The Messenger, sometime radical Black monthly

The eighth February 1922 post for our annual celebration of Black History Month.

One hundred years ago today … The February 1922 issue of The Messenger was billed the “lecture tour number” on a cover that showed journal editors and founders Chandler Owen and A. Philip Randolph superimposed over a map of the US.

Published out of 513 Lennox Avenue in Harlem, theMessenger had begun what would be an 11-year-run in 1917, starting as a monthly devoted to radical politics. Adam McKible notes: “At first, Randolph and Owen pursued a radical agenda that drew the unwanted attentions of Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer, J. Edgar Hoover of the U.S. Department of Justice, [and] New York’s Lusk Committee” (41).

(Note: Palmer, Hoover, and the Lusk Committee have appeared repeatedly on this site.)

This version of the journal was invested in the Bolshevik revolution in Russia. In later years, however, that investment shifted. According to George Hutchinson, “A. Philip Randolph opposed affiliation of American socialists with the Third International in Moscow, believing that they should resist direction from outside the United States–in part, it would seem, because of the specific conflict between Marxist ideology and American racial reality.” 

Correspondingly, McKible writes that by the early 1920s, “The Messenger began to redefine its political commitments by moving away from its original radical socialism and toward boosterism for the African American bourgeoisie” (42).

Be that as it may, the February 1922 issue is intently focused on leftist, proletarian, if not radical politics. Its pages address labor fights such as a coal miners’ strike (p. 348-9), a waist makers union drive (349) a fight to keep the radical New York Call  in publication (351), and a two-page spread of short notices called “The Labor World.”

And the journal ads suggest that the audience was still radicalized.

Read the entire Feb., 1922 Messenger here thanks to Marxists.org.

References/ Further Reading:

Hutchinson, Goerge. "Mediating 'race' and 'nation:' the cultural politics of 'The Messenger.' (magazine)." African American Review, vol. 28, no. 4, winter 1994, pp. 531+. Gale Academic OneFile, 

McKible, Adam. The Space and Place of Modernism: The Little Magazine in New York. New York, Routledge, 2013.

– Jonathan Goldman, Feb. 16, 2022

TAGS: Black history, African American politics, socialism, communism, labor, print, publishing, Harlem Renaissance, civil rights, law, legal