The Messenger Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from The Messenger Magazine (Harlem Renaissance)

Unlike the NAACP's Crisis and the Urban League's Opportunity, The Messenger--the literary arm of legendary labor leaders A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen--was not linked with any African American civil rights organization. The two men created the publication after they were fired from their hotel jobs for questioning unfair union practices. Overtly socialist in nature, The Messenger ran from 1917 to 1928 and claimed to be "the only magazine of scientific radicalism in the world published by Negroes." As this wide-ranging anthology shows, the journal practiced equal-opportunity criticism. Owen's "Failure of Negro Leadership" takes issue with W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and Archibald Grimke for their advocacy of Negro participation in World War I. Randolph's "Reply to Marcus Garvey" and "The Negro in Politics" expose the philosophical flaws of the famous race leader's movement and express a lack of faith in the U.S. two-party political system. But the real gems of this reader lie in its impressive array of poetry, fiction, and plays from such luminaries as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, and Zora Neale Hurston. As editor Sondra Kathryn Wilson writes, the magazine "unequivocally made socialistic economics and politics a priority of culture." --Eugene Holley Jr.