[1] Through the 1920s it also noted the success of blacks who were reaching the middle class in business and the professions, publishing a series of essays known as "These 'Colored' United States", submitted by writers across the country.

[2] Toward the end of 1916, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen dropped out of college, joined the Socialist Party, and gave soapbox orations on street corners around Harlem.

When they walked into the office building at 486 Lenox Avenue, while looking for a meeting space for their Independent Political Council, they were recognized by William White, President of the Headwaiters and Sidewaiters Society of Greater New York.

The magazine attacked President Woodrow Wilson's call to make "the world safe for democracy", when the black community was at risk in the U.S.

Such statements led to Justice Department agents ransacking the Messenger's editorial office in the dead of night, breaking furniture and confiscating back issues.

Randolph and Owen conducted a public speaking tour against the war, appearing in Chicago and Cleveland, while selling copies of their fiery July 1918 issue.

Reaching Cleveland on 4 August, Randolph and Owen took turns addressing the mass meeting gathered by the city's Socialist Party leader Walter Bronstrup.

Randolph and Owen were held for trial under charges of violating the Espionage Act by: "unlawfully, knowingly and feloniously, the United States being then and there at war with the Imperial German Government, willfully print and cause to be printed, publish and cause to be published, circulated, in a certain language intended to incite, provoke and incur resistance to the United States and to promote the cause of its enemies in a certain publication known as the Messenger.”[4]After two days in jail, the two men were brought to trial.

When they returned to New York, they learned that the Postmaster General Albert Burleson had denied second-class mailing privileges to their magazine because of its content.

Theophilus Lewis, the magazine's drama critic from September 1923 till May 1926, supported the African-American little theatre movement, and helped develop a black aesthetic in the theater.

George S. Schuyler, a staple of the magazine for his satiric column "Shafts and Darts" (which he sometimes wrote with help from Lewis), contributed the piece "Hobohemia" to the Messenger.

In 2004, Adam McKible "discovered" and helped reprint Edward Christopher Williams’ anonymously published serialized novel, The Letters of Davy Carr.

Republished as When Washington Was in Vogue, Williams' book is a slyly humorous and culturally critical epistolary novel following members of the black bourgeoisie in 1920s Washington, D.C. Other contributors of note include Arna Bontemps, who later wrote Story of the Negro, and Claude McKay, whose poem, "If We Must Die", was reprinted in the Messenger as an anti-lynching, pro-self-defense statement to all African-Americans.

[8] Randolph and Owen criticized Garvey's goal of re-populating the African continent solely with blacks and his promotion of the idea in the United States.

[10] They believed that Garvey's ideas diverted African Americans from working on current racial issues and change in the United States.

In the small world of Harlem, Garvey rented offices for his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in the same building as those of The Messenger.

One such article was published in 1924 by T. Gillis Nutter, an attorney and former state representative of West Virginia (1918–1920), elected at a time when most blacks had been closed out of statewide office by disenfranchisement across the South at the turn of the century.

He reported on 28 successful men and women in business, the professions and teaching, as well as crops produced by black farmers in the state, and other property held by them.