Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

Church.²³ It was through an Epworth connection that Asa met Lucille Greene; among their common interests were political radicalism and Shakespeare. They married in 1914.

      Dissuaded by his parents’ objections to his potential acting career, Randolph channeled his energies into another avenue: socialism. Working odd jobs during the day, Randolph explored New York City and discovered a world of learning—and radicalism. In 1912, he enrolled in inexpensive night classes at City College—then among “the hottest beds of radicalism in New York City,” as he put it.²⁴ Randolph studied public speaking, political science, history, philosophy, and economics. It was in this interracial intellectual milieu that he first encountered the arguments of socialist thinkers and studied the history of workers’ movements in Europe. According to biographer Jervis Anderson, Randolph was so excited by his discovery of the Left that “in his spare time, he ‘began reading Marx as children read Alice in Wonderland.’”²⁵ As an Ebony magazine portrait recounted in 1958, this young man, “always hungry for learning,” found an intellectual home in New York. “In libraries and rented rooms he feasted on books of all kinds.”²⁶

      Study led to action. In the realm of practice, he helped to found an Independent Political Council as a forum for the discussion of political issues and the advancement of a radical critique. “We were having a great time,” Randolph told Anderson. “We didn’t think of the future, of establishing a home, getting ahead, or things of that sort. Those things weren’t as important as creating unrest among Negroes.”²⁷ Meeting Chandler Owen at a party at Madame C. J. Walker’s home in 1915, Randolph found an intellectual soul mate. They challenged one another intellectually, undertaking an independent course of study of Marxian socialism and Lester Ward’s sociology, spending countless hours reading and discussing at the New York Public Library or at the Randolphs’ apartment, attending radical meetings addressed by such left-wing luminaries as Eugene V. Debs, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, or Morris Hillquit, and soaking in the soapbox oratory of Hubert Harrison. In 1916, they opposed military preparedness efforts in Harlem and campaigned for the Socialists’ presidential candidate, Allan Benson, while maintaining their political independence. “We are not Socialists. We are not anything,” Randolph made clear.²⁸ That independence was short-lived; the two young black men joined the Socialist Party (SP) in 1917. Later that year, they founded the self-consciously radical Messenger magazine, with financial assistance from the Socialists, and threw themselves into the mayoral campaign of socialist candidate Morris Hillquit, coordinating the party’s efforts in Harlem.²⁹

      At a time of tremendous ferment marked by the emergence of so many ideological currents analyzing the ills of American life and proposing solutions for transcending them, Randolph without reservation cast his lot with the Socialist Party. For a young black migrant making New York his home in the prewar years, a turn toward socialism was hardly a logical or popular choice. It was, rather, a move that put Randolph at odds not only with most of the African American establishment but with many black critics of the social order as well. Within the broader black community, mainstream civil rights leaders dismissed the party as too utopian to be of value to the black cause, while the rising leader Marcus Garvey and his nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association dismissed it as simply another tool of the white race; other black radicals simply found the party too class-focused and insufficiently race-focused to warrant their support. Unmoved by criticisms from either his right or left, Randolph maintained his faith in the Socialist Party against considerable odds, sticking with it through thick and thin. That decision took him down a somewhat lonely and certainly unpopular political road.

      By the time Randolph had joined the Socialist Party, the organization had already passed its “high-water mark,” in Daniel Bell’s words.³⁰ The party’s ability to attract votes peaked in 1912, with its perennial presidential candidate, Eugene V. Debs, garnering some 6 percent of the national total. With the outbreak of the World War I in Europe in 1914, the myth of working-class internationalism was shattered as Europe’s socialists put aside cross-border class solidarity and took up arms for their respective countries. By the following year, party membership in the United States had fallen to just eighty thousand (down from 125,000 in 1912); when its numbers began rising again, it was new European immigrants, not native-born whites or African Americans, who made up the reconstituted party. And when the United States finally entered the war in April 1917, the debate over the SP’s stance nearly tore the organization apart. In the end, many of its prewar leaders broke with the party over its antiwar stance and instead allied themselves with President Woodrow Wilson. What internal dissension failed to accomplish, governmental and extralegal repression did. By the war’s end, government persecutions, along with numerous arrests and convictions, decimated the party.³¹

      Ideological fissures and government hostility notwithstanding, the Socialist Party’s appeal to African Americans was virtually nonexistent. That black ministers, journalists, and businessmen would object to the party and its anti-capitalist goals is not surprising, for their abiding hostility to white organized labor—whose execrable track record on race made it an enduring target of black contempt—and embrace of captains of industry as offering black workers their only chance for economic survival rendered socialism anathema. A miniscule number of black activists were temporarily attracted to the party, however, including W. E. B. Du Bois and Hubert H. Harrison. Du Bois, the scholar-turned-editor and NAACP leader, first encountered socialist doctrines as a graduate student in Germany in the 1890s; by 1904, he would “scarcely describe [himself] as a socialist” but admitted that he held “many socialistic beliefs,” which included public ownership of railroads, mines, and factories.³² He joined the New York party local in 1911, but his flirtation with the Left was brief. With the approach of the 1912 presidential election, he voted for the southern-born Democrat, Woodrow Wilson (a decision he would come to rue). Although never overtly hostile to the socialists, he made clear his sharp disappointment with America’s white radicals. The party’s socialism was the “Socialism of a State where a tenth of the population”—some nine million “Americans of Negro descent”—is “disfranchised,” yet they “raise scarcely a single word of protest against it.” When “Revolution is discussed,” he asked, “it is the successful revolution of white folk and not the unsuccessful revolution of black soldiers in Texas”? For Du Bois, the answer was an unfortunately self-evident “no”. The nation’s silence—its lack of “moral courage” to discuss frankly the “Negro problem”—was shared by reactionaries and radicals alike.³³

      Hubert Harrison’s involvement with the SP was longer but his disillusionment even more bitter. A native of the Virgin Islands, Harrison made New York his home in 1900, completing his secondary schooling there and securing a position as a postal clerk. A voracious reader, an elegant and powerful writer, a trenchant social and literary critic, and a skilled and charismatic orator, he emerged as the Socialist Party’s most prominent and vocal black member by the early 1910s. His primary task, it seems, was to educate his fellow white socialists about the “Black Man’s Burden,” a subject that they knew little about and about which they expressed little interest. The facts he brought to their attention would “furnish such a damning indictment of the negro’s American over-lord as must open the eyes of the world,” Harrison wrote in 1911. Disfranchisement, segregation, a system of peonage that constituted a “second slavery,” and white trade unionists’ violent attacks against black workers were only part of his bill of complaint.³⁴ These alone should have commanded blacks’ plight to white socialists’ attention. But lest his white listeners fail to be moved by his indictment, Harrison translated it into a language socialists could not fail to understand. America’s black population formed a “group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group,” he insisted. Not only was the Negro “the most thoroughly exploited of the American proletarian, he was the most thoroughly despised.” The nation’s ruling class propagated race prejudice, the “fruit of economic subjection and a fixed inferior economic status.” Whatever else white socialists might think, they had to confront the fact that “the Negro problem is essentially an economic problem with its roots in slavery past and present.” Since the SP’s mission was to “free the working class from exploitation,” the fact that the “exploitation of the Negro worker is keener than that of any group of white workers” made it