The Messenger was a New York–based African American political and literary magazine that was founded with the help of the Socialist Party. This close association with socialism was alarming enough that the U.S. government initially deemed the publication “radical.” The editorial “How to Stop Lynching,” attributed to the magazine and probably penned by editor A. Philip Randolph (1889–1979), encouraged African Americans to fight back against white mobs and lynchers by using the two most powerful methods available to them: physical and economic force. Physical force referred to armed self-defense, and economic force referred to the unionization of their labor to demonstrate their economic importance to national and international markets. It was the hope that a unified front of Black people in both the North and the South would initiate a change in the anti-Black lawlessness that permeated the nation.