common man, both black and white. During the Chicago race riot, when churches, schools, charities, politicians, and Afro-American leaders were helpless, the common people mingled in the cabarets, "talking and drinking, enjoying the music, dancing when they cared to." The cabaret "is doing in many cities what the church, school, and family have failed to do": undermining racism by encouraging interracial conviviality. Although "it is commonly said that these are the ordinary people who don't amount to anything.... the people who will have finally to stop this race prejudice are the so-called common people, white and black. When their passions can no longer be fired by lying newspapers, screens and demagogues, the hope of the race baiter is gone forever."[42]
Disagreement and ambivalence about the relative virtues of cultivated and working-class blacks only underscored a fundamental ambiguity at the very core of the Messenger's radical mission. Sorrowfully, the black Socialists found no social base for their ambitious enterprise. How could a world-class intellectual elite inspire and mobilize a constituency so unlike themselves? Randolph and his cohorts sought the liberation of the masses of Afro-Americans; pursuing that goal, they attacked black educational institutions, civil rights organizations, newspapers, churches, leaders, and forms of popular culture. Indeed, no aspect of Afro-American life escaped their withering fire. Afro-Americans, they preached, must remake themselves, their culture, and their institutions in the very process of their liberation struggle. White radicals, of course, called for similar self-transformations in their own constituencies. Such demands, however, were an unrealistic basis for a mass, working-class insurgency.
Notes:
[1] "When the War Will End," TM, August 1919; "The Negro--A Menace to Radicalism," TM, May-June 1919.
[2] ibid. Elsewhere, of course, the Messenger recognized the IWW's stellar record.
[3] ibid.; "Book Reviews. The Negro Faces America, by Herbert J. Seligman," TM, September 1920.
[4] GSS, "Politics and the Negro," TM, April 1923.
[5] ibid.
[6] "The Real and Alleged Moens' Case," TM, July 1919.
[7] "Big Business and the YMCA," TM, March 1921; "Our Mr. Fortune," TM, July 1919.
[8] APR and CO, "The Causes of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[9] "Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, April-May 1920.
[10] "Du Bois Fails as a Theorist," TM, December 1919.
[11] Grimke's poem, "Her Thirteen Black Soldiers," commemorated the first thirteen soldiers hung for their part in the Houston disturbances. Du Bois wrote Grimke that "We have just been specially warned by the Justice Department that some of our articles are considered disloyal. I would not dare, therefore, to print this just now." Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York, 1973), 115-116. Ellis (Surveillance, 132) speculates that Du Bois might have wished for an excuse to reject Grimke's poem because of its alleged lack of literary merit; but Bruce (Grimke, 224) specifically rejects this hypothesis. Bruce documents the fact that Du Bois had previously agreed to publish "Her Thirteen Black Soldiers" and had planned it for the June Crisis. "Australia to Give Up Color Line," TM, August 1922; "The Crisis of the Crisis," TM, July 1919; "A Record of the Darker Races," TM, September 1920.
[12] Colson, "Phases of Du Bois," TM, April-May 1920
[13] "The Crisis of the Crisis," TM, July 1919.
[14] "Robert Russa Moton," TM, July 1919; "New Leadership of the New Negro," TM, May-June 1919.
[15] "The Invisible Government of Negro Social Work," TM, December 1920.
[16] "Who's Who. A New Crowd--a New Negro," TM, May-June 1919.
[17] "Resolution of the Convention of the Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, September 1920; APR and CO, "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920.
[18] "Debs and the Negro," TM, November 1920; J.A. Rogers, "The Ku Klux Klan: A Promise or a Menace?," TM, March, April, June, August, and October 1923. Of course, temporary enfranchisement of blacks, largely enacted out of cynical motives, did not obviate the necessity of military rule; when the troops were withdrawn, white terrorism once again reigned. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were never enforced, a failure in which US Presidents, Congresses, and Supreme Courts colluded for almost a century.
[19] "Who's Who. Theodore Roosevelt," TM, March 1919.
[20] "Negro Republican Leaders," TM, July 1921; "Labor and Lynching," TM, February 1920; "Negro Fails to Get Registrar of Treasury Job," TM, February 1922.
[21] APR, "Negro Political Representation," TM, November 1917; "Chas. W. Anderson," TM, April 1923; "The Negro in Politics," "Negro Republican Leaders," TM, July 1921.
[22] "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920; APR, "Hard Times," TM, November 1921; "The Failure of the Negro Church," TM, October 1919; McKinney, "A Vanishing Conservatism," TM, November 1924.
[23] "The Failure of the Negro Church," TM, October 1919.
[24] "Who's Who. Oswald Garrison Villard," TM, August 1919; "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920.
[25] "Negro Mass Movement," TM, May-June 1919; "The Negro Business Man," TM, January 1918; "The Crisis of Negro Business," TM, March 1922; "Patronize Your Own Facilities," TM, September 1924.
[26] "Racial Equality," TM, October 1919; "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920; "Labor and the Movies," TM, October 1920; "Prohibition: Promise or Menace," TM, February 1920.
[27] "Art in America," TM, February 1922; "Resolutions of the Convention of the Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, September 1920; APR and CO, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919; J. Cogdell, "Truth in Art," TM, March 1923; "Book Reviews. Negro Folk Songs, With a Story," TM, September 1922. According to Thomas Talley, the author of the collection of folk songs, the songs subtly and surreptitiously expressed opposition to the slave regime in ways the whites could not decipher.
[28] CO, "Love. A Type of Truth Found Chiefly in Works of Fiction," TM, January 1923; "Operas and Cabarets," TM, March 1924; Fort-Whiteman, "Theatre, Drama, Music," TM, November 1917.
[29] "The Theatre," TM, January 1923; APR and CO, "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920. The editors added that this is "the economic interpretation of the stage."
[30] "Who's Who. Bert Williams," TM, April 1922.
[31] J. Cogdell, "Truth in Art," TM, March 1923. "Who's Who. Gilpin and the Drama League," TM, March 1921, severely criticized Gilpin for truckling to white racism.
[32] Fort-Whiteman, "Theatre, Dance, Music," TM, November 1917; "Drama," TM, April 1923.
[33] Fort-Whiteman, "Theatre, Dance, Music," TM, November 1917; "Drama," TM, April 1923; Wallace Jackson, "The Theatre," TM, June 1923; Abram H. Harris, "The Ethiopian Art Players and the Nordic Complex," TM, July 1923.
[34] "Propaganda," TM, February 1920.
[35] "The Invisible Government of Negro Social Work," TM, December 1920; "American Institutions," TM, March 1919.
[36] APR and CO, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[37] Advertisement for the Friends of Negro Freedom, TM, January 1923; "Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, August 1922; "Aftermath of the Exodus," TM, November 1923; "The Negroes' Indictment Against Mayor John Purroy Mitchell of New York City." TM, November 1917; "Garvey Believes Conviction Just," TM, August 1923.
