Early Voice I—A. Philip Randolph’s Radical Harlem (2024)

(This is the first part of a three-part article. Read the second part.)

These were the poorest people of the South, who poured into New York City during the decade following the Great Depression. These migrants were told that unlimited opportunities for prosperity existed in New York and that there was no “color problem” there. They were told that Negroes lived in houses with bathrooms, electricity, running water, and indoor toilets. To them this was the “promised land” that Mammy had been singing about in the cotton fields for many years.—Claude Brown in “Manchild in the Promised Land.”

I—FROM FLORIDA TO HARLEM

Blacks had been coming to New York long before the Great Depression. One was A. Philip Randolph, who lived in Harlem through most of its history as a black community, having arrived from Jacksonville, Florida, in 1911, at the end of the first modern wave of black immigration to the North. During the First World War, there was an even greater flow—the one that furnished the Northern reservoir for Marcus Garvey’s great black-nationalist movement. And then there was the swell after the Depression. The migrants, especially the ones before the Depression, did not come only from the South: thousands came from the West Indies. Nor were all the Southerners from the cotton fields: some were businessmen or aspiring politicians, and some, like the young Randolph, were budding intellectuals, filled with hopes for careers in art, education, or mass culture, or in the arenas of political protest and radicalism. And to all of them New York City—Harlem—was the promised land.

Of course, things did not turn out that way. A few people found what had chiefly drawn them there. Aspiring black Republican politicians—men like Charles W. Anderson and Edward Johnson—achieved great power in Harlem during the first two and a half decades of the century. Real-estate men and speculators did so well for themselves that they are to be credited with having opened up Harlem as a black residential community. And those who came in search of nothing more than “houses with bathrooms, electricity, running water, and indoor toilets” cannot have been disappointed. But the essence of what New York City, or Harlem, promised was freedom from the “color problem”—an equal opportunity for the pursuit of racial and political happiness—and that kind of freedom has proved elusive to this day.

Yet the early experience in Harlem was not a total loss. The migrants—especially those who came during and after the First World War—established the most important black cultural and political community in America. By the mid-nineteen-twenties, the relatively young community had generated one of the most spectacular bursts of black cultural activity—the Harlem, or Negro, Renaissance—the country has ever witnessed. Politically, Harlem was also, for all its limits and for all the aspirations it imprisoned, a somewhat freer place in which to operate, to articulate the demand for black freedom, than any other oppressed black community or any colonized black country in the world. Because of this, Harlem became, even before its Renaissance, the international center of black-nationalist and black-radical agitation—giving an enormous impetus to the awakening of black consciousness and black political agitation in other parts of America and the world.

The two most important main streets in the history of black Harlem have been 135th and 125th. It was on 135th Street, between Fifth and Seventh Avenues, that blacks in the community got their first taste of good tenement living, and it was from there that black residency pushed outward, steadily darkening once all-white Harlem. It was at the intersection of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, the spawning ground of the first generation of Harlem radicals, that the young Randolph made his first appearance as a street-corner agitator, in 1916. And it was in that general area that the headquarters, and the magazines and newspapers, of all the black-radical and black-nationalist organizations of the First World War—notably Randolph’s Messenger magazine and Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association—were based. By the late nineteen-twenties, nationalism and radicalism were no longer in vogue, black Harlem had spread rapidly, and 125th Street had become the new center. It was a different kind of center, lacking the distinctively black historical and intellectual flavor that once clung to 135th. It was brasher, gaudier, and saucier, given more to the arts of pleasure and entertainment, to business and consumption. But, in a way that 135th had never been, 125th became, and has remained, a paradigm of the total life of Harlem, a crucible of its various styles, flavors, and politics and its warring business interests. In 1925, when Harlem had lost the moderate concern it once had for radicals of Randolph’s stripe, he organized a union of sleeping-car porters, and a dozen years later, joining the migration of action from 135th Street, he and the porters’ union also came to 125th Street, where, in the nineteen-forties, the union became perhaps the most important black political institution in America.

Until the building at 217 West 125th Street was torn down, in 1969, to make way for an ultramodern concrete-and-glass structure, it was one of the best-known office buildings in Harlem. Around 1900, it had been a luxurious apartment dwelling, adjoining the Harlem Opera House—built by Oscar Hammerstein I, in 1888. In 1938, some ten years after No. 217 was converted into an office building, it received what became its most widely known tenant, the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—which, after a long struggle, had finally won recognition from the Pullman Company. Randolph’s union remained there until 1968, when it moved to new headquarters, at 103 East 125th Street. By then, the Brotherhood had seen its best days. It had never been one of the larger unions (at the height of its power, during the early nineteen-forties, it had fifteen thousand members), and by 1968 the membership had dropped to two thousand. What remained of its prestige rested upon the role it had played between 1940 and 1950, when it had been the spearhead and the principal support of black mass politics in America, and upon the even greater national reputation of its head, Randolph, whom it had catapulted into a position of labor and civil-rights leadership.

During the March on Washington movement of the nineteen-forties, when Randolph became the leading black public figure in the country, 217 West 125th Street was the political headquarters of black America, and, though it was superseded by several other headquarters during the nineteen-fifties, when the modern civil-rights movement began to emerge, it remained right up until 1968 one of the country’s important political centers. One of the larger offices in the new Brotherhood’s headquarters was Randolph’s, looking out over West 125th Street. It was a long room, sparsely furnished but with a pale-green wall-to-wall carpet. At the eastern end was Randolph’s desk, and at the opposite end was an old wine-colored leather couch, soft and scuffed from long and frequent use. At one end of the couch stood an American flag and at the other end an ensign of the Brotherhood. There was a large bookcase against a wood-panelled partition halfway between the couch and Randolph’s desk. And all four walls were hung with large photographs of the founders of the union: Randolph himself; Milton Webster, of Chicago; Bennie Smith, of Omaha; Ashley Totten and Thomas T. Patterson, of New York; E. J. Bradley, of St. Louis; and C. L. Dellums, of Oakland.

A visitor’s first impression of Randolph’s office in recent years was one of serenity, especially when Randolph was there working, with horn-rimmed glasses on, and looking—despite his splendid presence—somewhat lonely in the large, not very bright room. But though the first impression of him in his office would endure, the sight was usually a fleeting one. No sooner did a visitor enter than Randolph laid aside his work, took off his glasses, and left his desk to greet his guest in the middle of the room. Tall, and smiling cordially yet correctly, he was always tastefully dressed, suggesting—in view of a certain polish and urbanity in the way he moved—that he might at one time have attached more than a little importance to matters of style and fashion. In the summer, he usually had on a blue serge suit, with a black vest (or a beige cardigan sweater), a black knit tie, a white shirt, and a white handkerchief flowering rakishly out of his breast pocket. At other times of the year, he showed a preference for pepper-and-salt tweeds. By 1960, when his health had begun to fall, he presented a fragile, sensitive, and often grave face, striking under soft white hair. Now he no longer carried the large heavyweight’s body he had developed in the nineteen-forties but seemed to be returning to the willowy build of his earlier years, when, as a young radical in Harlem during the First World War, someone had referred to him as “string-bean Randolph.” He was still erect of bearing, however, as if the way he stood were something he was no more able to change than his inmost nature.

Though Randolph’s health was failing, his voice retained the power and attractiveness of his younger years. After hearing him speak at the March on Washington in 1963, a reporter from the Times observed that Randolph’s voice was “soft and deep, almost like an organ,” and that his language, “Biblical in its eloquence, never seems directed at his immediate audience, but somewhere out beyond, perhaps the whole human race.” Also remarkable was his accent, suggesting a cultivated mating of the Bostonian and the West Indian. People have been as curious about the origin of his “cawn’t,” “enhawnce,” and “mawsses”—to say nothing of the old-time words he uses, like “verily” and “vouchsafe”—as they have been about the sources of his dignity. How did he come to talk like that? Throughout his life, it was the people who wondered about his accent who were responsible for the notion, once widespread, that he was educated at Harvard. He had never received anything from Harvard, of course—or, at least, not until June, 1971, when the university gave him an honorary Doctor of Laws degree for being “a wise and courageous leader of labor, pioneer champion of civil rights, whose early and unflagging struggle for justice and widened economic opportunity made a signal contribution to our nation’s life.” He had never earned an academic degree at all, though he had been educated, as an evening student, at the City College of New York. Randolph himself has mentioned three early influences on his speech: listening to his father, a self-trained preacher, whose own language had been shaped by the Bible, and the black Reconstruction oratory of the Reverend Henry McNeal Turner, of Georgia; studying Shakespeare and elocution when he thought, as a young man, of becoming an actor; and reading the Abolitionist speeches of Frederick Douglass and Wendell Phillips.

Randolph’s entire active career—from 1911, when, at the age of twenty-two, he arrived in Harlem from Jacksonville, to 1968, when, at the age of seventy-nine, he retired as the president of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—was spent in Harlem. For the last thirty-five of those years, he had lived in the Dunbar Apartments, a five-acre complex of six buildings, containing five hundred and eleven apartments, at 150th Street and Seventh Avenue. They had been built by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., to meet the demand of middle-class Harlemites for “excellence” in apartment dwelling.

When Randolph moved there, in 1933, he qualified only by virtue of his standing in the community, for he had almost no income. That year was one of the worst years of the Depression, and it was also the year when his struggle—then about eight years old—to organize the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters almost collapsed. One day, he came back from a trip to Chicago to find that his wife, Lucille, had borrowed the down payment on one of the five-room coöperative apartments and had moved theIr belongings in. The Randolphs’ tenancy was to long outlive the Dunbar’s “excellence.”

