Leading Black Socialist, and future head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, A. Philip Randolph is simple, bitterly funny, precise, and urgent in this appeal for a united front of ‘Negroes, Jews, Catholics, organized labor and foreigners’ to ‘annihilate’ a resurgent Klan.

‘The Ku Klux Klan: How to Fight It’ by A. Philip Randolph from The Messenger. November, 1921.

THE “Invisible Empire” of the Ku Klux Klan has become visible. The Knights of the Ku Klux have been dragged into the light of day. The invisible has been made visible. The Knights of Night, who live a life of darkness, who move only under cover of masks, have been unmasked by the splendid journalism of the New York World.

The imperial wizard and his lieutenants are not very much of wizards after all. As a matter of fact, we would favor awarding William Joseph Simmons of Atlanta a mud medal for colossal ignorance. And then when one considers the five hundred thousand followers of this pusillanimous professorette of Southern history, it is easy to understand the Niagara of illiteracy in America and the invisible empire of ignoramuses. It is sufficient to note that William Joseph Simmons, president of Lanier University, Atlanta, Georgia, copyrighted a book, and placed it in the library of Congress; subject to the view of anybody who wanted to see it and then proclaimed to the world that this hook was the greatest secret of civilized southern savagery.

But these savages, bootleggers and thieves must be fought because they are vicious. How shall this fighting be done? Who shall do it?

As we very early insisted, almost a year ago, the Ku Klux Klan thieves and bootleggers must be fought by all against whom their darts are directed, plus all public spirited and far visioned persons.

The Klan announces that it is opposed to Negroes, Jews, Catholics, organized labor and foreigners. Then Negroes, Jews, Catholics, organized labor and foreigners should combine to annihilate the Klan. The Klux Klan uses physical force. The Negroes, Jews, Catholics, labor and foreigners should use all the force necessary to suppress the Ku Kluxers.

The Ku Klux Klan also uses propaganda- a vicious, lying propaganda, which poisons public opinion. It spreads rape lies against the Negro. It represents the Jews as stirring up race war between whites and blacks. It forges mendacious oaths into the ritual of the Knights of Columbus. It represents labor and foreigners as having no place in the country. Obviously these groups, the victims of such misrepresentation, must counter with propaganda just as the World and about twenty other papers are now doing. The light of publicity will drive them to the tall timbers; the truth will retire them to oblivion.

Economically, the imperial wizard says they urge all Klansmen to trade only with Klansmen. In return the Negroes, Jews, Catholics and foreigners should boycott any Klansman’s business until he is bankrupt.

Politically, these Negroes, Jews, Catholics, labor and foreigners should, as they can, sweep from political office every known or suspected Klansman and then see to it that none rises to power any more.

Legally, pressure should be brought to bear to have the leaders and organizers indicted. tried and convicted. If legislation does not exist already, Congress should he pressed to enact the requisite laws to disband and outlaw the entire motley crew just as it did in 1872.

In the meantime Negroes, Jews, Catholics, labor and foreigners must not try to carry on any debating society. They must he prepared to protect themselves, must be well armed, must shoot to kill anyone who encroaches upon their lives. No tarring and feathering fraternity should be respected except by bullet, brick, bottle, club or some deadly intimidating weapon. A good cold steel lesson is what is needed. Negroes everywhere, the Knights of Columbus, labor, foreigners and Jews are surely able to give a few lessons at this sort of defense. Also let our Southern Negroes brace up. Get in the mood of hanging together and then you will no longer hang separately. In Mobile, Birmingham and Montgomery, Alabama; in Jacksonville, Florida, Atlanta, Savannah, Columbus and Macon, Georgia; in Charleston, S.C., in New Orleans, La., in Houston, Galveston, Dallas and Austin, Texas; in Richmond, Petersberg, Norfolk and Newport News, Virginia, Negroes are in sufficiently large numbers to protect themselves against the Ku Klux Klan. ·Of course, we are ready in New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Baltimore, Trenton, Newark, Boston, Chicago and such places to take care of the situation whenever it arises. If the Klan were to drill through the Negro section of New York it would never be able to drill back! The Negroes of every organization are a unit on that. The Ku Klux grafters and thieves and murderers may drill through the streets of Atlanta, Jacksonville, Birmingham and Richmond. Brave Knights of the Ku Klux, don’t try it in New York! Probably you have heard already of the organization of Negroes in Trenton known as the -“Kan Klux Too.” Well, we can Klux all over the North and West and we are rapidly stiffening the back bone of our black brothers in the South so that they “will Klux too”, as they Kan Klux too.

Lastly, a group of ignoramuses who believe in snake charmers, wizardry and witchcraft, an imperial wizard in an ordinary fraternal hustler-are in no way prepared to govern any empire beyond the bailiwick of the cotton boll weevil. We know of no set of Negroes who would fall for such transparent clap trap. We have never seen a gathering of Negro peons in the black belt of the South who were so bankrupt in ideas, so poverty stricken in information, who were such intellectual Iilliputians that five hundred thousand of them would follow and pay ten dollars each to some fraudulent mental midget, some clay-eating, hook-wormed and pellagraized cracker, posing as a wizard, usurping the livery of imperialism, claiming sway over an invisible empire, nay describing himself in terms which to any sane man would be indisputable evidence of a fakir, a charlatan, a quack or a veritable mental moron.

But the Ku Klux Klan must go. It must be destroyed. There is no place for the revival of a “Know Nothing Society” in an alleged land of the free. Good deeds need no mask. Laudable acts seek no shroud of secrecy. Empires belong to yesterday. Wizardry and Witchcraft hark back to the dark ages. Invisible government has been discredited. The world tomorrow will be visible. The empire will have yielded to democracy. Wizards and Witchcraft echo yesterday- not the nascent voice of tomorrow. The mask of ignorance and ignobleness will be torn from the lurid face of illiteracy; and where now there is darkness, the miasmic menace of religious bigotry, the putrescent breath of race prejudice-tomorrow will behold a new world illumined with intelligence, touched by the magic wand of credal tolerance, ionized by the alembic of human brotherhood. END.

The Messenger was founded and published in New York City by A. Phillip Randolph and Chandler Owen in 1917 after they both joined the Socialist Party of America. The Messenger opposed World War I, conscription and supported the Bolshevik Revolution, though it remained loyal to the Socialist Party when the left split in 1919. It sought to promote a labor-orientated Black leadership, “New Crowd Negroes,” as explicitly opposed to the positions of both W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T Washington at the time. Both Owen and Randolph were arrested under the Espionage Act in an attempt to disrupt The Messenger. Eventually, The Messenger became less political and more trade union focused. After the departure of and Owen, the focus again shifted to arts and culture. The Messenger ceased publishing in 1928. Its early issues contain invaluable articles on the early Black left.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/messenger/1921-11-nov-mess-RIAZ.pdf