[38] Angelina Grimke, "Book Review. Rachael," TM, July 1921; CO, "Tulsa," TM, July 1921.
[39] Miller, "The Social Value of the Uncultured," TM, October 1919.
[40] ibid. The question mark is Miller's.
[41] ibid.
[42] CO, "The Cabaret--A Useful Social Institution," TM, August 1922.
The Messenger complained that the capitalists assiduously propagandized blacks, censoring and controlling their press, pulpits, and schools. "Through contributions to Negro schools, churches, and charitable institutions, [the capitalists] are impressing him with the idea that they are his real benefact[ors] and friends." The Negro, therefore, backed the capitalists in the class war: "Through ignorance or error the opposition of the Negro to the very movements which are calculated to achieve his economic, political emancipation, is being effected by big, hand-picked Negro leaders--and the plutocratic interests of this country.... This is why, unless the Negro workers are unionized and the Negro public educated as to the nature and aims of radical movements, the Negro constitutes a definite menace to radicalism in America." The AFL had ignored Negroes or actively opposed their entry into the unions and labor market; and the Negro "sees workingmen forming the mobs of the South and opposes unions on the grounds that workingmen lynch him." Furthermore, "no systematic effort has been made to arouse the interest and enlist the support of the Negro by radical labor and political organizations, with the exception, only recently, of the Socialist party in New York."[2]
Capitalist power, AFL racism, and radical neglect enormously complicated the African-American radical intellectual's task. "The Negro radical's task is doubly huge and difficult," Randolph said, entailing the education of the workers, radicals, and intellectuals of both races. Blacks "must learn to differentiate between white capitalists and white workers, as yet they only see white men against black men." (Elsewhere Randolph lamented that blacks did distinguish between white workers and white capitalists--in favor of the capitalists.) Randolph necessarily opposed the entire panoply of Afro-American institutions, leaders, and culture. The New Negro, he said, "is a Socialist upon the political field and a union man on the industrial field. While fighting the system of capitalism, and criticizing the social order, the New Negro mercilessly criticizes his own race, its leadership, its church."[3] This was hardly a formula for easy success.
George S. Schuyler, a regular Messenger columnist, presented what Randolph called "a basic analysis of economic determinism in the realm of politics" in his brilliant "Politics and the Negro." Schuyler said that productive relations "form the basis upon which are built up the laws, customs, morals and theology of any human group"; those with power of life and death over us become dominant. "All must bow to the owning class, for all must eat, sleep, and clothe their bodies. For this arrangement to continue, it must be considered just by the masses whose toil accumulates wealth for the owning class. The work of keeping the great majority loyal to the owning-class philosophy is entrusted to the judiciary, pedagogues, politicians, and theologians." These "political retainers of the ruling class" must eat, and hence sell themselves to the highest bidder. "Social and economic pressure, aided by the police power of the state, is generally sufficient to keep the number of dissenters at a safe minimum. A certain amount of criticism and reformism is allowed when the dominance of the owning-class and their intellectual police is firmly established, but the lid of repression is clamped down when any crisis impends." Then liberals either join in the witch-hunt, go to jail, or "hibernate until the country is safe for dissenters." Discontent was "given voice and organized by agitators [and] intellectual heretics descended by desertion or ousting from the ruling class." The master class allowed only tepid reforms except during times of crises such as wars; but the rulers disagreed within themselves and contested for control of the government. "The masses, drugged by the mental opiates administered to them from every side, are the pawns in the political contest for privilege.... Since the radical organizations with an intelligent program make only appeals to reason, their slow growth is easily understood." Politics was a charade of meaningless elections, bogus debate, and crowd-pleasing fanfare. "The masses feverishly await another opportunity to vote out one representative of business and vote in another."[4]
Schuyler noted that 2 percent of the American population owned 65 percent of the wealth, 33 percent owned 30 percent, and the bottom 65 percent owned 5 percent. Before an equitable redistribution of wealth was possible, the working class must organize industrially and politically as the capitalists did. Capitalist-induced racism, however, thwarted class unity. Schuyler believed that racial antagonism in America, if uncultivated, would dissipate as it largely had (he claimed) in South America. However, the competition between slave and free labor, and, after formal emancipation, the divisions between black and white workers fostered by the capitalists and their intellectual police and mercenaries, deliberately divided the workers. Only a united class could overthrow capitalism. "This work can only be done by the workers themselves," Schuyler said. "Those who have banished the owning-class philosophy from their minds."[5]
The Messenger also attacked the racial hegemony by which blacks considered themselves inferior to whites. "Slave psychology," generated by both cultural persuasion and economic pressure, was "a tendency of a race which is dubbed inferior to feel especially honored by the praise or the association of the allegedly superior race." In the United States, slave psychology had both class and racial origins; light skin was "a mark of the leisure class." Black children were taught to deify everything white. They were given white dolls, worshipped a white Christ, and taught to exalt white historical figures. Therefore, "the psychology of emulating [the] color and hair of white peoples or worshipping all their qualities, early formed by colored children and girls in particular, is the fault of the Negro parents themselves.... Real history must be taught--history of everybody. You cannot continue to teach children only of the virtues of white men, and only of the slavery of Negroes, and then expect them not to feel that white people are superior."[6]
Randolph and his cohorts faced formidable obstacles in their counter-hegemonic project. African Americans, as among the worst oppressed people in the United States, naturally sought refuge, solace, pride, and practical benefits in their indigenous institutions--churches, businesses, newspapers, fraternal societies, popular culture, and self-help organizations. Afro-American Socialists, however, like their white allies, forcefully attacked the entire infrastructure of their potential constituency, deeming most "Negro" organizations as instruments of both capitalist and white hegemony. The Messenger repeatedly attacked "the ignoramuses who edit most of the Negro papers, the pedagogical poltroons who teach history in most Negro colleges, the pygmy-minded preachers who infest many of the Negro churches, the political prostitutes who ply their trade for petty gain, the social work yeggmen who fatten off the bodies of human derelicts, the vast army of me-too-boss Negro leaders who bask in the beams of white financial bosses....." The Messenger at times heaped vituperation upon its opponents, as in its characterization of T. Thomas Fortune, an Afro-American with a distinguished, if erratic, career, who had decades previously advocated (and subsequently abandoned) a class-based alliance of white and black workers. "What we are urging the Negro young men and women to do, is bury the old crowd," the Messenger said. "They are dead, already, but like most dead bodies, when putrification sets in, disease germs emanate therefrom, more rapidly than during life. The chief fortune which Fortune will tender, both to the race and to himself, will be when the hand of death touches his tired body as it has long since touched his tired, inert and inactive brain."[7]
White radicals experienced scant success in their necessary countercultural enterprise; black radicals found even less. Afro-American radicals complained that blacks were even less accustomed than whites to viewing themselves as members of a self-conscious class, rather than in racial or ethnic terms. Blacks, oppressed far worse than white workers, naturally demanded equality with whites within existing structures, rather than a transformation of those structures themselves. Frederick Douglass's insight--that a slave with a bad master wants a good master, while a slave with a good master wants freedom--remained valid. Hence Randolph and Harrison justly complained that most black "radicals" were radical only concerning racial issues, and ignored the fundamental inequities of class society. They were, Randolph said, merely liberals. Furthermore, Harrison, Randolph, and other class-conscious black radicals also assailed white working-class institutions, particularly unions and popular culture. As Randolph complained, white supremacy was "preached by political, religious, and journalistic demagogues to the poor, ignorant whites."[8] This criticism did not resonate within a white working class markedly unreceptive to such critiques even from white radicals. The dual role of the radical black intellectual--preaching class, rather than race, consciousness to the workers of both races--remained a Sisyphean labor.