Randolph’s wife died on April 12, 1963—three days before she would have turned eighty and he would have become seventy-four. Their marriage had been childless, and he continued to live by himself in their Dunbar apartment, a third-floor walkup, ever since. One day in the summer of 1968, Randolph—having been advised by his physician to take the afternoon off because of the heat—returned to his apartment, where he was accosted by three young men. One choked him from behind while the two others went through his pockets. Finding no money or jewelry on him, the three roughed him up, threw him to the floor, and walked away. A month after Randolph was mugged, Bayard Rustin, who heads the A. Philip Randolph Institute, a labor and civil-rights organization that was founded in 1965, moved him downtown—into a five-room apartment in the coöperative buildings run by the International Ladies’ Garment Workers’ Union in the Chelsea area, where Rustin himself lives. “We had to move him for two reasons, Rustin says. “At his age, he had to live in a place where he didn’t have to walk up three flights. Secondly, he had to live in a building where there was some real protection. And there could be no better place for him to live than in a coöperative owned by the trade-union movement, in which he had spent so many years of his life.”

At the beginning of the century, when Randolph was growing up there, Jacksonville was well on the way to becoming the business metropolis of Florida, or, as one of its admirers called it, “a gem for business.” Where the black residents were concerned, the city was considered a good place. In the late nineteenth century, they composed about a third of the population. Not only did they own some of the better houses but, since the city was still relatively unsegregated, they lived wherever they could afford to. Mostly, though, they lived together in the neighborhoods of Oakland, Brooklyn, Burbridge Addition, La Villa, and East Jacksonville. A former resident of Jacksonville remembered that “a lot of the colored people used to ride around in nice carriages; they had something; they had class.” But that was only part of the story. Most blacks in Jacksonville were poor, and owned neither houses nor fine carriages. They were mainly house workers, factory workers, tradesmen, and service attendants. Then, too, as James Weldon Johnson wrote in his autobiography, “Along This Way,” by the turn of the century Jacksonville had become “a one hundred per cent Cracker town.”

When the Randolphs arrived there, in 1891, from Crescent City, Florida—where the Reverend James William Randolph had been a self-trained African Methodist Episcopal preacher, and where, on April 15, 1889, Asa Philip, their second son, was born—Jacksonville was not yet, of course, that kind of cracker town, but the change must have been in the wind. The family settled in the Oakland section, which was predominantly black, and, as Randolph later recalled, “the toughest part of town.” They lived in a rented two-story house on Jesse Street—an old structure with a shingle roof, weatherboard siding, and a small front porch. The house was painted green, the window facings white. A ramshackle picket fence in front had so many slats broken or missing that the chickens, cats, and dogs of the neighbors wandered in and out as they pleased. There were two oak trees at the gate, and on festive occasions, like Christmas, the elder Randolph whitewashed the lower trunks.

Before Randolph and his brother, James William, Jr., who was two years his senior, grew up and started buying their own books or bringing others home on loan from the public library, there were a few volumes in the house, representing the range of the elder Randolph’s intellectual interests and some of the sources of his self-education. His younger son remembers that there were Shakespearean dramas; the novels of Sir Walter Scott, Charles Dickens, and Jane Austen; writings by Charles Darwin and John Calvin; historical accounts of the A.M.E. Church; and one or two books on American and African history. There were also the inevitable family Bible, back issues of the Christian Recorder and the A.M.E. Review, and of a radical political journal of the period, the Voice of the Negro. Before the boys could read, their father read and explained parts of this literature to them, hoping as much to encourage the habit of reading as to arouse their interest in serious affairs.

The Reverend James Randolph was a tall, sparely built man with a deep and powerful voice. Randolph remembers him as having “a high nose, a chin beard, and a certain refinement and polish of bearing”—especially on Sunday mornings, when he put on a long frock coat, a vest, and a celluloid collar. Though Calvinist in temperament, he was not entirely out of sympathy with human error. For instance, though he never drank himself—and would not permit in his house any bottle that had ever contained liquor—he took no moral stand against people who drank, especially if they did so in moderation. But he felt no leniency whatever toward things like gambling and “lewd women.” His relaxations were few and, in keeping with his means, rather simple: reading his books, his church magazines, and the Florida Times-Union and Metropolis; chewing tobacco; and smoking three-for-a-nickel Virginia Cheroots. Now and then, when he was in funds, he splurged on Cremo cigars, at a nickel apiece.

Elizabeth Randolph was just as tall as her husband, but lighter-skinned, with high cheekbones and long, flowing hair. Randolph remembers her as “a beautiful woman with a radiant smile and firm eyes that could look straight through you.” She was the disciplinarian of the family, and supervised her sons, Randolph has said, “with the rigidity of a corporal.” Like her mother, she was an ardent churchgoer, possessing deep wells of religious emotion; Randolph has recalled that after testifying on Communion Sundays his mother sometimes buried her face in her hands and burst into tears. But, like her father, she made no friends unless they were in the church, paid no social calls—even on her neighbors—and went nowhere except to religious affairs, funerals, and weddings, or to see her parents in Baldwin.

Within a year of arriving in Jacksonville, the elder Randolph started raising funds to build a permanent place of worship for the congregation—a few people who met on Sundays in a rented room—he had come to minister to. He raised enough to buy a plot of land and to erect upon it a modest clapboard structure, which he named the New Hope A.M.E. Chapel. The salary from New Hope—even supplemented by what he got from a church in Baldwin, where he preached one Sunday a month—was never enough to support his family. Nor was the situation much improved when he was given two other rural churches he had been promised, in Palatka and Green Cove Springs. Usually when he came back from visiting those churches, he sat by the fireplace and counted up his receipts. The two boys, who watched from a distance, “never saw anything but coins, and nothing larger than a quarter.”

The elder Randolph was the chief moral and intellectual influence upon his sons. He demanded that they be in church every Sunday, barring illness or similar acts of God. Nor should they forget, he told them, that no church was better than their own, and that no faith took precedence over African Methodism. He made reading a mandatory daily activity for them after they started attending school. People who grew up on Jesse Street remember that one of the familiar sights on the block was that of James and Asa Randolph reading every afternoon on the family porch. Beaman Hearn, a playmate of Asa’s, who lived across the street, remembered several years later that “those boys did practically nothing but read,” and added, “Matter of fact, if Asa and I were burying a cat behind the house, he wanted to read a service.”

Though they “found out different” as they grew older, James and Asa Randolph were told by their father that most of the great men in the world were men of color. Thus, to be black was not to be inferior. They should consider men like Crispus Attucks, Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Frederick Douglass, Richard Allen, and Henry McNeal Turner. They didn’t even have to look that far afield, their father said; if they looked right there in Jacksonville they would see a man like Joseph E. Lee, the Collector of Internal Revenue in the city.

Asa and his brother were close friends. They went almost everywhere together, studied and read at home together, and, despite the difference in their ages, were always in the same grade at school. Asa was ahead of other children his age, mainly because of his brother’s help. A better and more serious student than Asa, James was particularly brilliant at languages and mathematics. He was not unduly impressed with his reputation as a student, though he can hardly have helped enjoying the fact that almost everyone else seemed to be. “He was the brains,” says a relative who once lived with the family. “He had a superior mind.”

In 1903, at the ages of sixteen and fourteen—after attending the Oakland Elementary School and an A.M.E. school, Edward Waters College—James and Asa entered the Cookman Institute. The Institute was one of the memorials to the Northern white Methodist concern for the education of black children in the South. Its academic standards were somewhere between those of a high school and those of a junior college, and certainly higher than those of Edward Waters College—with which the boys’ parents had become dissatisfied. The Institute—which was the first high school for blacks in Florida, and for a number of years the only one—was founded in 1872 by the Reverend S. B. Darnell, of the Methodist Church North, and was named after another white Methodist, the Reverend Alfred Cookman, who donated the funds for its construction. When the Randolph boys went there, the faculty was made up equally of Southern black teachers and Methodist teacher-missionaries from the North. The missionary part of their work was to develop “desirable” sexual and family mores among the young blacks—requirements that the Institute had considered even more urgent in the eighteen-seventies, when most of the students were the children of freed slaves. The school taught what were called “the higher branches”—natural science, French, Greek, Latin, ethics, philosophy, law, mathematics, literature, music. Over the years, it also taught branches that, if not so high, were absolutely essential to the survival of some, and probably most, of its graduates—shoemaking, tailoring, agriculture, printing, and home economics.

The morning after his graduation, in 1907, Asa, then eighteen, was hired by a life-insurance company to collect premiums in the black neighborhoods of Jacksonville. A week later, James was hired by the post office to make special deliveries. These were the most impressive jobs that either was to hold in Jacksonville—except later on, perhaps, when James became a Pullman sleeping-car porter. After about a month, Asa got tired of collecting premiums, and over the next four years he clerked in a grocery store, drove a delivery wagon for a drug company, stacked logs in a lumberyard, pushed wheelbarrows in a fertilizer factory, and carried water and shovelled dirt for an outfit laying railroad crossties. Through this succession of dreary, sometimes backbreaking occupations, only his cultural interests, some of which he had developed at Cookman, sustained him spiritually.

In the spring of 1911, Asa told his mother that he and Beaman Hearn were going to New York for a few months and would return early in the fall. That was Hearn’s plan. If Asa could help it—if he could latch on to something in New York—he did not intend to return at all. In April, both young men took their savings and sailed for New York City on the Clyde Steamship Company’s Arapahoe. To help pay the passage, the elder Randolph had arranged with the ship’s head waiter, a friend of his, for the boys to work in the kitchen. And on the voyage up Asa washed dishes—“until I got cramps in my fingers,” he said later. It was a useful introduction to the kind of work he would have to do in New York to support himself.

When Randolph and Hearn arrived that April, black Harlem was bounded by 128th and 145th Streets and Fifth and Seventh Avenues. Beyond those boundaries, Harlem was white; it was apprehensive as well, for the black section was slowly expanding in all directions. The two young men rented, for a dollar and a half a week, a room on 132nd Street, between Seventh and Lenox. They spent the first two months or so wandering through Manhattan, sightseeing and taking in the shows. But the ambition that had brought Randolph to New York was never far from his mind, and he was now set on becoming an actor—an idea he had developed after playing in a few amateur productions around Jacksonville. In the mornings, Harlemites encountered the odd spectacle of the young Randolph reading aloud as he walked from 132nd Street to a restaurant at the corner of 130th and Lenox, where he had breakfast. “People used to look at him and shake their heads, as if they were sure he was out of his mind,” Hearn has recalled. (Hearn, who lived his later years in retirement in Pensacola, Florida, died only a few weeks ago.) Randolph’s favorite haunts in the city were the New York Public Library, at Forty-second Street and Fifth Avenue, and the Hippodrome, at Forty-fourth and Sixth, where for twenty-five cents he could spend an entire day watching variety and vaudeville shows. In October, Hearn, honoring a pledge he had made to his parents, returned to Jacksonville to go into business.

