News and Letters "Black/Red Column"--November 1997

Black Radicalism and the Russian Revolution

by John Alan

Eighty years ago on Nov. 17, 1917, two young Black socialist intellectuals, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, converted The Messenger, the waiter union's newspaper, into a Black journal of radical ideas. By coincidence this radical conversion of The Messenger happened at the time the Russian Revolution exploded in the middle of a world-wide imperialist war, a war which brought Black and white race relations in the U.S. to the point of bloody violence, i.e., "race riots."

The first edition of The Messenger went to press before the news of the Russian Revolution had arrived, but its second edition hailed the Russian Revolution as the "greatest achievement of the twentieth century." Of course, that ideal prediction was never actually realized.

When today one has a chance to look back at the now long defunct Messenger, it is natural to ask what does it mean today. First, the coterie of young Black intellectuals, George Schuyler, Chandler Owen, Ernest Rice McKinney, Lovett Fort-Whiteman, Abram L. Harris, Hubert Harrison, Claude McKay and William Pickens, that Randolph brought together to write for The Messenger didn't propose to fix up capitalism but proposed the creation of a new society without racism and human exploitation.

Second, they recognized that there were two poles of thought in the Black community, one for change and the other for the status quo. Thus, in the first edition of The Messenger, Randolph wrote that the main aim of The Messenger "...is to appeal to reason, to lift our pens above the cringing demagogy of the time, 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."

Within the context of 1917, Randolph was declaring war on DuBois and all the other members of the "talented tenth" leadership who were supporting the U.S. intervention in an imperialist war. Under the banner of "saving democracy" white racists were burning and lynching scores of African Americans. The U.S. army hanged 14 Black soldiers in Houston, Texas for defending themselves against mob violence. This blazing contradiction aroused Black masses to take defensive action.

The Messenger was certain that once the African-American masses were urbanized workers and integrated into the labor union movement, they would become the most potent force in transforming American capitalistic society. However, contrary to this perception, Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) proved to be the preferred organization of the urbanized Black workers.

Claude McKay, the Black novelist, thought that Garvey was a charlatan, but nevertheless thought that the astonishing success of the UNIA was due to the fact that "Negroes from all parts of the world, oppressed by the capitalists, despised and denied a fighting chance under the present economic system by white workingmen, have hailed it as a star of hope, the ultimate solution of their history-old trouble.... Although an international Socialist, I am supporting the movement, for I believe that for subject peoples, at least, Nationalism is the open door to communism. Further more, I will try to bring this great army of awakened over to the finer system of socialism."

The above quote came from an article McKay wrote for the English Workers' Dreadnought, Jan 31, l920. It is relevant for us today because it is dialectical whether or not McKay intended it to be. What McKay said is that in 1920 when thousands upon thousands of African-American workers left the South and went North to labor in factories and industrial plants, they didn't escape from racism and exploitation but instead a newer "concrete totality" of racism was imposed on them and they were "in need of a new beginning." As McKay indicated, the "new beginning" is not a nationalist ideological projection of Black capitalism as an alternative to white capitalism.

Marxist-Humanism has always opposed A. Philip Randolph's and Ernest Rice McKinney's theoretical subordination of the African-American struggle for freedom within labor struggles, as if African Americans had to wait for labor to act. Both Randolph and McKinney held fast to that theory. Yet, as Charles Denby wrote in his autobiography, the practice of that theory meant that during the days of the Trade Union Leadership Council, Randolph "told us plainly that this was not going to be an organization to take up grievances of Black workers on the shop level."

In spite of that Randolph and the Blacks around him made a sharp historical break with the past in 1917. They were dedicated radical intellectuals who engaged in many sharp battles of ideas. The editorials of The Messenger critiqued racism, sexism, colonialism and the exploitation of labor.

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