In his call for a cultural revolution within the black community, Randolph denounced all prominent Afro-American civil rights and educational organizations--including the NAACP, Tuskegee and Hampton Institutes, and the Urban League--as instruments of white dominion. "At the present time there is not a national organization alleged to be fighting in the interest of Negroes which is controlled, in any considerable degree, by Negroes," he complained. "On the contrary, their leading organizations are controlled by persons who are neither members of their class nor members of their race."[9]
Randolph stridently attacked the NAACP. The Messenger strongly praised some NAACP officials such as James Weldon Johnson, Robert Bagnall, and William Pickens (the latter two became Messenger contributors), and supported the organization's civil rights and anti-lynching campaigns. Nevertheless, it generally assailed the Association itself. The NAACP was "led, controlled, and dominated by a group who are neither Negroes nor working people, which renders it utterly impossible to articulate the aims of a group that are the victims of social, political and economic evils as a race, and as part of the great working people." Irish could not lead Jews nor Jews lead Irish; why should whites head an organization for blacks? Randolph charged that Du Bois was the only leader of an oppressed group who abjured revolution, thus repudiating America's founding document, the Declaration of Independence. "Every notable and worthwhile advance in human history has been achieved by revolution, either intellectual, political, or economic," the Messenger declared. Du Bois equated revolution with bloodshed, violence, and terror, when it meant the abolition of private property, "the causes of these things." Du Bois believed that white decency underlay black progress: "If this were true, it would simply indicate the utter hopelessness of the Negro."[10]
Randolph believed that the Marxist doctrine of class struggle provided a scientific alternative to vapid philanthropy as the mechanism of social change. "Labor like capital is utilitarian, egoistic, selfish," he said. "It is well that we understand this philosophy." But Du Bois's education was classical and literary rather than modern and scientific; it predisposed him toward philosophical idealism--toward ideas rather than action, persuasion rather than struggle. According to Randolph, Afro-America's most prominent sociologist was not a social scientist but a man of letters. Further, he was a political opportunist and a defender of strikebreakers. Randolph compared Du Bois's infamous "Close Ranks" editorial to Washington's "Atlanta Compromise" speech, condemned Du Bois's support for the segregated officers training school at Des Moines, and complained that Du Bois and his crowd had demanded no white concessions for black wartime loyalty. Randolph argued that Germany was more democratic than the United States in its suffrage laws and in its lack of Jim Crow; Du Bois could attend the Kaiser's universities but not Woodrow Wilson's Princeton. The Messenger complained that Du Bois sometimes condoned segregation, and accused Du Bois of cowardice for refusing to publish an incendiary poem by Archibald Grimke which the Messenger printed without suffering anything more than "a little bluster by the Department of Justice and the Senate." Randolph also accused Du Bois of censoring news about radical African Americans even when mainstream white publications discussed them. The Crisis ignored Randolph's own campaign for New York Secretary of State in 1922, when he ran thirty thousand votes ahead of the SP's gubernatorial candidate. The Crisis, Randolph concluded, was not really a "record of the darker races" as it claimed.[11]
William N. Colson, a regular Messenger contributor, praised Du Bois as a poet who gave "genuine expression to the spiritual strivings of those who lived within the Veil," but denied that he was a scientific thinker. Rather, he was "a romanticist of a higher order. Mystic, passionate, free spirited, even his more serious essays are never mere prose." However, he "has not always comprehended the mind and aspirations of the man furthest down." His fundamental thesis that "the problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the color line" contradicted his own occasional insight that the maldistribution of wealth was a more fundamental oppression. Colson asserted that Du Bois argued for the Negro's right to justice by citing his contributions; this, however, undermined the essential idea that freedom and justice were rights. Colson asserted that Du Bois was a philosophical idealist who "often mistakes the effect for the cause, as he does when he lays the ground for the new order on the basis of a moral system" instead of acknowledging that "ethical principles are merely the outgrowths of the social system" rather than its base.[12]
When Du Bois said that blacks "are not by nature traitors," the Messenger retorted that "the vice of being traitorous depends entirely upon what one is traitorous to. Treason of a slave to his master is a virtue. Loyalty of a slave to his master is a vice. Liberty and justice have advanced in the world in proportion as people have been traitorous to their tyrants and oppressors." Blacks, therefore, must commit treason against the entire apparatus of white supremacy. Du Bois was also criticized for lacking intelligence, courage, and independence. "He has not had modern training in economics and sociology and his knowledge of political science has not proceeded in economics beyond Adam Smith, and in sociology beyond Auguste Comte. He is essentially a classicist. His emphasis is placed upon music, Latin, Greek, French, and trigonometry, to the disparagement of economics and sociology--the business of getting a living and improving the standard of living."[13]
Randolph's critique of Du Bois paled before his attack on Robert Moton, Washington's successor as head of the Tuskegee Institute, as both ignorant and venal. "The leader of Tuskegee is set up and considered by the white ruling class as a leader of the Negro," he said. Moton told blacks to get more work, but was silent about higher wages and better conditions because "those who hire Moton cannot get big profits if they pay Negro or white workers high wages. The profits of the trustees of Tuskegee depend upon the low wages paid to Negro workers and white workers.... Tuskegee is a scab factory for producing a sufficient supply of Negro scab labor, so as to inculcate race prejudice between whites and blacks, break the strikes which occur and to instill in the minds of Negro young men and women the spirit of sycophancy and servility.... [Moton] must be a me-too-boss, hat-in-hand nigger to please the Southern white folks." At the orders of his white backers Moton exhorted African-American troops in Europe to be "modest and unassuming" when they returned, when "a real leader would have urged them to be arrogant, bold, assuming, uncompromising, courageous and manly."[14]
Although the Messenger occasionally praised the National Urban League (NUL) and some of its officials, it generally excoriated the NUL as well as the NAACP and Tuskegee. After describing the financial backers of the NUL and asserting that those who finance an institution control it, the Messenger concluded that the NUL's work was "largely the collection of scabs for the industrial magnates and capitalists in those cities who finance the League.... Truly the National Urban League is more completely dominated by capital than any other organization among Negroes. It is the Booker Washington's northern and western propaganda tool. It is the northern clearing house of the Major Moton idea.... The Urban League is an organization of, for, and by capital. The Negro race is a race of workers--of laborers. The interests of labor and capital are opposed. Therefore the capitalist Urban League cannot represent the working-class Negro race." Randolph also criticized progressive white backers of the Urban League for patronizing blacks. Roger Baldwin (founder of the American Civil Liberties Union) and other liberals supported the Urban League despite its organized scabbing, its support for the militaristic Boy Scouts, and its use of its office as a military recruitment center--activities they would not have countenanced in any white organization. Such liberals and radicals "are ready to permit a little leeway for the Negro. They will tolerate in him what would not be brooked among whites. They feel that the rule should not be applied with strict rigidity to a group which has been so oppressed, denied so much opportunity in the race of life."[15] Such indulgence, Randolph said, debilitated the interracial struggle for a new world.