Randolph, now alone in the city, did—in view of his background—the only natural thing: he turned to the churches. After looking in on a few Sunday services, he learned of the young people’s organizations connected with the various churches, and confined his attentions to them. Randolph’s interest in these organizations had little to do with religion. He wished merely to meet people with whom he could pursue his own social and intellectual interests and from whom he could gather a surer sense of life in New York. As it turned out, the first part of this wish was the harder to fulfill. The majority of the youth organizations allowed no extraneous matters to intrude upon their study and discussion of the Bible. An exception was the Epworth League of the Salem Methodist Church, on West 133rd Street. It was true that the League’s principal devotion was also the Bible, but it permitted itself a wider range of concerns and activities—including a theatre club.

The theatre club was not, if Randolph had had a choice, the kind of group he would have preferred to join. Its players lacked even the semblance of professional polish he had acquired by appearing in the amateur productions in Jacksonville. But, with his ambitions, any opportunity to keep his skills in shape was better than none at all—especially in a town like New York, where he did not know anyone of any importance, let alone of importance in the theatre. The club’s chief activity was rehearsing scenes from Shakespeare and presenting them, at least one Sunday afternoon a month, before community audiences at the church. Though appearing in these scenes brought Randolph no attention that would be useful in furthering his career, it led him to memorize “Othello,” “Hamlet,” and “The Merchant of Venice.”

But a measure of attention did come a while later. His search for professional improvement took him, quite by accident, to the City College of New York—where, in order to improve his skills in elocution, he registered for two evening courses in public speaking. The improvement must have been rapid, for at one of the Sunday-afternoon performances at the Salem Church soon after Randolph started going to City College, he caught the eye of an important man in the theatre. His name was Henri Strange, a black Philadelphian, who was then the leading tragedian on the Harlem stage. A few days after the performance, Randolph was having a bite in a luncheonette on Lenox Avenue when Strange entered and took an empty seat at Randolph’s table. Strange introduced himself and remarked that he had caught Randolph’s performance at the church the previous Sunday. “With your voice and diction, it doesn’t really matter whether you can act,” he told Randolph, and he offered to sponsor the young man’s admission to a drama group of which he was a member. Ecstatic, Randolph wrote triumphantly to his parents in Jacksonville: A professional stage career was about to open up for him, and he had no immediate plans to return to the South. The response was shattering, though not altogether surprising. It was all right with them, his parents replied, if he felt that there was a future for him in New York, but under no circumstance could they approve of his spending his life on the stage, especially in a town like New York. Though Randolph was now twenty-three and was entirely responsible for—or at least entitled to—his own choices, he realized now that he had no intention of defying his parents on an issue they considered so vital to their morality.

With the theatre eliminated as a serious ambition, Randolph focussed his interest on politics. To create a climate of discussion better suited to his tastes and his needs, he withdrew from the Epworth League and, with some of the freer thinkers there, formed a current-affairs group, the Independent Political Council. At City College, he dropped public speaking and, over the next few semesters, took courses in history, political science, philosophy, and economics.

The switch to political courses brought Randolph closer to the political life on campus, and he found the classrooms to be among what he later called “the hottest beds of radicalism in New York City.” In 1912 and 1913, campus groups were championing the causes of the Industrial Workers of the World—probably the most radical labor activists in America then. These campus groups were raising funds for and speaking out in support of two great Wobbly campaigns in the East—the textile strikes in Lawrence, Massachusetts, in 1912, and in Paterson, New Jersey, the following year. Randolph’s interest in the 1913 strike was heightened because one of the staunchest supporters of the I.W.W. in Paterson was Hubert H. Harrison, originally from St. Croix, who was a pioneer radical intellectual in Harlem, the community’s leading street-corner orator, and a member of the Socialist Party in New York. Among the other radical heroes of C.C.N.Y. evening students were William D. (Big Bill) Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, of the I.W.W., and Eugene V. Debs, of the Socialist Party. Debs, an early advocate of industrial unionism and a onetime member of the I.W.W., polled nearly a million votes as the candidate of the Socialist Party in the 1912 Presidential election. The combination of Debs’ prestige, the growing popularity of the Socialists, and the militant industrial unionism of the I.W.W. helped to raise hopes on the left that a Socialist millennium was about to arrive. On a campus like City College, no one felt these hopes more keenly than the evening students, many of whom, like Randolph, were struggling to make a living. It was in a course given by J. Salwyn Schapiro, an instructor of history at City College, that Randolph first read Socialism and, as he has put it, “the history of European working-class movements.” The discovery was so exciting to him that in his spare time, he later recalled, he “began reading Marx as children read ‘Alice in Wonderland.’ ” It was, he said, “like finally tuning into an idea which gives you your outlook on life.” Part of this outlook was a broader philosophy of the racial struggle.

The political institution that dominated the allegiance of most black Americans—and would do so up until the first election of Franklin D. Roosevelt—was the Republican Party. Half a century after Emancipation, Republican politicians still took the loyalty of their black supporters smugly for granted. Few attempts were made to court or retain the black vote beyond the practice of rewarding conspicuous members of the race—mainly ward leaders—with important federal appointments. Since black voters attracted even less attention from the Democrats, they regarded these appointments as tokens of the continuing esteem in which they were held by the party that had presided over the abolition of slavery. In Jacksonville, the most important of the appointees had been Joseph E. Lee—one of the men whom the Reverend James Randolph, a Republican himself, had held up to his sons as a model of what black men could achieve. When Randolph arrived in New York, the man who occupied that position here was Charles W. Anderson, Collector of Internal Revenue for the Second District. The elevation of men like Lee and Anderson had to be approved by Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Machine, which during Theodore Roosevelt’s Administration was the clearing house for all black political appointments. When Woodrow Wilson was elected, in 1912, practically all black federal officeholders, including Anderson, lost their jobs, and since the Wilson Administration was distinguished for its indifference to the problems of black citizens, the Republican politicians were more confident than ever that it would take a sledgehammer to drive the black vote from the Party of Lincoln. Randolph—now a budding Socialist—felt “nothing but contempt” for politicians in both parties who so cynically ignored or exploited the black situation.

In the spring of 1914, Randolph, who was then working for an employment agency known as the Brotherhood of Labor, in an old apartment house near the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, was introduced to an attractive thirty-one-year-old widow named Lucille Green. She was light-skinned, of medium height and build, and had a head of silvery short-cropped hair, prematurely gray. She was one of three children of William and Josephine Campbell, and was trained as a schoolteacher at Howard University. At Howard, she had met a law student named Joseph Green, and after graduating they married and moved to New York, where Lucille taught school and her husband worked as a customs officer. Not long after they arrived, Joseph Green died.

In 1913, Madam C. J. Walker, the black cosmetic millionairess, arrived in Harlem from Indianapolis, where she had been marketing her formula for straightening hair. To help popularize her formula in Harlem and extend her business, Madam Walker—who built a town house on West 136th Street and, later, a mansion at Irvington-on-Hudson—opened a school to train young women in the Walker hair-beauty system. It was named the Lelia College, after Madam Walker’s only child, A’Lelia, and its graduates operated their own salons, using only the Walker products and the Walker system. Lucille Green, who had given up teaching after her husband’s death, was one of the first graduates of the Lelia College. She not only started her own salon, on 135th Street, but became a close friend of Madam Walker and a member of the social set that grew up around her in Harlem.

As Randolph later put it, he and Mrs. Green were immediately “taken” with each other. He considered her “beautiful, gregarious, elegant, fashionable, and socially conscious.” He also found that they not only had the same birthday, April 15th, but shared an interest in both Socialism and Shakespeare. Though Randolph and Mrs. Green were anything but equal in material possessions, they were equally generous of disposition. Two of their acquaintances at the time have paid them quite similar compliments. One has said that “he would give you his last quarter,” and the other that “she gave away even the things she needed if she felt you needed them more.” Mrs. Green’s first impression of young Randolph was, as she summed it up, that he was “exotic.” It is not clear exactly what she meant by that; it may well have been her word for the combination of Randolph’s handsomeness, his courtly manners, his dignified bearing, his impressive voice, his private reticence, his public rebelliousness, and his devotion to the serious side of life. Nor is it unlikely that she detected something in his appearance which suggested that he was indifferent to—or, at any rate, lacked—money.

Randolph’s combination of qualities was probably uncommon among the young men of Lucille Green’s acquaintance. Despite the serious aspects of her own interests, she was, as Randolph had been told, a “socialite”—and in prewar Harlem that meant going to lots of parties, dances, and soirées. In her case, most of them were presided over by the social set of which Madam Walker had become the center. It was not a society of old families with old income, even as such things were measured by and among blacks: old family and old money were to be found mainly in Brooklyn, among blacks who had no memory of ever having lived anywhere but in New York, and who, when they examined their lineage, found no trace of Southern soil or servitude. Madam Walker’s society consisted largely of successful speculators of recent vintage, community-club women, recently arrived urban professionals, and other parvenus. And the kind of young men it attracted were those who were drawn chiefly by the promise of a good time in the company of beautiful, gregarious, and well-to-do women. On a more genteel social plane, Mrs. Green was an established member of St. Philip’s Episcopal Church, which was then, and for several years after, the wealthiest and best-known black congregation in the world.

