Frequency Monthly Final issue 1928 Based in New York City | First issue 1917 Country United States Language English | |
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The Messenger was a political and literary magazine by and for African-American people in the early 20th century that was important in the flowering of the Harlem Renaissance. The Messenger was co-founded in New York City by Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph in August 1917.
Contents
After 1920, The Messenger featured more articles about black culture and began to publish rising black writers. It became a kind of literary magazine (like The Little Review, the revived The Dial, and The Liberator). It was notable for helping strengthen African-American intellectual and political identity in the age of Jim Crow.
History
Toward the end of 1916, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen dropped out of college, joined the Socialist Party, and gave soapbox orations on street corners around Harlem. Their socialist and labor union propagandizing gained them celebrity in the area. When they walked into the office building at 486 Lenox Avenue while looking for a meeting space for their Independent Political Council, they were recognized by William White, President of the Headwaiters and Sidewaiters Society of Greater New York. He suggested they move into his society’s headquarters and edit a monthly magazine for waiters. From January until August 1917, Randolph and Owen brought out the Hotel Messenger until their exposé of union corruption (wherein the headwaiters were selling uniforms to sidewaiters at high prices and pocketing the kickbacks from uniform dealers) resulted in their immediate dismissal.
They moved into an office next door at 513 Lenox Avenue and, with the patronage of Randolph’s wife Lucille, launched the Messenger. The first issue cost 15 cents (its price would never change) and ran the mission statement written by Randolph and Owen:
“Our aim is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy of the times, and above the cheap peanut politics of the old reactionary Negro leaders. Patriotism has no appeal to us; justice has. Party has no weight with us; principle has. Loyalty is meaningless; it depends on what one is loyal to. Prayer is not one of our remedies; it depends on what one is praying for. We consider prayer as nothing more than a fervent wish; consequently the merit and worth of a prayer depend upon what the fervent wish is.”Declaring that “with us, economics and politics take precedence to music and art,” the magazine’s first two years were primarily devoted to advocating black labor unionism and socialism, and denouncing the War and its effects on black Americans. The magazine attacked President Woodrow Wilson’s call to make “the world safe for democracy,” as the black community was at risk in the U.S., having suffered a high rate of lynchings in the South and other violence. Its editors also criticized major black figures such as W. E. B. Du Bois, who was pro-war at the time, and Marcus Garvey. They believed that Garvey's program to “repatriate” native-born American black citizens to Africa was illogical and far fetched.
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.”
Such statements led to Justice Department agents ransacking the Messenger′s editorial office in the dead of night, breaking furniture and confiscating back issues. Randolph and Owen conducted a public speaking tour against the war, appearing in Chicago and Cleveland, while selling copies of their fiery July 1918 issue. Reaching Cleveland on August 4, Randolph and Owen took turns addressing the mass meeting gathered by Cleveland’s Socialist Party leader Walter Bronstrup. He sold issues of the Messenger in the crowd until an undercover Justice Department official bought an issue and broke up the meeting. He pulled Randolph from the stage, arrested him and Owen, and held them the following day for investigation. Randolph and Owen were held for trial under charges of violating the Espionage Act:
“unlawfully, knowingly and feloniously, the United States being then and there at war with the Imperial German Government, willfully print and cause to be printed, publish and cause to be published, circulated, in a certain language intended to incite, provoke and incur resistance to the United States and to promote the cause of its enemies in a certain publication known as the Messenger.”
After two days in jail they were brought to trial. The judge, looking at the two men and what they had written, said that he could not believe they were old enough, or, being black, smart enough to write that “red-hot stuff”. He did not doubt that they were being used by white socialists who had written the editorials for them. He said there would be no trial and ordered Randolph and Owen returned to their parents' homes; telling them to leave town quickly. The men continued their tour. When they returned to New York, they learned that the Postmaster General Albert Burleson had denied second-class mailing privileges to their magazine because of its content.
Socialism failed to attract followers in Harlem. By February 1920 the Messenger identified as “A Journal of Scientific Radicalism;” in June 1923, it billed itself as “The World’s Greatest Negro Monthly.” It published increasing amounts of poetry, stories, and other work of Harlem intellectuals as the area became the center for black culture.
Although lacking a literary editor, The Messenger was influential in the Harlem Renaissance; it published a range of new writers before they had reached literary significance. Theophilus Lewis, the magazine’s drama critic from September 1923 till May 1926, supported the African-American little theater movement, and helped develop a black aesthetic in the theater. Lewis may have been untrained and was not paid for his contributions (apparently the Messenger offices only paid for his cab fare to and from shows), but his enthusiasm for the theater led to well-developed criticism that helped shape African-American theater on many levels from the little theaters all the way to Broadway.