In general, the Messenger complained that the so-called "leaders" of the Afro-Americans were the worst leaders of any group. However, it thundered, "the New Crowd is uncompromising. Its tactics are not defensive but offensive. It would not send notes after a Negro is lynched. It would not appeal to white leaders. It would appeal to the plain working people everywhere.... To this end the New Crowd would form an alliance with white radicals such as the IWW, the Socialists, and the Non-Partisan League, to build a new society--a society of equals, without class, race, caste, or religious distinctions."[16]
The liberal arts institutions that trained many black leaders also evoked criticism from the Messenger. Washington had criticized liberal education as a diversion from the necessary business of earning a living; Randolph criticized it as obstructing the African-American quest for a free society. Just as Du Bois criticized the manual training favored by Washington, Randolph lambasted the traditional liberal arts curriculum as breeding complacency and subserviency. Negro colleges and universities were "dominated by an invisible government," the Messenger said, "an interlocking directorate, which controls the curricula, shapes the policy, and suppresses academic freedom even more ruthlessly than in white colleges and universities." This made "intellectual puppets of the student and intellectual prostitutes of the teacher." Lincoln University banned African Americans from positions as teachers or administrators; Howard University was controlled by whites who suppressed academic freedom; Howard's dean, Kelly Miller, learned Greek, Latin, and the Bible rather than worthwhile sciences. White capitalists, the Messenger complained, controlled almost all black schools at all levels. "This is as true of the white schools as it is of the colored schools.... [The capitalists] have bought and paid for Yale and Columbia as truly as they have bought and paid for Howard and Fisk."[17] African Americans, however, suffered from both capitalist and white control--from an exploiting class and an oppressing race.
The Messenger viewed the plutocratic Republican party as second only to supposedly black institutions as an instrument of Afro-American oppression. African-American Socialists confronted an almost unanimous black loyalty to the party of Lincoln and Emancipation. This loyalty was partly based on historical realities--the Republicans were somewhat preferable to the Democrats, who often publicly condoned lynching and sometimes even advocated the extermination of blacks. However, it stemmed even more from the understandable desire, common among oppressed groups, to feel somehow part of the mainstream, to feel that they have friends in high places. Unfortunately, this often results in identification with the oppressors. Black Socialists, however, denounced the Republican party's abandonment of blacks and stressed that the Republicans had never sincerely favored African-American rights. "Lincoln was the tool of a class that required wage slaves instead of chattel-slaves," Randolph said. Industrialization and a new form of capitalism had rendered slavery obsolete; it would have perished even without Lincoln and civil war. Lincoln only nominally freed the slaves, turning them over to the tender mercies of their former owners. In a remarkable series on the Ku Klux Klan, J.A. Rogers asserted that blacks received the vote during Reconstruction as an alternative to military rule and as a mechanism for Republican dominance, not because of any Republican solicitousness for blacks.[18]
The Messenger described the vast deterioration in the condition of blacks under Republican rule. Republican administrations had acquiesced in Jim Crow, lynching, disfranchisement, peonage, and convict labor in the South and, after disfranchisement was an accomplished fact, abandoned even their token concern for blacks. The Messenger castigated the records of Taft and Harding on racial issues and pointed out that Congressional Republicans collaborated with the Democrats to kill the Dyer anti-lynching bill and a proposed ban on Jim Crow railroad cars in interstate travel. Theodore Roosevelt's meal with Booker T. Washington in the White House, widely praised by blacks, was a purely symbolic gesture which did not raise wages, reduce rents, or lower the cost of living. "We did not regard it as of any value whatever. On the contrary, it had a pernicious effect in lulling Negroes into a false sense of security." Conditions for blacks markedly deteriorated during Roosevelt's administration, the Messenger said. It also asserted that Roosevelt, as New York's police commissioner, had tried to introduce a special weapon for use on striking workers--a club with spikes, which could be released by pushing a button, to lacerate the flesh.[19]
The Messenger positively gloated at glaring Republican betrayals of blacks, believing that these would wean the black masses from their slavish devotion to the GOP. When the Republicans overwhelmingly upheld the Jim Crow car, the Messenger was "glad to see it. It will teach the gullible, credulous, ignorant Negroes a lesson." When Harding failed to appoint a Negro to the traditionally-black post of Registrar of the Treasury, the Messenger said that "we congratulate Mr. Harding on his wallop to the jaw of the old crowd Negro politician. This will pull more Negroes from the GOP than tons of arguments made by the Messenger ever could.... We are just suffocated with delight; for the radicals could not hope for anything better."[20] When some black leaders advocated support for the Democrats in the North, Randolph pointed out that this would only further empower the lynch-law Southern Bourbons who controlled the party.
Randolph criticized black Republican leaders even more harshly than the white plutocrats who controlled the party and the "insincere, designing and hypocritical white Republican politicians" who doled out the jobs. Occasional appointments of "little Negro peanut politicians" to symbolic posts was "political chloroform" that "has made the Negro indifferent, apathetic and unconcerned about elective representation." Such blacks "identified their own selfish interests with that of the masses of toiling blacks who they betrayed," and were "the worst enemies of the race." To represent a constituency, Randolph stated, a politician must have the same interests as that constituency, the intelligence and knowledge to perceive those interests, and the independence from monied interests to pursue them. (This latter criterion entailed a politician's direct dependence upon his constituency for his office). Black Republican officials, ignorant, venal, and controlled by the whites who appointed them, qualified on none of these counts. "The Negroes have not given their leaders their places and consequently they cannot control them," the Messenger said. The practice "of appointing members of the servant-class to positions in the government or to places of race leadership, has been uniformly adopted by the ruling class in all parts of the world." These traitors became the worst oppressors of their own group, as the experiences of Ireland and India attested. "The jobs given these Negro leaders are but little more than bribes for race treason. They are the compensation to leaders for the betrayal of the colored masses. Sleek, fat, pot-bellied Negro politicians have been trafficking for a half century in the sweat and blood and tears of toiling Negro washer women, cotton pickers, miners, mill and factory hands. They have not fought for decent legislation, fair administration of the laws, education, sanitation, good wages, reasonable prices--or anything for the Negro masses."[21] Randolph acknowledged that the same could be said of white politicians, who prated about the common man and served the plutocrats; Afro-American politicians, however, were the servants of the white servants of capital.
