Hubert Harrison
Encyclopedia
Hubert Henry Harrison was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, and radical socialist political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by activist A. Philip Randolph
as “the father of Harlem radicalism” and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers
as “the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time.” John G. Jackson
of American Atheists
described him as "The Black Socrates
"
An immigrant from St. Croix at age 17, Harrison played significant roles in the largest radical class and race movements in the United States. In 1912-1914 he was the leading Black organizer in the Socialist Party of America
. In 1917 he founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the race-conscious “New Negro
” movement. From his Liberty League and Voice came the core leadership of individuals and race-conscious program of the Garvey
movement.
Harrison was a seminal and influential thinker who encouraged the development of class consciousness
among working people, positive race consciousness among Black people
, agnostic atheism
, secular humanism
, social progressivism, and freethought
. He was also a self-described "radical internationalist" and contributed significantly to the Caribbean radical tradition. Harrison profoundly influenced a generation of “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph
, Chandler Owen
, Marcus Garvey
, Richard Benjamin Moore, W. A. Domingo, Williana Burroughs
, and Cyril Briggs
.
. Harrison's biological father, Adolphus Harrison, was born enslaved. One account from the 1920s suggested that Harrison's father owned a substantial estate. Harrison's biographer, however, found no such landholding and writes that "there is no indication that Adolphus, a laborer his entire life, ever owned, or even rented, land". As a youth, Harrison knew poverty but also learned of African customs and the Crucian people’s rich history of direct action mass struggles. Among his schoolmates was his life-long friend, the future Crucian labor leader and social activist, D. Hamilton Jackson
.
In later life Harrison worked with many Virgin Islands-born activists, including James C. Canegata, Anselmo Jackson, Rothschild Francis, Elizabeth Hendrikson, Casper Holstein
, and Frank Rudolph Crosswaith
. He was especially active in Virgin Island causes after the March 1917 U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands, and subsequent abuses under the U.S. naval occupation of the islands.
s, which were reaching a peak in these years in the South
. They were a horror that had not existed in St. Croix or other Caribbean islands. In addition, the fact that in most places blacks and people of color far outnumbered whites meant they had more social spaces in which to operate away from the oversight of whites.
In the beginning, Harrison worked low-paying service jobs while attending high school at night. For the rest of his life, Harrison continued to study as an autodidact. While still in high school, his intellectual gifts were recognized. He was described as a “genius” in The World, a New York daily newspaper. At age 20, he had an early letter published by the New York Times in 1903. He became an American citizen and lived in the United States the rest of his life.
, Harrison started writing letters to the editor of the New York Times on topics such as lynching, Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution, and literary criticism
. He also began lecturing on such subjects as the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar
and Reconstruction. As part of his civic efforts, Harrison worked with St. Benedict's Lyceum (along with bibliophile Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico
, journalist John E. Bruce, and activist Samuel Duncan); St. Mark's Lyceum (with bibliophile George Young, educator/activist John Dotha Jones, and actor/activist Charles Burroughs); the White Rose Home (along with educator/activist Frances Reynolds Keyser), and the Colored YMCA
.
In this period, Harrison also became interested in the freethought
movement, which encouraged use of the scientific method
and thought devoid of theistic dogma
. He experienced a deconversion from Christianity
and became an agnostic atheist similar to Thomas Huxley
. His new worldview placed humanity, not a god, at its center (secular humanism
). In 1907 Harrison obtained work as a clerk with the United States Post Office.
Harrison, like Huxley, became vocal in his opposition to organized religion, remarking famously that any black man who believed Biblical material must be insane. He called the Christian religion a slave-making faith, citing passages that allegedly justify slavery in the Bible. He also said that the only Blacks
in Christianity were the devil
and his demons; Jesus, God, and his angels were white. For these reasons, Harrison preferred remaining black and going to hell. Harrison regularly offered rebuttals to the bible and god's existence in his commentary on faith. Naturally, theists condemned his remarks, and riots often broke out at his lectures as a result of his antitheism. One such incident involved a religious extremist attacking him with a crowbar, whom Harrison disarmed and chased out. He was arrested by a policeman (who let the attacker escape) for assault, but later acquitted by a judge, who said Harrison had acted in self-defense
and that the cop had arrested the wrong person. Harrison had been arguing (at the meeting) for birth control
, and castigating churches for superstition, ignorance, and poverty.
Harrison was an early supporter of the protest philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter
. Particularly after the Brownsville Affair
, he became an outspoken critic of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt
and William Howard Taft
, and of the Republican Party
.
