In
1917, William White, president of the Headwaiters and Sidewaiters
Society of Greater New York, hired
Chandler Owen and Philip
Randolph to edit Hotel
Messenger,
the periodical for Black hotel employees. As editors, Randolph and
Owen printed an expose of union corruption and were immediately sacked.
Chandler Owen and Philip
Randolph now decided to establish their own socialist journal,
The Messenger.
The first edition published in
August, 1917, was a mixture of political comment, trade union news,
literary criticism and biographies of leading radicals of the time.
The
Messenger
published the work of E. Franklin Frazier,
Joel Rogers, Hubert
Harrison, George
Schuyler, Roy Wilkins, Claude
McKay, Scott Nearing, Langston
Hughes, Paul Robeson and Eugene
O'Neill. The journal losed in 1928.
(1)
The Messenger (November, 1917)
Our
aim is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy
of the times, and above the cheap peanut politics of the old reactionary
Negro leaders. Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party
has no weight with us; principle has. Loyalty is meaningless; it depends
on what one is loyal to. Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends
on what one is praying for. We consider prayer as nothing more than
a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend
upon what the fervent wish is.
(2) Philip
Randolph,
The
Messenger
(July, 1918)
At a recent convention of the National
Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a member
of the Administration's Department of Intelligence was present. When
Mr. Julian Carter of Harrisburg was complaining of the racial prejudice
which American white troops had carried into France, the administration
representative rose and warned the audience that the Negroes were
under suspicion of having been affected by German propaganda.
In keeping with the ultra-patriotism of the oldline type of Negro
leaders the NAACP failed to grasp its opportunity. It might have informed
the Administration representatives that the discontent among Negroes
was not produced by propaganda, nor can it be removed by propaganda.
The causes are deep and dark - though obvious to all who care to use
their mental eyes. Peonage, disfranchisement, Jim-Crowism, segregation,
rank civil discrimination, injustice of legislatures, courts and administrators
- these are the propaganda of discontent among Negroes.
The only legitimate connection between this unrest and Germanism is
the extensive government advertisement that we are fighting "to
make the world safe for democracy", to carry democracy to Germany;
that we are conscripting the Negro into the military and industrial
establishments to achieve this end for white democracy four thousand
miles away, while the Negro at home, through bearing the burden in
every way, is denied economic, political, educational and civil democracy.
(3) Philip
Randolph,
The
Messenger
(July, 1919)
The IWW is the only labor organization in the United
States which draws no race or color line. There is another reason
why Negroes should join the IWW. The Negro must engage in direct action.
He is forced to do this by the Government. When the whites speak of
direct action, they are told to use their political power. But with
the Negro it is different. He has no political power. Therefore the
only recourse the Negro has is industrial action, and since he must
combine with those forces which draw no line against him, it is simply
logical for him to draw his lot with the Industrial Workers of the
World.
(4)
George
Schuyler, wrote about his time working for The
Messenger in his autobiography, Black and Conservative.
Philip Randolph was one of the finest, most engaging
men I had ever met. Undemanding and easy to get along with, leisurely
and undisturbed, remaining affable under all circumstance, whether
the rent was due and he did not have it, or whether an expected donation
failed to materialize, or whether the long-suffering printer in Brooklyn
was demanding money. He had a keen sense of humor and laughed easily,
even in adversity.
(5) Philip
Randolph
and Chandler
Owen,
co-editors of the The
Messenger,
were both charged with breaking the Espionage
Act in August, 1918. Randolph later wrote about his trial.
The judge was astonished when
he saw us and read what we had written in the Messenger. Chandler
and I were twenty-nine at the time, but we looked much younger. The
judge said, why, we were nothing but boys. He couldn't believe we
were old enough, or, being black, smart enough, to write that red-hot
stuff in the Messenger. There was no doubt, he said, that the the
white socialists were using us, that they had written the stuff for
us.
He turned to us: "You really wrote
this magazine? We assured him that we had. "What do you know
about socialism? he said. We told him we were students of Marx and
fervent believers in the socialization of social property. "Don't
you know," he said, "that you are opposing your own government
and that you are subject to imprisonment for treason?" We told
him we believed in the principle of human justice and that our right
to express our conscience was above the law.
(6)
William Patterson, The Man Who
Cried Genocide (1971)
One day, as I walked to the hotel from the university,
I was attracted by a copy of the Crisis, on display in the window
of a
bookstore. This was the official organ of the National Association
for the Advancement of Colored People, and what particularly struck
me was the headline "Close Ranks." It turned out to be the
title of an editorial written by W. E. B. Du Bois, the magazine's
editor. His injunction that colored people should support the U.S.
war effort did not correspond with my own thoughts on the subject.
But I wanted to examine the arguments in support of the opposite viewpoint.
Walking into that store was like walking into a new life. Emanuel
Levine, a short, stocky man of about 30, with a shock of black hair
and a muscular body that made me think of a wrestler, greeted me cordially.
It was not surprising
that a discontented Black law student should find pleasure in a place
where he could engage in
friendly and informative discussions. At school they were teaching
me to accommodate to the racist society in which I
lived, while in the bookstore I began to learn some fundamentals about
the nature of that society and how to go about
changing it.
I became acquainted with
the Masses, a militant magazine that published lively social criticism
of the entire American
scene. I was introduced to Marxist literature and books; I read the
Messenger, a magazine published in New York by two
young Black radicals - A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. I was
stirred by its analyses of the source of Black oppression and the
attempt to identify it with the international revolution against working-class
oppression and colonialism. This was an enriching and exhilarating
experience.
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