If the radical assault on the Republican party constituted an attack on the self-image and identities of many blacks, the Messenger's contempt for the black church was even more inflammatory. Nothing, in fact, indicated the chasm separating Randolph and his cohorts from the black masses as much as their conflicting attitudes toward the black church, routinely included in Randolph's list of vicious institutions that inculcated false consciousness. White radicals, of course, faced the same problem. Religion was often a bedrock of personal and community identity for working Americans, transfused with ethnic, moral, and family ideals; yet it was for that very reason also a bastion of conservatism and of class, racial, and gender oppression. Attacks on religion, however necessary, greatly alienated most workers. While many Socialist writers severely attacked religion, the SP itself, much to the disgust of Wobblies and anarchists, officially proclaimed that faith was a purely personal matter of no concern to the party. For blacks, of course, the church was even more important than for ethnic Americans because it was a vital institution under slavery, giving African Americans a semblance of limited autonomy and voicing surreptitious protest in language that whites could not suppress.
Historians have long debated the relative importance of accommodation and resistance for the black church, both in slavery and freedom; but Randolph and his editors thought the issue settled. "In the Negro church, the ministers are largely ignorant, venal, or controlled," Randolph said. "The church is usually the tool of the ruling class. It is mental chloroform" which creates "apathy, lethargy, inertia--contentment with one's lot." Ministers "center the attention of the people on spiritual things, on eternal things, in order that the ruling class might have control of the material things. The leadership of the church, on the whole, was and is crassly economic.... No institution, no matter how abominable, will be without the support of some clergy, if somebody will pay the clergy." Black ministers preached ancient and discredited superstitions and worried about nonsense, such as Jonah in the belly of the whale, while ignoring real issues; they were "ignorant of the modern problems of capital and labor" and "disinterested in unionism." In a major article analyzing the reasons for black conservatism, frequent Messenger contributor Ernest McKinney said that under slavery "the Negro developed an inferiority complex similar to that of women in relation to men. The security of the master class was in large measure dependent on slave docility. The white preacher talked to the slave and emphasized the inevitableness of his status. The slave preacher unconsciously encouraged humility and docility by laying great stress of the rewards that were laid up in Heaven for the righteous.... The slave was kept in childhood mentally and was expected to behave like a child." The Christian doctrine of non-resistance was "a ruse to keep a race in subjection at very little cost to the stronger race."[22]
Randolph called for a thoroughgoing, secular reformation of the church. The ministry "needs less Bible and more economics, history, sociology and physical science," he said. The church "must become an open educational forum where problems of hygiene, labor, government, racial relationships, national and international questions are discussed by specialists" and as centers for cooperative stores. "The New Negro demands a new church--a church that is the center of his social, economic and political hopes and striving."[23] (Randolph's wish was partially realized in the 1950s and 1960s, when many black churches, however orthodox in theology, fostered Civil Rights activism.)
The black press was a further target of Randolph's criticism. "Negro newspapers seldom publish anything about men who are useful to the race," the Messenger said. "Some parasite, ecclesiastical poltroon, sacerdotal tax gatherer, political fakir or business exploiter will have his name in the papers," but the black press ignored prominent black IWW leader Ben Fletcher and opposed a miners' strike that benefited hundreds of thousands of Negroes. "On the whole, Negro papers are little campaign sheets for the Republican Party.... The editors, too, are generally near the poverty line. Hence a hundred dollar bill has considerable force in swerving journalistic opinion among Negroes."[24]
As a Socialist who favored interracial working-class unity, Randolph also opposed black capitalism, which Washington and Garvey saw as a remedy for black oppression. (Washington's National Negro Business League was among his most formidable legacies.) While admitting that the problems of black businessmen stemmed partly from lack of credit and the competition of chain stores, he excoriated black capitalists who "will charge you the highest prices and pay [their] employees the lowest wages just like anybody else." He criticized "buy black" campaigns and asserted that many black businessmen were incompetent, gave poor value and service, and relied on race loyalty. The black businessman "forgets that a Negro consumer does not buy the business man's color. He cannot consume that.... Race loyalty operates very infrequently in the business world" and was "usually employed by the self-seeking, at the expense of the race." Randolph said that patronizing black-owned businesses out of race loyalty was "the rankest and worst form of race disloyalty" because it benefited a few businessmen (who often distanced themselves from their less wealthy brethren) while impoverishing the black masses and imbuing them with false consciousness. Randolph advised black customers to buy where the prices and service were best. He eschewed "buy black" campaigns and hostility towards white businesses not only out of principle but because such practices would justify racist white behavior. "Segregation in business is objectionable just as it is in other lines," he proclaimed. "It limits the Negro business man's market too much... [and] when given a monopoly he tends to exploit." Jews sought the business of everyone; racist whites in Western states bought meats even from the detested Japanese when their price and service were best. Randolph advised that black (and white) employees of black-owned businesses unionize and strike for higher wages. Although Negro businesses provided jobs for a handful of educated blacks, Randolph concluded that "we anticipate no great change in the conditions of the broad mass of working Negroes through a few successful businessmen."[25]