Randolph’s courtship of Mrs. Green—or Buddy, as they would always call each other—was brief and unspectacular. He took her to political lectures, movies, and a few legitimate theatres. She sometimes invited him to Madam Walker’s parties, but he always begged off, saying he had no time to waste with “fly-by-night people.” A Harlem acquaintance said later that he “never saw Randolph at a dance or a party,” adding, “He had bigger things in view.” In November, 1914, Randolph and Mrs. Green were married at St. Philip’s. Randolph had not wanted a church wedding, but she had insisted on St. Philip’s—thinking, no doubt, of her standing in the church. She had compromised by allowing him to choose the wedding trip, which—not entirely to her surprise—turned out to be a ride on the open streetcar from their new apartment, at 2453 Seventh Avenue, to South Ferry and back. But even that was a considerable concession to nuptial convention, for, saturated in politics as his mind was, he would just as soon have taken her down to Union Square to listen to Eugene Debs.

A few months after the marriage, the new Mrs. Randolph was introduced, at a party at Madam Walker’s, to a man who would become her husband’s closest friend and comrade. His name was Chandler Owen, and he was a student at Columbia University. Owen, born on April 5, 1889, in Warrenton, North Carolina, was just ten days older than Randolph. After four years at Virginia Union University, in Richmond, Owen had entered Columbia in 1913 to study sociology and political science. He was light-skinned, had bright, alert eyes in a round, fleshy face, and was a chunky five feet seven inches tall. He struck Lucille Randolph as aggressive and irreverent. He seemed to hold a critical opinion on everything, and was especially cynical on the subject of women. After listening to him for some time, she paid him one of her highest compliments. She told him he talked just like her husband. What she must have had in mind was his political irreverence, because, beyond that, Owen and her husband were as unlike in the way they talked as they were unlike in appearance. At any rate, Mrs. Randolph invited Owen to come around to their apartment the following day and meet her husband.

Randolph was at once impressed by the similarity of Owen’s political temperament to his own. Here, Randolph recognized with delight, was a “natural-born iconoclast,” a man “who did not believe in anything, including the church,” and who was “just as discontented as I was about the racial problem.” He was not influenced in the slightest by the differences between himself and Owen, but that did not mean he failed to see them, or did not find them in some respects surprising. He observed, for instance, that Owen knew nothing about Socialism, and that his political ideas derived mainly from his reading of the sociologist Lester F. Ward.

After their initial meeting, Owen introduced Randolph to Ward’s writing, and Randolph, in his words, “led Owen to Marx.” Neither had a steady job. Randolph had left the Brotherhood of Labor soon after his marriage, his wife having assured him of her willingness to support him in the pursuit of his public ambitions. And Owen, who had been doing odd jobs around the Columbia campus, felt no obligation to continue, having found that he was welcome to share in the amenities of the Randolph household. When not attending their classes at City College and Columbia, the two men spent their spare time together—chiefly at the Randolphs’ apartment and at the New York Public Library—studying, in Randolph’s words, “the theory and history of Socialism and working-class politics” and “their application to the racial problem in America.” In the evenings, whenever radicals like Eugene Debs, August Claessens, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Abraham Shiplacoff, and Morris Hillquit were appearing in Socialist and labor forums downtown, Randolph and Owen went to hear them. And whenever Hubert H. Harrison, black Harlem’s own Socialist spellbinder, was speaking at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street (which was then the heart of Harlem’s street-corner agitation and, for several years to come, the center of the militant consciousness of black America), the young men were there.

Toward the end of 1916, Randolph and Owen joined the Socialist Party. Even if they had not been spiritual converts by then, they might have seen, on pragmatic grounds alone, no alternative. Randolph has said, “’The Republicans knew they had the Negroes in their pockets, and the Democrats looked down on them. Neither party thought it had to offer Negroes elective office, and neither had a program for the Negro. The Socialist Party was the only party that had a philosophy and an economic program that took account of the race problem and whose economic analysis addressed itself to the solution of the Negro’s problems.” Feeling by the end of the year that they had, in Randolph’s words, “discovered all truth,” Randolph stopped going to City College—though over the years he went back for an occasional course—and Owen dropped his studies at Columbia. They reorganized the Independent Political Council, with Randolph as president and Owen as executive secretary.

Following the example of Harrison, as other young men in Harlem were doing, Randolph and Owen became soapbox orators themselves, propagandizing on the street corners for Socialism and unionism. Largely because of Randolph’s forensic gifts, they quickly became the most notorious street-corner radicals in the black community, exceeding even Harrison in the boldness of their assaults upon political and racial conditions in the country. Most weeknights, they were to be seen at the corner of Lenox Avenue and 135th Street. On Sunday nights, the two shifted over, a block west, to Seventh Avenue, for a weekly open forum, where the cream of the soapbox intelligentsia shared the platform and took turns enlarging “upon everything,” as Randolph has said, “from the French Revolution, and the history of slavery, to the rise of the working class.”

One day in January, 1917, Randolph and Owen went into an office building on Lenox Avenue, looking for a larger meeting place for their Independent Political Council. While there, they were recognized by William White, the president of the Headwaiters and Sidewaiters Society of Greater New York, who had heard them several times on the street corners. White called them into the Society’s headquarters, a single room on the third floor, and told them they were just the men he wanted to see. He had an idea for a monthly magazine for the waiters, White said, and he thought they were the ideal pair to edit it. Instead of looking for office space of their own, White suggested, why didn’t they move into his Society’s headquarters? They could have nearly half of the large room for themselves, and, beyond writing and editing the magazine, they were free to use their end of the room as they wished. Finally, White said, they could be assured of total editorial freedom, down to deciding what the magazine should be called.

White gave them the sunnier end of the room, with a bay window looking out on Lenox Avenue. It was furnished with a desk, which was large enough to accommodate Randolph, sitting on one side, and Owen, sitting opposite him, two soft leather chairs, a typewriter, a file cabinet, and a few folding chairs. Here, for the next eight months, the two young men brought out the Hotel Messenger—the name they chose for the magazine. They also held daily meetings with members of the Independent Political Council and with other young radicals in the community, who, having nothing better to do with their daytime hours, drifted in for political discussions. Some of those who dropped in at the Hotel Messenger were Lovett Fort-Whiteman, a Texan, who had graduated from McGill University; Cyril V. Briggs, a native of the Dutch West Indies and an editorial writer for the Amsterdam News; W. A. Domingo, a Jamaican nationalist and Socialist, who had migrated to Harlem a few years before; and Hubert Harrison.

The Hotel Messenger, which circulated among black waiters in the New York area, folded in August, when White fired his two young editors. A group of disgruntled sidewaiters had come to Randolph and Owen with the story that headwaiters were selling uniforms to sidewaiters at exorbitant prices and pocketing kickbacks from the uniform dealers—a racket that the editors exposed in the Hotel Messenger. Since White was indebted more to the headwaiters than to the sidewaiters for his office as president of the Society, he considered the exposé a threat. Incensed, he denounced the two editors as ingrates and ordered them out. And since he wanted no reminder of them around his office, he told them they were welcome to take the furniture they had used. Unrepentant—proud, in fact, of what they had done—Randolph and Owen returned a few days later, took the furniture, and set up office in a building next door, at 513 Lenox Avenue, determined now to make it on their own. First, to practice some of what they had been preaching, they organized their own union, the United Brotherhood of Elevator and Switchboard Operators (of which they later lost control). Hearing that the Socialist Party was then looking around for someone to coördinate Morris Hillquit’s mayoralty campaign in Harlem, Randolph and Owen not only took the job but formed the first black Socialist political club in Harlem’s Twenty-first Assembly District.

In addition, all within two months, they had launched their own monthly magazine, the Messenger—dropping the “Hotel” from its masthead not only to indicate that the magazine was no longer an organ of the waiters but to dissociate themselves from what they called “the ‘thought-controller’ in the hotel field.” Though in any case Randolph and Owen may have wanted to start their own magazine—considering the importance they now attached to radical journalism—they founded the Messenger, they explained in the first issue, in response to the “steady and numerous requests” of their “intelligent, radical, forward-looking and clear-eyed thinking patrons.” Some of the “patrons” were white Socialists and trade unionists downtown who were aware of Randolph’s and Owen’s reputation as Socialist propagandists in Harlem and were interested in supporting an organ of Socialism and unionism in the black community. And they might, in the years ahead, help to assure the magazine’s survival with contributions and advertising. But at the outset the Messenger’s most important patron was Randolph’s wife, Lucille. “Without her money,” Randolph said later, “we couldn’t have started the Messenger.”

Thus, in addition to the sustaining role Mrs. Randolph had been playing, and would continue to play, in her husband’s private and public life, one of the important footnotes to the history of radicalism in Harlem must surely show that she was indispensable to the founding of what her husband would call “the first voice of radical, revolutionary, economic, and political action among Negroes in America;” what the Justice Department, two years later, would characterize as “by long odds the most able and the most dangerous of all the Negro publications;” and what William Dufty, in the Post of December 28, 1959, described as one of the ornaments of its age, adding that it “has been called one of the most brilliantly edited magazines in the history of American Negro journalism.

The Messenger stepped into “the big, broad world of human actions,” as its editors put it in the first issue, in November, 1917, seven months after the United States entered the war against Germany, and the month the Russian Revolution began. The magazine’s political prose was thoughtful and analytical, even though powered by the verve and flourish of agitational rhetoric. The Messenger was neat and attractive in appearance, suggesting something of the high standard of printing that even poorly financed journals were once able to call upon. Though its personality was reflected mainly in its editorials and its political commentary, it also published fiction, poetry, and criticism, and it carried photographs or line drawings on its front cover. Slightly larger in format than most magazines, it sold for fifteen cents. From the outset the Messenger was always in debt—seldom able to meet its rent on time, unable some months to appear at all, and never in a position to offer contributors anything but token payments. This state of affairs had its effect upon the magazine’s tenancy. After a few months at 513 Lenox Avenue, where it was born, the Messenger was evicted for nonpayment of rent. It found a new home at 2305 Seventh Avenue, and remained there through its best years. But late in 1923 it was evicted again, and moved to 2311 Seventh Avenue, where it stayed until 1928, when it folded for lack of funds.

