Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

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СКАЧАТЬ But if Du Bois succeeded in opening Randolph’s eyes in 1903 and pushing him toward a more radical outlook, it would take less than a decade and a half for the student to reject the teacher’s insights as wholly inadequate to the task of the liberation of the race. Although conceding that Du Bois possessed “more intelligence than most Negro editors,” Randolph and his intellectual and editorial partner, Chandler Owen, denounced the NAACP leader as “comparatively ignorant of the world problems of sociological and economic significance.”¹⁷ Du Bois might be “the most distinguished Negro in the United States,” but his advice was “puerile and effete . . . not worthy of an alleged Negro sociologist.”¹⁸ If Randolph had drawn inspiration from Du Bois, he was later quick to put considerable distance between his own radicalism and that of Du Bois.

      Whatever his thinking as a teenager, Asa’s geographical horizons had to expand before his political horizons could. The road to an activist politics first carried Randolph to New York, where he immersed himself in new intellectual and radical communities profoundly different from those in his native Jacksonville. This brings us to the second part of this biographical introduction: a political coming-of-age story that began when Asa joined the migrant stream that was steadily carrying the South’s Talented Tenth to a region that would soon be called a “land of hope.” The twenty-two-year-old Asa arrived in New York City in 1911, at the end of a small but steady movement of southern blacks to the North that had tripled the city’s black population between 1890 and 1910. In some ways, the city to which he moved depressingly resembled the world he left behind. Just over a decade before his arrival, one journalist had concluded that the “prospect for the Negro in New York City is not very encouraging,” for not only had an anti-black riot in 1900 revealed police indifference to blacks’ safety but the “opportunities of Negroes are less in New York than they have ever been, and there does not seem any likelihood that present conditions will be immediately changed.”¹⁹ Any black man or woman attempting to secure employment would have run up against employment barriers that relegated them to menial, unskilled work. The year after Randolph’s arrival, sociologist George Edmund Haynes found that “the large majority of Negroes are employed today in occupations of domestic and personal service” in New York, and that their relegation to such jobs was the result of “the historical conditions of servitude, of a prejudice on the part of white workmen and employers,” and the “inefficiency of Negro-wage-earners.”²⁰ The job market hardly beckoned; opportunities remained restricted.

      For a number of years, Asa Randolph joined thousands of other black New Yorkers, old timers and new arrivals alike, in maneuvering the low-wage common labor market and living what one observer called the “hand-to-mouth existence so common to Negro migrants of that period.”²¹ He kept few jobs for long. At one point he was a hall-boy in apartment buildings on 89th Street where a cousin worked as a janitor; his effort to become a waiter on a Fall River Line steamship ended quickly when he was fired either for attempting to unionize his fellow waiters over poor conditions or for screwing up a white customer’s order for little neck clams, or for both. (His accounts of that incident vary.) Then, he commuted from New York to Jersey City to work as a counter waiter boy in a restaurant.²² During these years before the U.S. entry into World War I, Randolph barely eked out a living on his own wages.

      If his work experiences resembled those available to blacks in the South, in other ways Randolph’s New York was a world away from the Jacksonville of his youth. The rapid relocation of Manhattan’s black population north to Harlem was in the process of transforming that community into what would soon be viewed as the “Negro Mecca,” the vibrant, cultural capital of black America. Although “Harlem wasn’t the Harlem it is now,” an elderly old Randolph reminisced, its “Negro artistic and literary life . . . was developing rapidly.” Harlem, already home to a “type of Negro artist, musicians, singers and so forth, that were on a high order from the point of view of quality,” appealed to the young Randolph’s vocational aspiration: to become an actor. As a newcomer to the nation’s largest city, he soon found fellowship and an institutional anchor in the Salem Methodist Church’s Epworth League, a youth group sponsored by the Methodist Episcopal 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 СКАЧАТЬ