The Messenger also condemned the hegemonic effects of American popular culture. Some of this indictment paralleled white radical denunciations of mass commercial culture as a degrading and trivial distraction from the class struggle. For example, while demanding black admission to the major leagues, the Messenger complained that more blacks watched baseball games than voted. Lamenting the popularity of Charlie Chaplin, it asserted that both whites and blacks were "too addicted to fun." Noting that fifty million Americans attended the movies each week, and that new developments in politics, science, and religion were increasingly molding public opinion through that medium, Randolph declared that "most of the motion pictures are against the public interest.... The rule of the stage will be: What pays and propagates, at the same time, in the interests of the owners of the stage and the country will be shown, and nothing else." He endorsed the Labor Film Service, which would "get the truth about labor before the public" and hoped that it would "present the achievements and struggles of the Negro truly, free from the general buffoonery and stigma which usually are attached to capitalist productions in which the Negro appears." The Messenger, alienating its proposed urban working-class constituency of both races, endorsed Prohibition on the grounds that alcohol bred crime and political corruption and distracted workers from their miseries. Alcohol constituted "the bulwark of Tammany Hall.... The corruption of the Negro vote has been through the use of liquor plentifully served."[26]
Deprecating almost every distinctively African-American form of popular culture, including music, the Messenger complained that white money and patronage "has well-nigh killed the soul of our people" by confining black musicians to "typical Negro music," thus imposing an artistic segregation inflicted upon no other group. The Friends of Negro Freedom condemned the "defamation and stigmatization of Negroes on the stage, screen, and in music, through Negro quartettes and jubilee singers." Randolph said that "so-called American Negro music, such as plantation songs and old spirituals, sung by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, the Hampton and Tuskegee Quartettes, has been more funny than musical. Besides, it has served to instill the spirit of servility into Negro youths. Capitalists contribute large sums of money to these institutions, because they know that if they can get the black and white workers to singing slave songs, they can more successfully rob them, for they cannot think about their own interests." Another Messenger writer complained that jazz "deplorably cheapens our instincts and corrupts the true spirit of music. Jazz is essentially a capitalistic production, it steals its melodies from all sources, the Masters, the Negroes, the Orient, with naive greed and unconcern, then proceeds to ruin them. It is as noisy and rapacious as the system that creates it." The article added, however, that "Broadway jazz must not be confused with Negro Folk Music, the only real music America has yet produced." Floyd J. Calvin said that Negro folk songs "are all quite crude, and to the later generation, perhaps meaningless and absurd"; he advocated their preservation only because "they are a part of our history." Calvin feared that "whatever criticism falls their way is to be shared by the Race as a whole."[27]
Although Owen praised cabarets as fostering racial egalitarianism and ragtime for expressing "primitive natural love," Messenger contributors more often preferred classical music. The cover of the October 1921 issue featured pianist Helen Hagan, acclaimed as expressing, far more than ragtime or the jubilee singers, the potential of African-American music. Similarly, the Black Swan Phonograph Company frequently advertised in the Messenger and attacked the shibboleth that "colored people don't want classical music." Endorsing the quaint middle-class notion that music could shape character, the Messenger lamented that European workers hummed tunes from operas, "cultured food," whereas blacks hummed that "musical pablum," the blues. Poverty was no excuse, for a cheap seat at the opera cost less than swilling drinks at a cabaret. "In the opera houses there is music, light, colorful life, culture, poetry, art--all those warm and finer influences which throw a beautiful, irresistible charm over human life. In the cabaret there is loud, boisterous, cheap, tawdry, unmusical music.... On the whole there is little that is uplifting." The opera patron was "elevated by the drama, music, and scenery... he brings away something worthwhile." The denizen of the smoke-filled cabaret, on the other hand, "gets jaded, exhausted by the monotony and noise, finally returning to his home physically, mentally and financially depleted." The Messenger concluded that "a race that hums operas will stay ahead of a race that simply hums the 'blues'." In a similar vein, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, the Messenger's first drama editor, praised the Lincoln Theatre for installing an organ, which would spur a "much-needed elevation of musical taste in Harlem" and play "a creditable part in the cultivation of good taste and refined feeling in our community."[28]
The low-brow dramatic tastes of most blacks drew the ire of the Messenger. The Afro-American, it complained, preferred laughs and girls to thought and considered the drama a diversion from work rather than as a serious vehicle for critiquing and improving life. "Give him first rate drama and he thinks the box office is trying to get something for nothing," Calvin lamented. Randolph similarly complained that "the Negro on the stage has been a most effective instrument in degrading, stigmatizing and debasing his race. He has there been portrayed as a clown, menial and sycophant. Bert Williams, for instance, probably the best paid Negro actor in the world, has been engaged for a decade in lowering the Negro in the eyes of the country--not that he intends to do so, but because that is the condition of getting his pay. Those who see Bert on the stage shooting crap and drinking liquor get to believe that this is the Negroes' chief avocation or sport. But this makes no difference for the actor. He gets paid for this."[29]
The Messenger often criticized Williams, even while acknowledging his unhappiness that he was never offered the dignified parts he deserved. White control of the theatre ensured that he "rendered a disservice to black people." Williams routinely performed in theatres that, assuming and reinforcing Afro-American inferiority, segregated or excluded blacks. Williams "was a facile instrument of this insidious cult. At the end, he lamented his failure to be considered and acclaimed as a whole, full-orbed man on the American stage and yet his life's work rendered it possible for the Negro actor to be received as a half-man only." The Messenger continued:
It is a matter of general opinion that Broadway will not countenance the Negro in a serious, dignified, classical drama. Theatre-going white America will only respond favorably to Negro clowns, buffoons, funny-men, that kind of acting that stamps him as an inferior. Modern capitalist America won't have it otherwise. The church, press, theatre, novel, film, all sedulously preach the doctrine of Negro inferiority, and with a tragic naivete, silhouetted against a grim, and uncanny economic determinism, Negroes preach it, too. But history teaches that the oppressed have always acquiesced in and defended their own oppression. Hence black geniuses must be strangled, art sacrificed to the blear-eyed gangrenous monster of race hate spewed up by a rotten and rotting social order. Such was the unhappy fate of Mr. Williams, entangled in the cruel web of a sodden and sordid commercial art world, without assurance or hope of realizing [his] dream and passion for creative work. In his heart there welled up a bitter revulsion against his many plaudits from a [racist] white world....
