The Messenger Reader: Stories, Poetry, and Essays from the Messenger Magazine

This enlightening collection from the 1920s socialist black journal extends the political debate beyond Marcus Garvey and the literary circle beyond Paul Laurence Dunbar. Intelligently assembled by Wilson, an associate at the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute (at Harvard), who also edited The Crisis Reader, it is divided into four sections: poetry, fiction and plays, book and theater reviews, and essays. Notable poets include Countee Cullen, Claude McKay and young Langston Hughes, who, even in early poems such as ""Grant Park"" and ""The Naughty Child,"" emerges as the most original and damning. White-written works about blacks, like Du Bose Heyward's Porgy, are skewered by pithy Theophilus Lewis, who attributes their inauthenticity not to racism but the near-impossibility of interpreting ""alien character in its lighter moods."" But such ""well-meaning"" creations, he says, point to the need for black-run artistic institutions. Threaded throughout the collection are disillusionment and bitterness at racism and attempts to recast black Americans' view of themselves, in A. Philip Randolph's words, as ""aroused and awakened, militant, intelligent Negro masses"" transcending white leadership and the limited notions of Marcus Garvey and others. Informative and revealing, this is an impressive collection. Just as impressive is the existence of the magazine itself. One of a triumvirate (with the Crisis and Opportunity) of journals of black culture, and part of a larger web of U.S. periodicals, it marks itself as yet another casualty from a vanished era of broad journalistic outlets. (Feb.)