The Messenger: The World's Greatest Negro Monthly was edited by A. Philip Randolph (1889-1979), who also organized workers of the Pullman Company into the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters. Overall, the material selected for inclusion from The Messenger highlights the conflicting strands of Randolph's thought, which oscillated between economic radicalism and the rights of black labor on the one hand, and Negro business and high society on the other. (Readers interested in the goals behind the push to unionize the Pullman porters, who were skilled labor, may wish to read "The Negro and Economic Radicalism" by A. Philip Randolph in the February 1926 issue of Opportunity, journal of the National Urban League.)
In 1923, The Messenger produced a "Negro Business Achievement Number," premised on the mutual interests of black capital and black labor. By 1924, the masthead, which had read "The Only Radical Negro Magazine in America," had become "The World's Greatest Negro Monthly."
One of the more intriguing items to appear in the magazine in the mid-twenties was an epistolary novel, The Letters of Davy Carr -- A True Story of Colored Vanity Fair, which made its debut in January 1925 and was still appearing in installments in March 1926. A Prefatory Note in the January 1925 issue of The Messenger observes that "in the city of Washington colored American society has reached the point of greatest complexity, if not of highest development. . . . In these days of ease and fatness, following an era of small things . . . [the letters offer] a rather brilliant cross-section of Washington's Vanity Fair" (p. 25). The letters are said to be real, but to have been edited to protect the identity of members of Washington society; nor is the author of the Letters identified.
The Library of Congress does not possess hard copy of The Messenger, only a microfilm. Readers should be aware that signs on the microfilm indicate that many issues are missing. Selection for inclusion in Coolidge-Consumerism was made on the basis of what remained.