His was the ignoble lot of dragging his people through the flotsam and jetsam of art to the derisive and vulgar hand-clapping of race prejudiced America. His fun-making, of course, was what they wanted, the lowest form of intellection. They delight in visualizing a race of court-jesters. Such people don't demand social equality or organize their labor power for economic betterment. They are content to make the world laugh; they are not concerned about making it think.... Such is the reason for white capitalist America's flattering [of] Bert Williams.[30]
The Messenger guardedly praised Charles Gilpin's performance in The Emperor Jones: Gilpin "faced a Broadway audience as a straight, full-fledged dramatist" and "challenge[d] subtly behind the lines of his art." The play itself, although "not flattering to the Negro race," was "the necessary intermediate step."[31]
Some Messenger writers called for a more racial theatre, while others extolled the drama's universality. While favoring the productions of contemporary white playwrights at Harlem's Lafayette Theatre, Messenger contributing editor Lovett Fort-Whiteman also demanded that blacks "must see our society reflected upon the American stage even if we have to call a mass meeting of Harlem's theatre-goers and effect a boycott of the Lincoln Theatre." Later, however, he ascribed the black community's alleged lack of interest in serious theatre to those who believed "that drama, the flowered sentiments and emotions of a social group, and growing out of its history, tradition, and group experience, is a thing that can be transplanted and fastened on the feelings of any other group regardless of that group's history, tradition, and outlook." Fort-Whiteman called for a black theatre that would embody "the Negro's spiritual sufferings, aspirations, and withal his rich, colorful imagination and warmth of soul" and said that "Negro tradition and history are as yet an untouched field for the creative artist."[32]
Another Messenger critic asserted that any national or racial community could best interpret and appreciate plays by its own group; Norwegian actors best performed Ibsen's plays. Whites, however, would boycott the authentic depiction of black life and stifle any African-American efforts in that direction. Afro-American scholar Abram Harris, on the other hand, echoed Randolph's complaints about music, upheld the universality of great art, and asserted that black theatrical companies should perform world classics without regard to color. Any well-trained actor of any race could depict the life of any other race. "Our inability to witness a dramatic performance by Negroes without reference to the societary meaning of color is no fault of the artist," he said. All cultures were hybrid creations of many peoples; "the great works of Shakespeare, Moliere and others are not the indisputable heritage of the white man," forbidden to other peoples.[33]
Randolph's criticisms of mass popular culture posed a dilemma that he shared with white radicals: could the consumers (and partial creators) of such culture emancipate themselves from capitalist hegemony and establish a free and just society? Randolph saw black intellectuals such as the Messenger group as intermediaries between the black and white working classes, rather than as an independent social force in their own right. Capitalist and white racist hegemony created a need for an intelligentsia that would dispel plutocratic and racist illusions, yet only the masses of workers could liberate themselves. Noting the massive use of propaganda by all sides during the Great War, Randolph asserted that "all oppressed groups must employ it in order to counteract the influence of propaganda employed against them."[34]
But Randolph placed his hopes in the white and black working classes not because of their actual behavior or mentality, but because of his belief in a "vulgar Marxist" version of economic determinism. Both groups of workers, he believed, would eventually perceive their own common self-interest and act upon it. His hopes were not based upon any empirical observations of the actually existing white or black working class, which he, despite his protestations, disdained. "The American working class is the most backward, ignorant, disorganized, reactionary and patriotic laborer in the world," he observed, noting that "almost everything of value in America has come from abroad."[35]
Randolph certainly did not romanticize the black working class. Southern "peasants"--tenant farmers, sharecroppers, and agricultural laborers, white and black--were "illiterate, morally depraved and physically broken," and hence, by implication, incapable of meaningful resistance.[36] Randolph denied that rural blacks could migrate North "from the ignorant, backward South, where even white people are 'far behind the times,' and step right into a new heaven." Randolph believed that recent migrants from the rural South needed the guidance of educated Northern blacks; the Friends of Negro Freedom's Tenants League would raise "the aesthetic and property preservation tastes" of the new arrivals, who often ignorantly and carelessly destroyed their tenements. Randolph also lamented the lack of the capitalist work ethic among blacks: "Negro workers must become more efficient. This is necessary both to hold their jobs as well as to enter the unions. They must also be less disposed to lay off on pay day until they have used up their wages in having a costly and empty good time." Such frivolity would obviously cripple radical organizing. Randolph also acknowledged "the crass immorality, indecency and vice which are seen in our communities," even while blaming them on exploitation, oppression and poverty. He asserted that "as a group we are too sentimental and credulous. We are loath to judge Negroes by universal standards. We want to change the multiplication tables for the benefit of Negro incompetents."[37]
The Messenger, then, while insisting on working-class revolution, was itself the organ of worker-intellectuals fighting the demoralization and the capitalist and white supremacist hegemony that afflicted most workers of all races. Indeed, Randolph's "revolution of rising expectations" theme (that dissatisfaction increases with improvement rather than with immiseration) led inexorably to the thesis that the "rage of a privileged class" would fire racial rebellion. Angelina Grimké (ironically echoing white racist fears of educated blacks) asserted that "it is much harder for the educated Negro to bear his fate because his demands have increased--his hopes reach higher and so his capacity for pain has multiplied as his desires are unfulfilled.... Fine, strong, intelligent Negroes are leaving the schools and colleges of America" and encountering "prejudice, insult, closed opportunities, denial of rights and a veritable hell for both body and soul." Owen, describing those allegedly most responsible for black resistance during the Tulsa riot, exalted "the fine intellectual specimen of Negro manhood, the group which, as a result of its education, success and social triumph, is the constant butt of attack from the whites because it is a competitor. Again, it has to carry the burdens of the race on its back because it is more conscious of proscriptions, foresees more clearly the wanton narrowing of opportunity and, pricked with a thousand civilized desires, growing more intense and extensive, feels most keenly the burden of being a black thing in America.... They are recognized as leaders; they are looked up to by the others; upon them is the responsibility for advice, for guidance."[38]
Long-time Socialist minister George Frazier Miller, in sharp contrast to Owen, claimed that educated and cultivated blacks did not resist during the pogroms, and ascribed their pusillanimity to the spirit of retirement superinduced by culture. That training which brings one to an appreciation of, and abidance in, the delicate features of refinement causes a recoiling with a shudder from the coarser displays of life: the higher the culture the more revolting become the coarser indulgences of the day.... [and] the greater becomes the spirit of insistence upon the maintenance of the dignity of the gentleman; and mixing in a street broil or riot is regarded as out of harmony with, and wholly destructive of, the genius of noble manhood and of the modesty becoming womanhood.... So, he says: I would lose caste to mix in a street broil, and rowdyism is incompatible with my station in life: such indulgence would inevitably result in my expulsion from my social group.[39]
Culture, therefore, often generated acquiescence in oppression and evil, in which case "culture itself becomes an offense [and] a contributory element to degradation." In that case, and "in the face of the demands for self-protection, [a person] could wish himself a ruffian, and could sorrow that culture in him had ever conduced to the subordination of the native disposition to proper assertiveness and self-preservation." Miller concluded that blacks must transcend the "soothing and deceitful voice of a culture (?) that lulls to inactivity and timidity when the stern voice of duty calls to resolute action."[40] Aside from "the soldiers recently returned from the field of battle, whose spirits are still vibrating with the spirit of militarism," blacks could depend "for the safeguarding of our homes and the lives of those who are dear to us" only upon "the man we call uncouth--the man unaccustomed to the exactions of the drawing room and the etiquette of the social board." Miller continued:
The social value of these uncultured is beyond estimate, and we of the "cultured" folk owe them a large debt of gratitude for their splendid and cherished service in the conflicts into which they were recently drawn by their economic antagonists, their political and social oppressors.... The determination.... to redress every grievance, to take reprisals upon assault, to defend one's rights at every angle, and one's life to the utmost, is more highly to be prized than a thorough knowledge of all that Aeschylus or Euripides ever wrote. I would rather be a crack shot when shooting is needed than be the most finished Homeric scholar in the land.[41]
At times Owen also found hope in the common man, both black and white. During the Chicago race riot, when churches, schools, charities, politicians, and Afro-American leaders were helpless, the common people mingled in the cabarets, "talking and drinking, enjoying the music, dancing when they cared to." The cabaret "is doing in many cities what the church, school, and family have failed to do": undermining racism by encouraging interracial conviviality. Although "it is commonly said that these are the ordinary people who don't amount to anything.... the people who will have finally to stop this race prejudice are the so-called common people, white and black. When their passions can no longer be fired by lying newspapers, screens and demagogues, the hope of the race baiter is gone forever."[42]
Disagreement and ambivalence about the relative virtues of cultivated and working-class blacks only underscored a fundamental ambiguity at the very core of the Messenger's radical mission. Sorrowfully, the black Socialists found no social base for their ambitious enterprise. How could a world-class intellectual elite inspire and mobilize a constituency so unlike themselves? Randolph and his cohorts sought the liberation of the masses of Afro-Americans; pursuing that goal, they attacked black educational institutions, civil rights organizations, newspapers, churches, leaders, and forms of popular culture. Indeed, no aspect of Afro-American life escaped their withering fire. Afro-Americans, they preached, must remake themselves, their culture, and their institutions in the very process of their liberation struggle. White radicals, of course, called for similar self-transformations in their own constituencies. Such demands, however, were an unrealistic basis for a mass, working-class insurgency.
