Hellraisers Journal: From The Messenger: “Negroes Organizing in Socialist Party”- Republican Party, Worst Sort of Fraud

Nothing counts but pressure, pressure, more pressure,
and still more pressure through broad,
organized, aggressive mass action.
-A. Philip Randolph
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Hellraisers Journal, Tuesday July 9, 1918
New York, New York – Randolph and Owen Recommend Socialist Party

From The Messenger of July 1918:

The editors of The Messenger decry the Republican and Democratic Parties as they give enthusiastic support to the Socialist Party of America.

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NEGROES ORGANIZING IN SOCIALIST PARTY

The new Negro is awakening. After having been the political Rip Van winkle of America for fifty years, sleeping in the cesspools of Republican reaction, he has at last opened his eyes. In New York City, in the very heart of the Negro settlement, there has been organized the Twenty-first Assembly District Socialist Branch which includes all white and colored Socialists in the district. The branch has grown to about one hundred members in two weeks, all of whom are dues paying and in good standing.

The new Negro leaders are pointing out the Republican party as the worst fraud under which Negroes have been laboring. The Democratic party is openly against the negro. The Republican party is ever striking him a blow in the the back. Either one or the other of those parties has been in power for the last fifty years, the Republicans the greater part of the time. The Jim Crowism, segregation, lynching, disfranchisement and discrimination are as much the work of the Republican as the Democratic party. Jim Crowism railroads was upheld in a decision by Chas. E. Hughes. Lynch laws thrived under McKinley, Roosevelt and Taft. The Grandfather disfranchisement laws were passed under the guardianship of the Republican party. The Sumner Civil Rights bill was declared unconstitutional by the Republican Supreme Court.

Lastly the Republican party is the party of plutocracy, of wealth, of monopoly, of trusts, of big business. But the Negroes-99 per cent of them-are working people. They have nothing in common with big business and their employers. They ought to belong to the workers’ party. And that is the Socialist party. The object of the employer is to get the greatest amount of work from the laborer and to give the least amount of pay. The object of the laborer is to get the greatest amount of pay for the least amount of work. In a word, the interests of the employer and the employee are opposed.

What negro workers need is more wages for their work, shorter hours for leisure recreation and education, and better conditions under which to work. The party which stands for these things is the Socialist party. It is also the party which stands at all times and in all countries against race prejudice. Indeed many of the finest workers in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People are Socialists. Instance Miss Mary White Ovington, its vice-president. Let the colored people throughout the country get into the Socialist party. Organize in the branches. No prejudice will be found anywhere and you will become a power to be feared and respected throughout this nation.

[Photographs added.]