The Messenger, which was virtually Randolph’s whole life from 1917 until 1925, collected around it a number of intellectuals, who came to be known as Messenger radicals. Some of them were merely young people who agreed with the magazine’s politics, but, by and large, Messenger radicals were contributing editors of the magazine. There were two of these at the beginning—W. A. Domingo and Lovett Fort-Whiteman, young radicals who had passed a good deal of time with Randolph and Owen in the days of the Hotel Messenger. But at different times over the next decade—as new contributing editors were added and old ones broke with the magazine—the list included George Frazier Miller, a tough, plainspoken Episcopal preacher from Brooklyn; William Colson, a newly returned war veteran; Ernest Rice McKinney, a left-winger who had attended Oberlin College, and whose parents had been acquaintances of Frederick Douglass; Abram L. Harris, a Howard University economist; Robert Bagnall, a Detroit preacher and the N.A.A.C.P.’s director of branches; William Pickens, a Yale-educated former dean at Morgan College, in Baltimore and an N.A.A.C.P. field secretary; George S. Schuyler, a self-educated Socialist and satirist from Syracuse, who had a greater admiration for H. L. Mencken than for Karl Marx; Wallace Thurman, a fiction writer of the Harlem Renaissance; and Theophilus Lewis, the Messenger drama reviewer, whose acquaintance with Randolph went back to the Epworth League days.

The Messenger radicals were part of a larger group known as the Harlem, or New Negro, radicals. Though the New Negro shared the Messenger’s brand of racial and political militancy, most of them had no formal ties with the magazine, and some edited radical journals of their own. The more prominent names were Richard B. Moore and Otto Huiswoud; Cyril V. Briggs, who resigned from the Amsterdam News to start his own magazine, the Crusader; Hubert Harrison, now the editor of the Voice; William Bridges, the editor of Challenge; and William H. Ferris, a radical black nationalist, who was a literary editor of Marcus Garvey’s Negro World. In addition to writing for the Messenger, W. A. Domingo founded his own weekly journal, the Emancipator, and, having once been a friend of Garvey’s in their native Jamaica, also helped—until they fell out—edit the Negro World.

Among the fourteen short editorials in the Messenger’s first issue were pieces on “The Rioting of Negro Soldiers” (in Houston, Texas); “Woman Suffrage and the Negro;” “Peace;” “Making the World Safe for Democracy;” “The Friends of Irish Freedom;” “Organizing the Negro Actor;” and “Who Shall Pay for the War?” There were two departments of public commentary—“Economics and Politics” and “Education and Literature”—both of which became permanent columns and, along with the editorials, constituted the political heart of the magazine. Though the inaugural issue of the Messenger noted, with predictable displeasure, America’s entry into the war against Germany, it was conspicuously silent on a political event of even greater moment in the life of radicalism—the October Revolution in Russia. This was because the November issue had gone to press before the triumph of the Bolsheviks. So in January, 1918, later than its radical contemporaries but second to none in its ardor, the Messenger joined the fanfare:

The Bolsheviki . . . represent the extreme radicals—not in the sense of being unreasonably extreme in their demands, but in the sense of being unwilling to take a half loaf when they are entitled to a whole loaf. . . . They demand that the land which the workers till and mine with their toil shall be owned and operated by the workers for the welfare of the workers. . . . The leaders of the Bolsheviki are Lenin and Trotsky, misrepresented here by the metropolitan press as German agents. This, of course, is simply a malicious libel uttered to discredit these rulers of Russia, lest their teaching should awaken the proletariat of the world to his power and his right to a fair share of the world’s goods. Lenin and Trotsky, however, are sagacious, statesmanlike and courageous leaders. They have a thorough understanding of the international situation. . . . They are calling, nevertheless, upon the people of every country to follow the lead of Russia, to throw off their exploiting rulers, to administer public utilities for the public welfare, to disgorge the exploiters and the profiteers.

Since the Russian Revolution strengthened all radicals’ hope for similar victories in their own countries, the Messenger, with the rest of the largely Socialist American left, continued for some time to celebrate the advent of the new social order over which the Bolsheviks presided. To the Messenger, the Russian Revolution was “the greatest achievement of the twentieth century,” for it signified that a new world was being born. Heartened by what they called the “ceaseless step” of the Soviet government, the Messenger cheered, “On with the dance!” But joy was not to be unconfined, or to last, for in 1919 the steady march of Bolshevism split the American Socialist movement, its revolutionary left wing breaking away to form the American Communist and Communist Labor Parties, and the Messenger suddenly lost its enthusiasm for the Russian dance. The Harlem radicals were themselves split. Men who had spoken with one voice since 1917 became bitter political enemies. Randolph, remaining with the Socialists, now began a lifetime of opposition to the Communist movement.

The Messenger devoted its first two years primarily to advocating labor unionism and Socialism among blacks and to protesting both the First World War and the violence black Americans suffered during it and afterward. It succeeded in none of these ventures. Its advocacy of labor unionism foundered not only on the racial practices of the American Federation of Labor but also on the anti-union attitude that the established black leadership had developed in response to racism within the Federation. Blacks were restrained by this leadership from joining unions, both because of the racist policies of organized labor and because, as the leadership said, it was with the property-owning class rather than with labor that their true interests—jobs and economic uplift—lay. This advice from the leadership was hardly necessary, since the majority of blacks—often from experience—already felt that way about business and labor. Thus, while black workers were not entirely unorganized, the prevailing sentiment at the time was that they should not join unions. It was difficult, then, for black workers to understand how members of their own race could come to them preaching racial solidarity with organized labor. Although, in the light of the anti-labor feeling, no answer to this question would suffice, Randolph and Owen offered a ready-made one. It was not the conservative, racist craft unions they were advocating solidarity with, they said, but the Industrial Workers of the World. The I.W.W., they pointed out, organized along industrial rather than craft lines, was radical in politics and excluded no one on the ground of race or color. But, like most whites, blacks saw the I.W.W. as a radical and subversive threat to the mainstream political and economic values in America.

In April, 1917, when President Wilson asked for a declaration of war against Germany, he told Congress, “The world must be made safe for democracy. Its peace must be planted upon the tested foundations of political liberty. We have no selfish ends to serve. . . . We are but one of the champions of the right of mankind.” By November, when the Messenger appeared, the war had become the No. 1 issue among American Socialists, to the majority of whom it was a war not for “democracy,” “political liberty,” or “the right of mankind” but simply for profits—or the “selfish ends” of business. As Socialists, Randolph and Owen fully endorsed what became their party’s official position on the war—unalterable opposition.

But what evoked the strongest opposition from Randolph and Owen, as well as from their fellow-radicals in Harlem, was the irony that black American soldiers were being asked to risk their lives abroad in defense of freedoms that were denied them at home. Addressing President Wilson in their magazine, Randolph and Owen charged that “lynching, Jim Crow, segregation, discrimination in the armed forces and out, disfranchisement of millions of black souls in the South—all these things make your cry of making the world safe for democracy a sham, a mockery, a rape on decency and a travesty on common justice.” Under such circumstances, they concluded, it was unthinkable that black men should serve.

They were speaking for themselves, however, because the sentiment among blacks was overwhelmingly in favor of serving. Before the war was over, two hundred thousand black soldiers had served in Army camps at home, two hundred thousand more had fought in France, and black civilians on the home front had helped finance the war effort by buying some two hundred and fifty million dollars’ worth of war bonds and stamps. The voices that such blacks preferred to heed—finding in them a reënforcement of what was already deeply felt—were those of the established and, in many cases, conservative leadership of the race: the black press, the black church, and, above all, the men who counselled “first your country, then your rights.” Partly in consequence of this, they would later be denounced by Randolph and Owen in the Messenger as a “handpicked, me-too-boss, hat-in-hand, sycophant, lick-spittling group of Negroes.” It was extremely easy for Randolph and Owen to dismiss the genuine conservatives, those protectors of Booker T. Washington’s accommodationist legacy, who had counselled “first your country, then your rights.” It was far more difficult—certainly agonizing—to dismiss W. E. B. Du Bois, whose thought and personal example had helped to forge the protest conscience of their generation but who during the war years seemed to them to be betraying both the spirit of his own past and the roots of their militant racial consciousness. But, together with the other Harlem radicals, they did dismiss him—in a controversy that announced more dramatically than anything else could have that while the leadership of the race would probably remain in established and trusted hands a new and more militant strain had emerged to challenge that leadership.

In July, 1918, amid rumors that President Wilson had offered him a desk captaincy in the Army, Du Bois published an editorial in his magazine, the Crisis, calling upon blacks to close ranks behind the war effort. Du Bois argued:

We of the colored race have no ordinary interest in the outcome. That which the German power represents today spells death to the aspirations of Negroes and all darker races for equality, freedom and democracy. Let us not hesitate. Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy.

The Harlem radicals were shocked, and Harrison, the senior among them, made what appears now to have been the definitive indictment of the editor of the Crisis. In an editorial headed “The Descent of Du Bois,” in his magazine, the Voice, Harrison wrote, in part:

The essence of the present situation lies in the fact that the people whom our white masters have “recognized” as our leaders (without taking the trouble to consult us) and those who, by our own selection, had actually attained to leadership among us are being revaluated and, in most cases, rejected. The most striking instance from the latter class is Dr. W. E. Du Bois. . . . Du Bois’s case is the more significant because his former services to his race have been undoubtedly of a high and courageous sort. Moreover, the act by which he has brought upon himself the stormy outburst of disapproval from his race is one which, of itself, would seem to merit no such stern condemnation. . . . Dr. Du Bois first palpably sinned in his editorial, “Close Ranks.” . . . But this offense . . . lies in a single sentence: “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks . . .” From the latter part of the sentence, there is no dissent, so far as we know. The offense lies in that part of the sentence which ends with the italicized words. It is felt by all his critics that Du Bois, of all Negroes, knows best that our “special grievances” which the War Department Bulletin describes as “justifiable” consist of lynching, segregation and disfranchisement and that the Negroes of America cannot preserve either their lives, their manhood or their vote (which is their political life and liberties) with these things in existence. The doctor’s critics feel that America cannot use the Negro people to any good effect unless they have life, liberty and manhood assured and guaranteed to them.