Notes:
[1] "When the War Will End," TM, August 1919; "The Negro--A Menace to Radicalism," TM, May-June 1919.
[2] ibid. Elsewhere, of course, the Messenger recognized the IWW's stellar record.
[3] ibid.; "Book Reviews. The Negro Faces America, by Herbert J. Seligman," TM, September 1920.
[4] GSS, "Politics and the Negro," TM, April 1923.
[5] ibid.
[6] "The Real and Alleged Moens' Case," TM, July 1919.
[7] "Big Business and the YMCA," TM, March 1921; "Our Mr. Fortune," TM, July 1919.
[8] APR and CO, "The Causes of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[9] "Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, April-May 1920.
[10] "Du Bois Fails as a Theorist," TM, December 1919.
[11] Grimke's poem, "Her Thirteen Black Soldiers," commemorated the first thirteen soldiers hung for their part in the Houston disturbances. Du Bois wrote Grimke that "We have just been specially warned by the Justice Department that some of our articles are considered disloyal. I would not dare, therefore, to print this just now." Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York, 1973), 115-116. Ellis (Surveillance, 132) speculates that Du Bois might have wished for an excuse to reject Grimke's poem because of its alleged lack of literary merit; but Bruce (Grimke, 224) specifically rejects this hypothesis. Bruce documents the fact that Du Bois had previously agreed to publish "Her Thirteen Black Soldiers" and had planned it for the June Crisis. "Australia to Give Up Color Line," TM, August 1922; "The Crisis of the Crisis," TM, July 1919; "A Record of the Darker Races," TM, September 1920.
[12] Colson, "Phases of Du Bois," TM, April-May 1920
[13] "The Crisis of the Crisis," TM, July 1919.
[14] "Robert Russa Moton," TM, July 1919; "New Leadership of the New Negro," TM, May-June 1919.
[15] "The Invisible Government of Negro Social Work," TM, December 1920.
[16] "Who's Who. A New Crowd--a New Negro," TM, May-June 1919.
[17] "Resolution of the Convention of the Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, September 1920; APR and CO, "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920.
[18] "Debs and the Negro," TM, November 1920; J.A. Rogers, "The Ku Klux Klan: A Promise or a Menace?," TM, March, April, June, August, and October 1923. Of course, temporary enfranchisement of blacks, largely enacted out of cynical motives, did not obviate the necessity of military rule; when the troops were withdrawn, white terrorism once again reigned. The Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were never enforced, a failure in which US Presidents, Congresses, and Supreme Courts colluded for almost a century.
[19] "Who's Who. Theodore Roosevelt," TM, March 1919.
[20] "Negro Republican Leaders," TM, July 1921; "Labor and Lynching," TM, February 1920; "Negro Fails to Get Registrar of Treasury Job," TM, February 1922.
[21] APR, "Negro Political Representation," TM, November 1917; "Chas. W. Anderson," TM, April 1923; "The Negro in Politics," "Negro Republican Leaders," TM, July 1921.
[22] "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920; APR, "Hard Times," TM, November 1921; "The Failure of the Negro Church," TM, October 1919; McKinney, "A Vanishing Conservatism," TM, November 1924.
[23] "The Failure of the Negro Church," TM, October 1919.
[24] "Who's Who. Oswald Garrison Villard," TM, August 1919; "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920.
[25] "Negro Mass Movement," TM, May-June 1919; "The Negro Business Man," TM, January 1918; "The Crisis of Negro Business," TM, March 1922; "Patronize Your Own Facilities," TM, September 1924.
[26] "Racial Equality," TM, October 1919; "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920; "Labor and the Movies," TM, October 1920; "Prohibition: Promise or Menace," TM, February 1920.
[27] "Art in America," TM, February 1922; "Resolutions of the Convention of the Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, September 1920; APR and CO, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919; J. Cogdell, "Truth in Art," TM, March 1923; "Book Reviews. Negro Folk Songs, With a Story," TM, September 1922. According to Thomas Talley, the author of the collection of folk songs, the songs subtly and surreptitiously expressed opposition to the slave regime in ways the whites could not decipher.
[28] CO, "Love. A Type of Truth Found Chiefly in Works of Fiction," TM, January 1923; "Operas and Cabarets," TM, March 1924; Fort-Whiteman, "Theatre, Drama, Music," TM, November 1917.
[29] "The Theatre," TM, January 1923; APR and CO, "Economic Interpretation of Leadership," TM, October 1920. The editors added that this is "the economic interpretation of the stage."
[30] "Who's Who. Bert Williams," TM, April 1922.
[31] J. Cogdell, "Truth in Art," TM, March 1923. "Who's Who. Gilpin and the Drama League," TM, March 1921, severely criticized Gilpin for truckling to white racism.
[32] Fort-Whiteman, "Theatre, Dance, Music," TM, November 1917; "Drama," TM, April 1923.
[33] Fort-Whiteman, "Theatre, Dance, Music," TM, November 1917; "Drama," TM, April 1923; Wallace Jackson, "The Theatre," TM, June 1923; Abram H. Harris, "The Ethiopian Art Players and the Nordic Complex," TM, July 1923.
[34] "Propaganda," TM, February 1920.
[35] "The Invisible Government of Negro Social Work," TM, December 1920; "American Institutions," TM, March 1919.
[36] APR and CO, "The Cause of and Remedy for Race Riots," TM, September 1919.
[37] Advertisement for the Friends of Negro Freedom, TM, January 1923; "Friends of Negro Freedom," TM, August 1922; "Aftermath of the Exodus," TM, November 1923; "The Negroes' Indictment Against Mayor John Purroy Mitchell of New York City." TM, November 1917; "Garvey Believes Conviction Just," TM, August 1923.
[38] Angelina Grimke, "Book Review. Rachael," TM, July 1921; CO, "Tulsa," TM, July 1921.
[39] Miller, "The Social Value of the Uncultured," TM, October 1919.
[40] ibid. The question mark is Miller's.
[41] ibid.
[42] CO, "The Cabaret--A Useful Social Institution," TM, August 1922.