Lewis helped recruit Wallace Thurman to the magazine as a contributing editor. He later founded the influential magazine Fire!! Thurman worked at The Messenger from late 1925 to 1926 and helped to publish Zora Neale Hurston’s “Eatonville Anthology,” as well as the early stories of Langston Hughes (Hurston and Hughes joined Thurman as an editors of Fire!!). Thurman also became known for his novels The Blacker the Berry and Infants of Spring. George S. Schuyler, a staple of the magazine for his satiric column "Shafts and Darts" (which he sometimes wrote with help from Lewis), contributed the piece “Hobohemia” to the Messenger. He became a correspondent and Chief Editorial Writer for the Pittsburgh Courier. Schuyler earned some renown for his satirical novel Black No More.
While the magazine was based in Harlem, its essays from the 1920s onwards took a look at black culture across the whole nation with contributors such as Schuyler, Thurman, Lewis, E. Franklin Frazier and others (see: Tom Lutz and Susanna Ashton’s These Colored United States). In 2004, Adam McKible “discovered” and helped reprint Edward Christopher Williams’ anonymously published serialized novel, The Letters of Davy Carr. Republished as When Washington Was in Vogue, Williams’ book is a slyly humorous and culturally critical epistolary novel following members of the black bourgeoisie in 1920s Washington D.C. Other contributors of note include Arna Bontemps, who would go on to write Story of the Negro, and Claude McKay, whose poem “If We Must Die” was reprinted in the messenger as an anti-war statement.
The magazine was always in such debt that it was unable to appear at all during some months where coeditors were on fundraising lecture tours, and contributors were given only token payments. Money problems also forced the magazine to change offices as they were evicted from the magazine’s birthplace, 513 Lenox Avenue, after only a few months and evicted once again after three years from its next home, 2305 Seventh Avenue, before ending up at 2311 Seventh Avenue, where it would stay until the magazine folded under its lack of funds in 1928.
Social influence
In addition to providing a platform for African-American literature, The Messenger published much political writing. Randolph also served as editor for The Socialist magazine. Writers published in The Messenger tackled issues which other journals and magazines avoided. The Messenger was notable for its critical perspective during the Harlem Renaissance. It was described as "The most feared black publication" during its reigning era from 1917 till 1928. Randolph and his wife Lucille ran for secretary of state and the state legislature on the Socialist ticket in 1917. The January issue of 1918 supported Bolshevism in Russia after its revolution.
The Messenger became a voice for those who were oppressed socially and economically. Many people would have suffered injustice for a longer period of time had it not been for The Messenger. For eleven years, it paved the way for social justice and equality. It was respected by many. Its influence was also described in 1919 by the U.S. Justice Department: "the most able and the most dangerous of all Negro publications.". Randolph and Owen did not believe that blacks should participate in the war because they did not have political equality in the United States. Randolph reacted to his questioning by an article which he described as "satirical and sarcastic." He wrote:
"the Negro may be choosing between being burnt by Tennessee, Georgia or Texas mobs or being shot by Germans in Belgium. We don't know about this pro-Germanism among Negroes. It may be only their anti-Americanism -meaning anti-lynching."
“Garvey Must Go” campaign
The Messenger openly critiqued Marcus Mosiah Garvey’s theory of Black Nationalism. Garvey’s call was to have [blacks] "go back to Africa, and more basically, back to their own blackness.” Garvey's goal of re-populating the African continent solely with blacks and his promotion of the idea in the United States was criticized by Randolph and Owen. “Even the Senegalese French Deputy, Blaise Diagne, agreed that Africa was too diverse and fragmented for Garvey’s black Zionism to be realized.” The editors wanted to present “the possibilities of an American future devoid of lynching and Jim Crow, discrimination and prejudice.”
They criticized Garvey’s ideas because considering a "return to Africa" diverted African Americans from working on current racial issues and change in the United States. Randolph and Owen started the “Garvey Must Go” campaign in 1922 with the goal of getting Garvey deported. This appeared to contradict their original mission statement. “Chandler Owen explained that historically radicals had opposed deportation only in cases of expression of political or class war opinions.”
Garvey and the editors of The Messenger represented competing strains of thought among African-American leaders in Harlem and the United States. In the small world of Harlem, Garvey rented offices for his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the same building as those of The Messenger.
Randolph and Owen continued to criticize Garvey. In the September 1922 issue, they described Garvey as a tool of the recently revived Ku Klux Klan (KKK), saying he was “the chief hat-in-hand, me-too-boss ‘good nigger’ puppet of the Ku Klux Klan Kleagle, Edward Young Clarke of Georgia.” After the Messenger debunked Garvey in these terms, many African-American racial organizations denounced Garvey and his philosophies.