Issue Number:46

Date: 06/23/1934

p. 6, c. 2

An open letter to T.J. Sellers, Editor of The Reflector.


My Dear Mr. Sellers:

I have been a constant reader of "The Reflector" since the Aug. 5th issue. I read your Journal along with six or seven other Negro publications every week. May I state here that I find your features and your editorials written in a scholarly and brilliant style that I feel will place you in a short time, along with the foremost Journalists in our present school of newspaper men.

Mr. Sellers, I find it difficult to understand your attitute towards what ou delight in defining as "Our Radical School of Thought". In your first issue you branded Communsim as a type of political disease, to be dreaded by all Negroes. You have followed this thought up with front page editorails from time to time, and in June 9th issue, there were traces of your distaste for the movement in the concluding paragraph of the article "Dr. Lewis K. McMillan the Scholarly Iconoclast". The June 16th issue of your paper featured "Pipe Dreams of our Radical Intelligensia", which contained more veiws [sic] against what you called "our Radical School".

In this age of wholesale lynchings, forced Negro labor and brazen segregation, it is amazing to find a Negro who would oppose action designed to abolish these intolerable conditions and inconceivable to imagine a person taking such a stand under the guise of "helping the Race". Communism, which is the language of what you define as "our Radical School", stands for racial equality in place of segregation; it advoates brotherly love rather than the lynch law, and liberation for the laboring mases in teh place of forced labor.

Mr. Sellers, your writings in the veiw that has been discussed tends to show, that maybe you are more versed in teh technique of Journalism than you are in the ethical duties towards the Race you serve.

Because facing squarely the principle of Communism, or if you would rather have me say, the platform of the "Radical School" forces one to accept the interpretations as a plan for the Negro's betterment socially, politically and economically - to approve such a movement is to deny the need of a change. Mr. Sellers, where is the sane man that could do this?