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Messenger, The
2 articles on Messenger, The
Messenger, The
Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 460 Includes: Bibliography1917–1928 Harlem-based monthly magazine of radical black opinion. In 1917 A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, Southerners who had migrated to New York City, were hired to edit The Hotel Messenger, then a newsletter for a Labor Union of hotel and restaurant employees. A few months into their tenure they accused the union, in print, of overcharging its members for uniforms. The union boss was enraged and fired Randolph and Owen, whereupon they moved down the street and in November 1917 began publishing The Messenger. It was the self-proclaimed “Only Radical Negro Magazine in America.”The Messenger attacked everybody. It proclaimed that the teachings of Booker T. Washington were accommodationist, that the writings of his rival W. E. B. Du Boisignored class struggle, and that the messages ofMarcus ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 327The Messenger, a monthly journal (1917–1928), was remarkable for its editorials, occasional literature, and varied appeal. Variously subtitled, it was first a spartan Journal of Scientific Radicalism or the Only Radical Negro Magazine in America, describing itself as the “first publication to recognize the Negro problem as fundamentally a labor problem.” Scintillating editorials by A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen rebuked President Warren G. Harding for endorsing California's exclusion of Japanese immigrants or lambasted W. E. B. Du Bois for “demagogy” regarding socialist revolution, while sociopolitical poems by Claude McKay and the memoirs of Bartolomeo Vanzetti appeared as occasional literature. Beginning in 1923, however, the Messenger as New Opinion of the New Negro or World's Greatest ...
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