Reframing Randolph. Andrew E. Kersten

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 great men on the platform for social change,” who “had the power of moving people . . . by painting pictures of the degradation of the working man.” In a description that others would later apply to Randolph, he viewed Debs as “selfless. He had no concern about amassing wealth, making money out of anything he did.”⁴⁹ Impressed by these attributes, Randolph admitted that Debs “had quite a bit of effect on me.” But the relationship went both ways. “Debs had great admiration” for the black socialists too, “because it was a new phenomenon to find Negroes leading in the Socialist movement.”⁵⁰ The Randolphs spent “time with him,” dining together at various downtown restaurants and talking philosophy and politics in Harlem. At no point did Randolph perceive any racial condescension in their exchanges. Debs “was a man who was absolutely convinced of the principle of equality among human beings, regardless of race, color, religion or anything else. And he practiced it and he demonstrated it by his work.”⁵¹

      Debs was not the only white socialist who favorably impressed Randolph.⁵² As Randolph took to soapboxes in Manhattan, he came into contact with the hitherto unknown but vibrant world of Jewish immigrant socialism and labor radicalism. The encounter was enlightening for both sides. “These people were really converted to us, because we were black,” Randolph later explained. “They had never seen any black people on a soapbox . . . this was altogether new to them.” The staff of the Jewish Daily Forward, in particular, found the young black radicals compelling. “They said, ‘I think you ought to be supported. You’re doing for our country that which ought to be done, that is, giving them knowledge about the history of man, the history of the struggle of civilization.” The Jewish socialists provided Randolph and the Messenger with modest financial assistance over the years.⁵³ But more than money was involved. “All of us Negroes know that, on the whole, the Jews are the fairest and most friendly people in the United States in their dealings with the Negroes,” the Messenger declared in its first issue in November 1917. “Despised and oppressed through centuries, the Jews know what oppression means, and consequently they have always been tender and sympathetic toward the Negroes who have been their companions in drinking the bitter dregs of race prejudice.”⁵⁴ In subsequent years, Randolph would appreciate the struggles of Jewish trade unionists in the Amalgamated Clothing Workers Union and the International Ladies Garment Workers Union; he would become a strong supporter of the state of Israel.

      What, then, was socialism to Randolph? What, specifically, did he think it would do for blacks? Why did he think that blacks should vote for the party? Another reason that the Socialist Party drew Randolph’s support stemmed from his belief that neither of the principal political parties had anything to offer black America. With the pre–New Deal Democratic Party attracting little black support, he castigated the black electorate for its “slavish and foolish worship of the Republican Party,” whose sole gesture was granting the occasional patronage post to a few prominent black politicos while offering them “no voice in the government.” Those obedient “Negro peanut politicians”—“political palliators, acquiescers and compromisers”—did their white masters’ bidding. With “hat in hand,” the hand-picked black official, the “old, archaic, fossilized Negro political” parasite “sermonizes, prates and apps about the grand, old Republican Party being the ‘ship and all else the sea” in exchange for “a crum [sic] from the political dinner table.”⁵⁵ The Republicans shared the blame for all that afflicted black America: “Jim Crowism, segregation, lynching, disfranchisement and discrimination.” And since the overwhelming number of African Americans were working people, they had “nothing in common” with the “party of plutocracy, of wealth, of monopoly, of trusts, of big business.”⁵⁶

      In the first issue of the Messenger, which appeared shortly before the 1917 mayoral election in New York City, Randolph put a positive spin on the Socialist Party’s race record. The SP “does not even hold race prejudice in the South,” the journal declared; the following year, it echoed that claim by declaring that the “Socialist party СКАЧАТЬ