Region Not Home: Reflections from Exile (2000).
In them McPherson focuses on the connection
between geography and identity, the posturing
found in regional identity. This emphasis allows
McPherson to develop his characters more com-
pletely, as he is able to unravel their psychologi-
cal and emotional states, which are reflected in the
landscape. McPherson also uses the oral tradition
as a core for his writings, often featuring a char-
acter telling stories. Most important, McPherson’s
vision is that all Americans have basic common
values, regardless of racial identity. He supported
the CIVIL RIGHTS MOVEMENT rather than the BLACK
POWER movement.
“Solo Song: For Doc,” McPherson’s signature
short story, is exemplary. When a college student
joins the regular crew of waiters on board a rail-
road during the summer, he encounters the narra-
tor, an employee who sees him as an opportunist
and the railroad managers as exploiters. He tells
the youth, “The man uses you but he does not
need you. But me he needs for the winter, when
you are gone” (1676). Ultimately, the narrator
wishes to celebrate members of the Old School,
like Doc Craft (Leroy Johnson), a waiter’s waiter,
a passing breed. The narrator tells the novice, “He
[Doc] danced down these aisles with us and swung
his tray with the roll of the train, never spilling in
all his trips a single cup of coffee” (1674). In the
end, however, McPherson, who had spent his sum-
mers working on the railroad, much like the young
apprentice in the story, not only celebrates a dying
class of railroad workers—porters and waiters,
their economic plight as members of the working
class whose cause is championed by the union—
but also of the death of the railroad itself.
Hue and Cry: Short Stories won the National In-
stitute of Arts and Letters Grant (1970), a Rocke-
feller Grant (1970), and a Guggenheim Fellowship
(1972). In 1981, McPherson won the MacArthur
Foundation Grant and in 1978 the Pulitzer Prize
for Elbow Room. Throughout his career, McPher-
son has taught African-American literature and
creative writing at the University of Iowa; the Uni-
versity of California, Santa Cruz; Morgan State
University; and the University of Virginia.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Beavers, Herman. Wrestling Angels into Song: The Fic-
tions of Ernest J. Gaines and James Alan McPher-
son. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 1995.
Kim Hai Pearson
Brian Jennings
Messenger, The (1917–1928)
World War I, the Great Migration, African-Ameri-
can participation in the war, and the formation
of such civil rights organizations as the NATIONAL
ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF COLORED
PEOPLE (NAACP), the National Urban League,
and MARCUS GARVEY’s Universal Negro Improve-
ment Association (UNIA) are often identified as
the impetus for the cultural blossoming known as
the HARLEM RENAISSANCE and the more militant,
defiant, and self-reliant African American who
presented himself in America during the postwar
era. These major organizations and their leaders,
W. E. B. DUBOIS, CHARLES S. JOHNSON, and Gar-
vey, strategically founded publishing organs—The
CRISIS, OPPORTUNITY, and The Negro World, respec-
tively—to promulgate their ideological and po-
litical platforms and agendas, and, in the case of
Garvey, his economic program managed through
the Black Star Line.
Although it was not connected to any of these
sociopolitical and economic organs, The Messen-
ger, “the only magazine of scientific radicalism in
the world published by Negroes,” was an equally
important venue that sought to champion the
voice of the New Negro and spearhead the Re-
naissance movement. It, too, served, according to
editor Sondra Kathryn Wilson, as “an intellectual
and cultural outlet for black artists” (xx) during
the 1920s.
The ardent socialists A. Philip Randolph and
Chandler Owens founded The Messenger. Oppo-
nents of World War I and supporters of the eco-
nomic program of the Industrial Workers of the
World, Randolph and Owens were included by the
FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover among the most dangerous
Messenger, The 353