The editors of the Messenger were neither as measured nor as graceful in their dissent. In their July issue, with characteristic belligerence, they asked: Close ranks around lynching, disfranchisement, and segregation? Owen wrote, “Since when has the subject race come out of a war with its rights and privileges accorded for such participation? . . . Did not the Negro fight in the Revolutionary war, with Crispus Attucks dying first . . . and come out to be a miserable chattel slave in this country for nearly one hundred years after?” In another attack on the war, the Messenger declared, “No intelligent Negro is willing to lay down his life for the United States as it now exists. Intelligent Negroes have now reached the point where their support of the country is conditional.” For such statements, the magazine’s editorial office was visited in the dead of night a number of times by agents of the Justice Department. Several mornings, Randolph and Owen arrived at the office to find that their files had been ransacked, their furniture broken, and back issues of their magazine confiscated. But they were undaunted, and, as other Socialist spokesmen were doing, the two Harlem radicals carried their opposition to the public platforms. Hearing in the summer of 1918 that Randolph and Owen were planning a tour to speak against the war and to get “colored people interested in the Socialist movement,” Walter Bronstrup, a leader of the Party in Cleveland, invited them to include Cleveland in their itinerary. They were also to bring along two hundred copies of the July issue of the Messenger, to be sold during the “propaganda meetings.”

It was an especially dangerous time for anti-war Socialists. In June of 1917, Congress had passed the Espionage Act, giving the government the power to ban newspapers from the mails, and to punish, by fines of up to ten thousand dollars and imprisonment of up to twenty years, anyone found guilty of obstructing conscription. And in May, 1918, the Act had been amended to make even an attempt at obstruction a felony. In the spring of 1919, Kate Richards O’Hare was sent to the penitentiary for an anti-war speech in North Dakota. In March, 1918, Rose Pastor Stokes had been sentenced to ten years in prison (the decision was later reversed) for saying in a letter to the Kansas City Star, “No government which is for the profiteers can also be for the people, and I am for the people while the government is for the profiteers.” And three months later, Eugene Debs was sentenced to ten years for saying, in Canton, Ohio, “The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose—especially their lives.”

The July, 1918, issue of the Messenger was also quite dangerous—or, at any rate, was deemed so by government agents. It contained an editorial, “Pro-Germanism Among Negroes,” that said, in part:

At the recent convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a member of the Administration’s Department of Intelligence was present. When Mr. Justin Carter of Harrisburg, Pa., was complaining of the race prejudice, which American white troops had carried into France, this 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 N.A.A.C.P. failed to grasp its opportunity. It might have calmly and frankly informed the Administration representative 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.

On the night of August 4th, while Randolph and Owen were addressing a mass meeting in Cleveland, an agent of the Justice Department took both editors into custody and held them for investigation the following day. It came out during the investigation that Owen had been classified 1-A and drafted, and was “waiting for orders to entrain.” In fact, his draft board in New York informed the Cleveland authorities that Owen was needed for the August quota and should be kept under surveillance. According to the agent’s report, Randolph appeared to have been more resourceful in avoiding the draft. The report claimed that when he was interrogated he produced documents showing that he was classified 4-A, on the ground that he was the sole support of his wife and children; the report was inaccurate, of course—not only was Randolph’s wife then his sole support but their marriage was childless. As it turned out, he was drafted after the incident in Cleveland. At the end of the investigation, both men were charged with violating the Espionage Act. Each was held in a thousand dollars’ bail, and after two days in jail they were brought to trial. They arrived in court to find Seymour Stedman, of Chicago, one of the prominent Socialist lawyers of the time (he was soon to appear in the defense of Eugene Debs), waiting to represent them. Both Randolph and Owen were twenty-nine, but the judge took them to be much younger. At first, he offered to release them in Stedman’s custody, and then, after listening to them explain their views, he merely ordered them out of town.

When Randolph and Owen returned to New York, they received news that Postmaster General Albert Burleson had withdrawn second-class mailing privileges for their magazine—or, as Randolph preferred to put it, “Burleson threw the Messenger out of the mails.” A few days later, Owen received his orders; he was sent to an Army camp in the South, where he served a hundred and twenty days, until after the war was over. And late in October Randolph was notified that he would be drafted to fill the November quota, but two days after he received his induction notice the armistice was declared. Barring such luck, Randolph might yet have ended up in jail, for, he said later, he “had no intention of serving.”

On March 23, 1916, Marcus Garvey arrived in New York, at the age of twenty-eight. Two years before, in Jamaica, he had formed the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities (Imperial) League, to unite, as he later wrote in a magazine article, “all the Negro peoples of the world into one great body to establish a country and Government absolutely their own.” He had been inspired to launch such a movement, Garvey said, after reading Booker T. Washington’s autobiography, “Up From Slavery,” and after travelling in Europe: “I asked: ‘Where is the black man’s Government? Where is his King and his kingdom? Where is his President, his country, and his ambassador, his army, his navy, his men of big affairs?’ I could not find them, and then I declared, ‘I will help to make them.’ ” To test the ground for a New York division of his U.N.I.A., Garvey sought out the company and the platforms of those he considered the genuine race radicals. He struck one of the first men he called upon in Harlem as “a little, sawed-off, hammered-down black man, with determination written all over his face, and an engaging smile that caught you and compelled you to listen to his story.” Several Harlemites have claimed credit for introducing Garvey to the public forums of the community. Randolph is one of them. He had “the pleasure and opportunity,” he says today, “of presenting Garvey to the American people in his first meeting on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, in 1916.” As Randolph recalls the meeting: “I was on a soapbox speaking on Socialism, when someone pulled my coat and said, ‘There’s a young man here from Jamaica who wants to be presented to this group.’ I said, ‘What does he want to talk about?’ He said, ‘He wants to talk about a movement to develop a back-to-Africa sentiment in America.’ I said, ‘Yes, I’ll be glad to present him,’ and after I’d spoken a few more minutes I told the people I had a surprise for them. It was a tremendous crowd, and I told them about the young man from Jamaica and what he wanted to talk about. I could hear a dubious rumble of ‘Oh’ run through the crowd. I said, ‘Well, it is good for us to get his position on this question, because we don’t know a lot about Africa ourselves.’ Garvey got up on the platform, and you could hear him from 135th to 125th Street. He had a tremendous voice.”

At first, says Edmund David Cronon, Garvey’s biographer, “The sidewalk crowds loitering on Lenox Avenue ignored his harangues and dismissed him as just another West Indian carpetbagger.” But as Garvey persevered he met and became closely attached to Harrison, in whose race-first doctrine there was a distinct echo of his own ideas. Thus, in June, 1917, when Harrison launched his Liberty League of Negro-Americans, at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Harlem—having resigned from the Socialist Party in order to pursue his own racial strategies—he presented Garvey as one of his guest speakers. James Weldon Johnson, who was then a columnist for the New York Age, later wrote:

This was Harlem’s first real sight of Garvey, and his first chance at Harlem. The man spoke, and his magnetic personality, torrential eloquence, and intuitive knowledge of crowd psychology were all brought into play. He swept the audience along with him. He made his speech an endorsement of the new movement and a pledge of his hearty support of it; but Garvey was not of the kidney to support anybody’s movement. He had seen the United States and he had seen Harlem. He had doubtless been the keenest observer at the Liberty League organization meeting; and it may be that it was then he decided upon New York as the centre for his activities.

Soon after this speech, Garvey founded the New York division of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, which had its headquarters on West 135th Street and was made up largely of West Indian immigrants. For a while after Garvey started the U.N.I.A. in New York, he and Randolph—despite basic differences in political philosophy—worked closely together. Toward the end of the war, for instance, both men collaborated with a group called the International League of Darker Peoples, which drew up a list of demands in behalf of colonized peoples, to be presented to England and France at the peace conference in Versailles in 1919.

In the “Red Summer” of 1919, as the U.N.I.A. welcomed the refugees from the anti-black violence that swept America after the war, and as its leader’s message of African redemption and black self-determination reached across the country, Garvey claimed the remarkable membership of two million—and that was only the beginning. According to Cronon, “American Negroes were ready for any program that would tend to restore even a measure of their lost dignity and self-respect.” Garvey now launched one of his most spectacular enterprises, the Black Star Line, “to own, charter, operate, and navigate ships of various types in any part of the world and to carry passengers, freight, and mails.” Cronon calls this “a supremely audacious move that aroused the greatest excitement in the colored world,” and continues, “Here was an enterprise belonging to Negroes, operated by and for them, that gave even the poorest black the chance to become a stockholder in a big business enterprise.”

All this—plus the colorful regalia of the U.N.I.A.’s officers, a marching hand, an African Legion, a Motor Corps, and an organization of Black Cross Nurses, as well as the pomp and ceremony of the organization’s public events—captured the emotions and the imaginations of millions of blacks, not only in America but also in Central America, the Caribbean, and parts of Africa. In August, 1920, the association’s international convention, in New York, drew delegates from all over the world, and twenty-five thousand blacks filled Madison Square Garden to hear the “Provisional President of the African Republic.” Garvey, by his own estimate—though certainly not his alone—“had become known as a leader of his race,” and “over 4,000,000 persons had joined the movement.”

At this time, however, Randolph and Owen were becoming increasingly displeased with the Garvey movement. A break between Garvey and the editors of the Messenger was inevitable. It would have been surprising if Randolph and Owen, who had been struggling at least since 1917 to build a Socialist movement in Harlem, had not suffered a certain jealousy—though neither of them confessed to such a feeling—because the movement they envisaged had been created by someone else so quickly and under an aegis so different from theirs. But if their displeasure with Garvey was that of radicals whose particular social vision had been rejected, they were hardly alone in their critical judgments of Garvey’s accomplishments. Du Bois, for example, himself no admirer of radicals like Randolph, made equally critical observations about Garvey and his movement. In any event, Garvey and the editors of the Messenger, as exponents of warring social ideas—class versus race—would never have been able to dwell together in harmony for any length of time. Although the public dispute between them flared most acrimoniously around incidental issues, it had its source in fundamental differences of political and economic belief.

