ABSTRACT
In the early days of the New Negro Renaissance, one summer, that of 1926, I lived in a rooming house on 137th Street in Harlem where Wallace Thurman and Harcourt Tynes lived, also. Thurman was then managing editor of The Messenger, a Negro magazine that had a curious career. It began by being very radical, very racial, and sort of socialistic just after the war. Later it became a kind of Negro society magazine and a plugger for Negro business with photographs of prominent colored ladies and their nice homes. A. Philip Randolph, now President of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, Chandler Owen, and George S. Schuyler were connected with the magazine. Schuyler’s editorials, a la Mencken, were the most interesting things in The Messenger verbal, vigorous brickbats. I asked Thurman what kind of magazine The Messenger was, and he said it reflected the policy of whoever paid off best at the time.
