Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten
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believed. Recruiting black members required special efforts on the party’s part, including an acknowledgement of “their history, their manner of life, and modes of thinking and feeling,” as well as the deployment of multiple black organizers. The party did neither. Then there was its members’ behavior. The purpose of socialism was to “put an end to the exploitation of one group by another,” Harrison insisted. “We are not a white man’s party or a black man’s party, but the party of the working class.” But that ultimately seemed like wishful thinking, not a description of fact. From within the party, Harrison took his white comrades, particularly those in the South, to task for embracing “Southernism” over socialism. Shortly after becoming a party organizer, Harrison observed that “south of the 40th parallel are some people who think that the Socialist movement can be made into a vehicle for the venom of their caste consciousness.”36 Putting the question bluntly, he asked: “Is it to be the white half of the working class against the black half, or all the working class? Can we hope to triumph over capitalism with one-half of the working class against us?”37
Over time, Harrison’s frustration with the party’s unwillingness to make race as central as he would like prompted him to withdraw and channel his energies in other directions. In print, on Harlem soapboxes, and in meeting halls, the man known as the “Black Socrates” had, by 1915, left the party and resolved to give himself “exclusively to work among my own people.”38 Advancing a “race first” perspective, he published a short-lived magazine, the Voice, and led a short-lived Liberty League to promote racial consciousness and black political influence in 1917. Self-consciously portrayed by its founder as the foundation of the “manhood movement for Negroes,” the League vowed to organize blacks to vote independently and to advocate armed self-defense. Turning to the Socialist Party for financial support in 1917, Harrison could maintain neither the journal nor the League when it rejected his appeal. It was not that New York party leaders had no interest in supporting black radicals; it was, rather, that they had already committed funds to subsiding Randolph, his partner, Chandler Owen, and their newly launched magazine, the Messenger.39 Harrison’s bitterness toward the Socialist Party, and its leading black members, Randolph and Owen, intensified over time. The SP’s record, he charged in 1920, did not entitle its members to respect from blacks. “We say Race First,” he lectured them, “because you have all along insisted on Race First and class after when you didn’t need our help.” Now that the party had lost influence and membership, it finally seemed willing to take up blacks’ cause. “Well, we thank honest white people everywhere who take up our cause, but we wish them to know that we have already taken it up ourselves.” As for the Messenger’s editors whom the party had selected to represent African Americans, they were “green and sappy in their Socialism.”40
That the Socialist Party of the early twentieth century was not an attractive or promising vehicle for advancing black rights is a conclusion drawn by most historians interested in race, labor, and radicalism. Prior to the war, argued the socialist writer James Weinstein almost half a century ago, “Negroes were virtually ignored by the Party officialdom.”41 With a few exceptions, Sally M. Miller once observed, the Socialists “did not see the Negro[,] . . . doubted Negro equality[,] and undertook no meaningful struggles against second-class citizenship.”42 Not only did southern branches sanction segregated locals, but some of the party’s leading figures—like Victor Berger of Milwaukee—were open in their belief in black inferiority.43 Perhaps most significant, the party’s official program seemed to leave little space for the recognition of black Americans’ distinctive place within American society. In his 1903 essay, “The Negro and the Class Struggle,” party leader Eugene V. Debs declared that “We have nothing special to offer the negro, and we cannot make separate appeals to all the races. The Socialist party is the party of the working class, regardless of color.”44 In so declaring, Debs was hardly signaling disinterest in black recruits; rather, he was affirming a shared socialist belief that, ultimately, race prejudice was but a tool of domination deployed by the ruling class intent upon dividing and conquering; that black workers were workers whose problems would be solved by a common working-class strategy and program resulting in capitalism’s defeat. Socialism “recognizes no class or race distinction”; it “contains the only hope for either black or white,” white party member Charles H. Vail had explained in 1901. For black Americans, it would both “emancipate the negro from economic servitude” and would “solve the negro problem by destroying race prejudice” over time. Socialism was “the only hope for the negro and for humanity.”45 Unlike the Communists in the 1920s and 1930s who insisted upon the specificity of blacks’ oppression as workers and as a national minority under capitalism, the SP in its “daily functioning . . . did not concern itself with the Negro’s economic and political problems,” in Miller’s disapproving words.46
What, then, would lead Randolph, Owen, and a small group of other African Americans into the party’s ranks, given the SP’s apparently problematic stance? What prompted them to remain socialists as opposition from black nationalists and interracial communists intensified into the 1920s? Their following of a less-traveled and idiosyncratic path into the world of socialism initially came through books and personal contacts. Unlike Harrison or Debs, Randolph and Owen never held up the party’s race record to close scrutiny; instead, they took individual socialists’ positive expressions of support for black rights as evidence of the party’s overall progressive stance. After all, key white socialists like Mary White Ovington and William English Walling had been instrumental in founding the NAACP and, in the pages of the New York Call, the party’s daily, could be found sympathetic and at times extensive coverage of the plight of black Americans, particularly in the South.47
On a personal level, individual white socialists made a deep impression upon Randolph. If Debs once suggested that the party had nothing special to offer blacks, he also affirmed, on numerous occasions, his firm belief in black humanity and his deep understanding of black suffering. Neither his door nor heart would “be ever closed against any human being on account of the color of his skin,” Debs insisted in 1904. In a wartime exchange with a skeptical Du Bois, Debs displayed no defensiveness, only a general endorsement of the Crisis editor’s indictment of the American racial order. “The whole history of the American slave trade and of African slavery in the United States, clear down to the present day, is black with infamy and crime against the negro, which the white race can never atone for in time or eternity,” Debs passionately wrote. Chattel slavery was a crime “without a parallel in history,” for which “complete restitution . . . can never be made.” As for the socialists, Debs concurred that even among their ranks “the negro question is treated with a timidity bordering on cowardice which contrasts painfully with the principles of freedom and equality proclaimed as cardinal in their movement.” He forthrightly condemned the socialist “who will not speak out fearlessly for the negro’s right to work and live, to develop his manhood, educate his children, and fulfill his destiny on terms of equality with the white man.” That individual simply “mis-conceives the movement he pretends to serve or lacks the courage to live up to its principles.” Debs may have incurred Du Bois’s disapproval with his admission that the “negro is ‘backward’ because he never had a chance to be forward,” having been “captured, overpowered, put in chains, plundered, brutalized and perverted to the last degree.” But all that would change, Debs argued, if African Americans were given a genuine chance. “The negro is my brother. . . . I refuse any advantage over him and I spurn any right denied him.” In the end, blacks’ “salvation” lay “with themselves,” and through organization, self-education, and their assertion of “united power,” they would “progress” and “take their rightful place in society.” Nothing in his words suggested a subordination of race to class or a failure to recognize the specific conditions experienced by African Americans. It would be difficult to find a stronger indictment of America’s racial past and present and a more open embrace of the African American cause from any group of whites at the time.48
In the Messenger and in later recollections, Randolph expressed a deep respect for the white socialist leader. Although he did not consider Debs to be a “great leader of thought,” he did see him as a “matchless” and “mighty orator, one of the