Garvey’s emphasis on black capitalism could scarcely have failed to evoke the intense opposition of the Messenger’s editors, whose hopes for human advancement were invested in democratic Socialism. And as long as capitalism was so central a difference there would also be an inevitable clash on such issues as social equality and labor unionism. On these, Randolph and Owen maintained that “black workers should use the same instrumentalities to save themselves as white workers,” and that “if Negroes admit they are the social inferiors of white people, they ipso facto admit that they are entitled to inferior treatment.” Garvey’s position, on the other hand—contained in some of his writings later reprinted in his “Philosophy and Opinions”—was:

If the Negro takes my advice he will organize by himself and always keep his scale of wage a little lower than the whites until he is able to become, through proper leadership, his own employer; by so doing he will keep the good will of the white employer and live a little longer under the present scheme of things. If not, between Communism, white trade unionism and worker’s parties he is doomed in the next 25, 50, or 100 years to complete economic and general extermination.

The eruption of anti-Garvey feeling—among black radicals as well as among the black bourgeoisie—occurred during the summer of 1922, after it was revealed that Garvey had visited Atlanta and held a secret meeting with Edward Young Clarke, the Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. By then, the Black Star Line had run into legal trouble, and Garvey was doubly vulnerable. It did not help matters when the July 10, 1922, issue of the Times quoted him as saying, “The Ku Klux Klan is going to make this a white country. They are perfectly honest and frank about it. Fighting them is not going to get you anywhere.” All this brought down a torrent of condemnation on Garvey’s head, for, as Theodore G. Vincent, another historian of the Garvey movement, has noted, “members of the black establishment and white liberals or leftists would choose to visit the devil in hell before fraternizing with the Ku Klux Klan.”

The editors of the Messenger—both in their magazine and through the Friends of Negro Freedom, an organization they had founded for educational purposes—began a campaign to banish Garvey, first from political leadership and then from the United States. The slogan of the campaign was “Garvey Must Go.” In one of their strongest editorials on the subject, Randolph and Owen urged “all ministers, editors, and lecturers who have the interests of the race at heart to gird up their courage, put on new force, and proceed with might and main to drive the menace of Garveyism out of this country.” This was followed by an editorial in which they declared, “When a Negro leader leagues with Negro lynchers as did Marcus Garvey in his alliance with the Ku Klux Klan, then it is time for all decent self-respecting Negroes to league together for the purpose of driving out that Negro. . . . The clock has struck. . . . The New Negroes must resolve each day: ‘Garveyism must be destroyed!’ ”

Garvey, of course, fired back with his own heavy oratorical artillery at these “so-called ‘Negro intellectuals’ ”—Randolph, Owen, and their allies. Aiming a deadly salvo at the insolvent editors of the struggling Messenger, he wrote in his Negro World, “Before Owen and Randolph can speak of the failure of any business and the incompetency of any individual to do business they should first prove their success and their competency to handle business.” And on August 5, 1922, the Negro World struck fear in the hearts of Garvey’s critics when it warned, “We say . . . to the Negro enemies of the past we are ready for you, and before the 31st of August comes we are going to give you your Waterloo. . . . So you will understand, whether it be Pickens [William Pickens, of the N.A.A.C.P.] or whether it be Chandler Owen, the Universal Negro Improvement Association has no fears of anybody and when you interfere . . . you will take the consequences.”

All this merely intensified the “Garvey Must Go” campaign. As the anti-Garvey language of the Messenger grew more vitriolic, Owen, in 1923, called Garvey an “ignoramus” and a “rascally renegade and scoundrelly traitor,” and Robert Bagnall, of the N.A.A.C.P., in perhaps the most sustained diatribe ever printed against the U.N.I.A. leader, gave the following description of him:

A Jamaican Negro of unmixed stock, squat, stocky, fat, and sleek, with protruding jaws, and heavy jowls, small bright pig-like eyes and rather bull-dog-like face. Boastful, egotistic, tyrannical, intolerant, cunning, shifty, smooth and suave, avaricious . . . as adept as a cuttle-fish in beclouding an issue he cannot meet, prolix to the ’nth degree in devising new schemes to gain the money of poor ignorant Negroes, gifted at self-advertisement, without shame in self-laudation, promising ever, but never fulfilling, without regard for veracity, a lover of pomp and tawdry finery and garish display, a bully with his own folk but servile in the presence of the Klan, a sheer opportunist and a demagogic charlatan.

The Messenger’s attacks also took on a sharp anti-West Indian edge. “I think that we are justified in asking the question, that if Mr. Garvey is seriously interested in establishing a Negro nation why doesn’t he begin with Jamaica, West Indies,” Randolph wrote in January, 1923. And the title of an editorial in the same issue characterized Garvey as “A Supreme Negro Jamaican Jackass.”

Remarks of this sort eventually ruptured one of the Messenger’s oldest and most valuable relationships—the one it had enjoyed from its birth with W. A. Domingo, its Jamaican-born contributing editor, who, in March, 1923, after an exchange in print with the Messenger editors, asked that he no longer be listed on the magazine’s masthead. Domingo, who had helped to edit Garvey’s Negro World soon after its founding—during the period when the black Socialists spoke on platforms with Garvey in the hope of educating the U.N.I.A. membership in the class struggle—had quit the paper in the fall of 1919, when it became clear to him that the U.N.I.A. was committed irrevocably to the priority of race. In an open letter to the Messenger, he claimed to have protested “the execrable exaggerations, staggering stupidities, blundering bombast and abominable asininities of our black Barnum” as early as the fall of 1919, and he was later denounced by Garvey as a “barbershop rat” and—by his account—was set upon and beaten up by a group of Garveyites.

As for Garvey, he was brought to trial in 1923 and convicted of mail fraud, and after an unsuccessful appeal he entered the federal penitentiary in Atlanta in 1925 to serve a five-year term. The sentence was commuted in 1927, and that year he was deported to Jamaica. After a number of abortive efforts to rebuild his movement from his homeland, he left for London, where, in 1940, he died.

The New Negro was not, of course, born during the Harlem, or Negro, Renaissance—that period between the early and the late nineteen-twenties when the work of black artists, chiefly in Harlem, began radiating racial self-awareness and self-assurance and vibrating with the forces of the mass experience. He was born earlier—amid the crises of the war and the immediate postwar years, when the economic radicals and the black nationalists had inspired, at certain levels, the emergence of a more militant black consciousness. What happened during the Renaissance may be seen as the cultural flowering of the earlier political insurgency. In any event, the failure of the Garvey movement in the mid-nineteen-twenties—though it did survive a while longer—was merely part of the general collapse of the New Negro militancy.

Among the casualties was the Socialist radicalism of the Messenger and its editors. Although the magazine lingered on until 1928, and never entirely lost interest in the politics of the left, it was never as politically brisk and provocative as it had been up to 1923. Whereas in previous years its pages had been dominated by economics and politics, from 1924 on the Messenger was a cultural organ of no great force or distinction—printing mostly the satirical railleries of George Schuyler, accounts of black communities around the United States, poetry and fiction of uneven quality, and the results of Owen’s resurgent fascination with the life of the rich and successful. Several years later, Langston Hughes, in his autobiography, described the Messenger of that period as “a kind of Negro society magazine and a plugger for Negro business, with photographs of prominent colored ladies and their nice homes in it.”

Between 1917 and 1923, Randolph and Owen started more than half a dozen political and trade-union organizations—not because they loved so much to start new things but because practically nothing they started lasted very long. The Friends of Negro Freedom was one of these organizations. It was formed in May, 1920, to conduct political and labor forums for the education of the masses, and to “proceed from the cities and towns” across the United States. But the Friends failed to catch on nationally, and the group spent its first two years as little more than a paper organization. It was not until 1922, when it opened its public campaign against Garvey, that the Friends of Negro Freedom came alive. It was a short life, though, because after the Garvey campaign few people beyond its own leadership ever heard of the organization again. What it became was a sort of private intellectual forum for Randolph and friends of the Messenger. On Saturday afternoons, a few of them met to talk in the Messenger’s office or in an empty storefront next to the Lafayette Theatre, on Seventh Avenue between 131st and 132nd Streets. Now and then, the organization sponsored lectures at the Harlem Y.M.C.A. and the Y.W.C.A., inviting speakers like Norman Thomas, then director of the League for Industrial Democracy; Algernon Lee, educational director of the Rand School of Social Science; Will Durant, the historian of philosophy; the psychologists Alfred Adler and John B. Watson; James O’Neal, the editor of the New York Call; Walter White, of the N.A.A.C.P.; and Jean Longuet, the French Socialist and member of the Chamber of Deputies. None of its members needed the Friends of Negro Freedom more than Randolph. He had few interests that were not political, and the group, until its demise, in 1924, was the center of his social and intellectual life.

On Sunday mornings, Randolph invited members of the Friends of Negro Freedom over to his apartment—then on West 142nd Street, between Lenox and Seventh—for breakfast and political discussion. Those who came regularly were the disputatious Owen; Frank Crosswaith, a Socialist and graduate of the Rand School; Theophilus Lewis, soft-spoken, Edwardian in manners, an avid reader of the Smart Set, and the drama critic of the Messenger, who sometimes left his listeners dangling from the middle of a sentence while he reached into his pocket for a box of snuff; the priestly Robert Bagnall and the scholarly William Pickens, of the N.A.A.C.P.; the acidulous young Socialist George Schuyler, who had recently arrived from Syracuse and was finding his way among the Messenger intellectuals; and Joel A. Rogers, a professorial Jamaican-born historian and Africanist. Also present was Randolph’s brother, James, who was now sharing the apartment with Randolph and his wife. (In 1922, at the age of thirty-five, James, who had been working for several years as a Pullman porter out of Jacksonville, had arrived to enter City College.) To Theophilus Lewis, the Sunday-morning discussions were “something like Samuel Johnson’s arguments in the coffeehouse.” George Schuyler, who had never been a part of anything so intellectually heady before, remembered the meetings years later as “Athenian conclaves” presided over by the “dapper” Randolph, whose “deep drawl poured oil over the stormy waters of dispute.”

