Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ 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 the duty of party members to champion the cause of African Americans. “This is the crucial test of Socialism’s sincerity,” he concluded.³⁵

      Socialists failed that test, Harrison 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 СКАЧАТЬ