When the sessions adjourned, in the early afternoon, Schuyler liked to accompany Randolph out to Seventh Avenue to watch or join the Sunday-afternoon promenades, which were then a fashionable part of Harlem’s social life. The activity has been described memorably by James Weldon Johnson in “Black Manhattan,” his history of black Harlem:

Strolling in Harlem does not mean merely walking along Lenox or upper Seventh Avenue or One Hundred and Thirty-Fifth Street; it means that those streets are places for socializing. One puts on one’s best clothes and fares forth to pass the time pleasantly with the friends and acquaintances and, most important of all, the strangers he is sure of meeting. One saunters along, he hails this one, exchanges a word or two with that one, stops for a short chat with the other one. He comes up to a laughing, chattering group, in which he may have only one friend or acquaintance, but that gives him the privilege of joining in. He does join in and takes part in the joking, the small talk and gossip, and makes new acquaintances. He passes on and arrives in front of one of the theatres, studies the bill for a while, undecided about going in. He finally moves on a few steps farther and joins another group and is introduced to two or three pretty girls who have just come to Harlem, perhaps only for a visit; and finds a reason to be glad that he postponed going into the theatre. The hours of a summer evening run by rapidly.

Such spacious, Old World evenings appealed to Randolph’s sensibility and harmonized with his own social style. He took a certain pleasure in being finely turned out himself. His “hello”s and “how-are-you”s and doffings of his hat were as courtly and as elegant as his carriage. And, like so many people who grew up in warm and intimate black communities, he retained memories of an entire boyhood of Sunday evenings when one put on one’s best clothes, paid leisurely calls on one’s neighbors, or took some of the world outside into the dark rooms of the old and the sick. Walking down Seventh Avenue, he and Schuyler delighted in the spectacle of men “wearing gaiters and boutonnières and swinging canes,” and of women in knee-length dresses and fur coats. Nor was “a monocle or lorgnette” an uncommon sight. It must have been a rare democratic concourse, where the classes of Harlem came out to mix their fashions with the masses, for what would militant, no-nonsense Garveyites, say, be doing in gaiters, boutonnières, and monocles, or twirling urbane walking sticks? Garvey himself, perhaps, with his flair for sartorial drama and splendor—but his legions?

The Friends of Negro Freedom started to disperse late in 1923, when the lives of both Randolph and Owen were disrupted by deaths in their families. Owen’s brother Toussaint, a master tailor from Columbia, South Carolina, who had arrived in New York in 1922, a few months after James Randolph, died in March, 1923—after failing to find employment in the garment industry. Bereaved, and embarrassed that the Messenger’s connections with the garment unions had failed to help his brother, Owen dropped out of the radical movement toward the end of 1923 and left for Chicago.

In September of 1924, the Reverend James William Randolph, who was sixty and had been suffering from heart and kidney complications for some months, died in Jacksonville. Randolph wrote a moving tribute to his father in the Messenger. When the elder Randolph died, his wife, Elizabeth, arrived in New York to join her sons and her daughter-in-law. This made the Randolph apartment no longer suitable for Sunday morning meetings, and the Friends of Negro Freedom broke up.

After Owen left New York, he continued working for the Messenger, and for about a year he sold advertising space in it to black businesses in Chicago and Philadelphia. Then, though his name remained on the Messenger’s masthead as co-editor, he took no further active part in the magazine’s affairs. In Chicago, he became an editorial writer for the Bee, a black newspaper, and a ghost writer and public-relations functionary for both Republican and Democratic ward politicians. He and Randolph remained close friends. Years later, Randolph spent a good deal of his time in Chicago, and saw a lot of Owen, who, he observed to friends, had “a joyous social life,” his associates being “people of money and station.”

With Owen in Chicago, Randolph started leaning heavily on George Schuyler for help in running the magazine. Many of Schuyler’s traits reminded him of Owen’s: cynicism, combativeness, and an enormous capacity for handling laborious detail. Schuyler, an admirer of Mencken—and later on a contributor to Mencken’s American Mercury—was a writer of biting satire, and would, in Randolph’s view, add an exciting dimension to the Messenger’s social commentary. He offered Schuyler ten dollars a week to join the Messenger as a contributing editor—which meant, as it turned out, that Schuyler would take over the practical running of the magazine. It was about the worst financial offer Schuyler ever received. After paying “half that much for a small room,” he calculated in his autobiography, “Black and Conservative,” there would be “little left for food and laundry.” He accepted, however, because he had developed a great admiration for Randolph, and because he felt that the Messenger was “a good place for a tireless, versatile young fellow to get plenty of activity and exercise.” When Schuyler saw the Messenger’s office, he almost regretted the decision. He later wrote, “The furnishings were nondescript, the files were disorganized, back copies of the magazine were scattered about indiscriminately, and finding anything was a chore. There was but one typewriter, a battered old Underwood.” Nor had he anticipated the extent of his duties: sweeping and mopping the office, opening and answering mail, reading manuscripts and proofs, taking edited copy to the Brooklyn Eagle press, where the magazine was printed, handling subscriptions, distributing the magazine to newsstands, and taking Randolph’s dictation on the old Underwood. But Schuyler, now that he was working alongside Randolph every day, found him even more likable. He later wrote of him in “Black and Conservative” that he 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 circumstances, 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. . . . However The Messenger might feel the fell clutch of circumstance, Randolph showed no dismay and his aplomb seemed impenetrable . . . he calmed all tension, anger, and insistent creditors.”

Still, as Schuyler said not long ago, “despite all the talk about black and white unite and fight, it didn’t quite pan out.” Several reasons have been advanced for the Messenger’s failure. An old resident of Harlem attributes it to the language of the black Socialists. “Socialism did not appeal to the Negroes, because the leadership did not speak the language of the masses,” he says. “Also because a lot of these leaders were West Indians, and were so pompous they antagonized the Negroes. The Socialists should have learned to speak the language of the masses. They should not have been standing in front of churches—they would have been better off in poolrooms and bars.” Whatever the errors of the black Socialists and the political reserve or conservatism of the general black population, the white radical movement itself bears a large part of the blame for the failure of class politics to engage the serious interest of the black community. Given the good intentions of the white-radical movement, the failure was tragic. Notwithstanding the fullness of the Socialist Party’s commitment, at least after the war, to racial and economic equality, it failed to recognize the two main facets of the black struggle: the one against the kind of economic deprivation that could be alleviated by inclusion in the trade-union movement, and the one against the kind of bigotry that barred all but a handful of blacks from that movement. For the Socialist Party, while it stood firmly behind the principle of trade-union solidarity, did not—except with the few unions closely allied to it—devote any special energy to the organization of black workers.

The Party’s policy made this inevitable. No other American Socialist had been as deeply committed to the principle of racial equality in the labor movement as Eugene Debs. The East St. Louis race riot of 1917 was, in his view, “a foul blot upon the American labor movement.” If the labor unions had “freely opened their doors to the Negro instead of barring him,” Debs argued, “the atrocious crime at East St. Louis would never have blackened the pages of American history.” And Debs declared that any Socialist who failed to speak out “for the Negro’s right to work and live, to develop his manhood, educate his children, and fulfill his destiny” equally with whites “misconceives the movement he pretends to serve or lacks the courage to live up to its principles.” But it would be difficult to live up to those principles as long as Socialists saw no need to address themselves to the race problem. The Party’s policy toward that problem had been enunciated as early as 1903 by Debs himself at the Party’s convention: “We have nothing special to offer the Negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist Party is the party of the whole working class, regardless of color—the whole working class of the whole world.” Because black workers had learned from their experience with organized labor that they were not considered part of “the whole working class of the whole world,” the Socialists could not overcome the ingrained political conservatism of the black community, let alone quicken its consciousness of class interests and class identity. Partly for this reason, Randolph, in 1925, withdrew from Socialist activism, and lost interest, if not in Socialism, at least in the Socialist Party. “The Socialist Party had no effective policy toward Negroes, and didn’t spend enough time organizing them,” he told an acquaintance not long ago.

Ernest Rice McKinney, a black Socialist who had been a contributing editor of the Messenger, concurred in Randolph’s view recently, saying, “As understanding as Debs was, he apparently didn’t understand this one problem: that Negroes had two disabilities, one being Negroes and one being workers; that Negroes had to struggle on both fronts, and probably more vigorous on the front against discrimination. Randolph’s main effort back then, as I remember, was to try to get this notion into the head of the Socialist leadership.”

By 1925, not one of the political or trade-union organizations that Randolph and Owen had founded remained. The Independent Political Council, reorganized by the two men in 1916, had quietly passed away soon after the war. The Twenty-first Assembly District Socialist Branch, founded in 1918, was defunct. The United Brotherhood of Elevator and Switchboard Operators, founded in 1917, was taken over the following year by the Elevator Operators’ and Starters’ Union. A National Association for the Promotion of Labor Unionism among Negroes, announced in 1919, failed to materialize. A National Brotherhood Workers of America, founded in 1919 as a sort of Negro Federation of Labor, was dissolved in 1921. A Tenants’ and Consumers’ League (“to meet and settle the problems of high rents . . . and high food”), set up during this period, did not survive its first few meetings in the Messenger’s office. An attempt to organize a Harlem branch of the Journeymen Bakers’ and Confectioners’ International Union was rebuffed in 1920. And the Friends of Negro Freedom went their own ways in 1924. All that survived was the Messenger, and even that—though its life would flicker on for three more years—was dying. Lucille Randolph’s once thriving beauty salon was in decline, her husband’s reputation as a “wild-eyed radical” having scared away most of her customers. In 1925, then, Randolph was facing the ruins not only of his radical dreams but of a career as well. He had no profession except that of a propagandist and self-employed journalist, and, as far as he or anyone else can remember, nothing to look forward to. In Harlem, the possibilities of radical propaganda had been exhausted, and in America as a whole. Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer had—as Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., has put it—slain the liberal dream.