He also criticized the prominent Black leader Booker T. Washington
, whose political philosophy Harrison considered subservient. In 1910 Harrison wrote two letters to the New York Sun
that were critical of statements by Washington. Harrison lost his postal employment through what he said were efforts of Washington’s powerful “Tuskegee Machine”, in events that involved the prominent Black Republican Charles W. Anderson, Washington’s assistant Emmett Scott, and New York Postmaster Edward M. Morgan.
and became America’s leading Black Socialist. He lectured widely against capitalism, campaigned for the party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs
in 1912, and founded the Colored Socialist Club (the Socialist’s first effort at reaching African Americans). He developed two important and pioneering theoretical series on “The Negro and Socialism” for the socialist newspaper the New York Call and for the socialist monthly International Socialist Review
. He maintained that it was the principal “duty” of the Socialists to “champion the cause of the African American and that the Socialists should undertake special efforts to reach African Americans as they had done with foreigners and women.” Perhaps most importantly, he emphasized that “Politically, the Negro is the touchstone
of the modern democratic idea” and that true democracy and equality implies “a revolution... startling even to think of.”
Harrison moved to the left in the Socialist Party. He supported the socialistic, egalitarian, and militantly radical Industrial Workers of the World
(IWW). He was a prominent speaker along with IWW leaders Bill Haywood
, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
, Carlo Tresca
, and Patrick Quinlan
at the historic 1913 Paterson Silk Strike of 1913
. He also supported IWW advocacy of direct action
and sabotage
. He commended the interracial, IWW-influenced, Brotherhood of Timber Workers efforts in the Deep South
.
Despite his efforts, Socialist Party practice and positions included segregated locals in the South and racist positions on Asian immigration. Harrison concluded that Socialist Party leaders, like organized labor, put the white “Race first and class after.”
, evolution
, literature, nonbelief, and the racial aspects of World War I
. His outdoor talks and free speech efforts were instrumental in developing a Harlem tradition of militant street corner oratory. He paved the way for those who followed, including A. Philip Randolph
, Marcus Garvey
, Richard B. Moore, and (later) Malcolm X
.
In 1915-16, after a New York Age editorial by James Weldon Johnson
praised his street lectures, Harrison decided to concentrate his work in Harlem’s Black community. He wrote reviews on the developing Black Theatre and the pioneering Lafayette Players of the Lafayette Theatre (Harlem)
. He emphasized how the “Negro Theater” helped express the psychology of the “Negro” and how it called attention to color consciousness within the African-American community.
In response to the “white first” attitude of the organized labor movement and the Socialists, Harrison provided a “race first” political perspective. He founded the “New Negro Movement,” as a race-conscious, internationalist, mass-based, radical movement for equality, justice, opportunity, and economic power. This “New Negro” movement laid the basis for the Garvey movement. It encouraged mass interest in literature and the arts, and paved the way for publication of Alain Locke’s well-known The New Negro eight years later. Harrison’s mass-based political movement was noticeably different from the more middle-class and apolitical movement associated with Locke.
In 1917, African Americans and others were asked to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy” by fighting during World War I. In the United States, lynchings, racial segregation and discrimination, and white-supremacist ideology continued. Harrison founded the Liberty League and the Voice, as a radical alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP). The Liberty League aimed at the Black masses beyond “The Talented Tenth”. Its program advocated internationalism, political independence, and class and race consciousness. It called for full equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment
s, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, armed self-defense, and mass-based political efforts.
In 1918 Harrison briefly served as an organizer for the American Federation of Labor
(AFL). He chaired the Negro-American Liberty Congress (co-headed by William Monroe Trotter
.) The latter was the major wartime protest effort of African Americans. The Liberty Congress pushed demands against discrimination and racial segregation in the United States
. It submitted a petition to the U. S. Congress for federal anti-lynching legislation, which the NAACP did not demand at that time. Harrison commented on domestic and international aspects of the war, writing, “During the war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world, mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims... [however]. those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending the limits or the applications of ‘democracy.’”
The autonomous Liberty Congress effort was undermined by the U.S. Army’s anti-radical Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB) in a campaign that targeted NAACP leader Joel E. Spingarn, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington
’s former assistant, Emmett Scott. The Liberty Congress protest efforts in wartime can be seen as precursors to the A. Philip Randolph
-led March on Washington Movement during World War II, and to the Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr.
-led March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
during the Vietnam War
.
In 1919 Harrison edited the monthly New Negro
magazine, which was “intended as an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races--especially of the Negro race.” Harrison’s concentration on international matters continued. Over the next several years, he wrote many powerful pieces critical of imperialism and supportive of internationalism. His writings and talks over his last decade revealed a deep understanding of developments in India
, China
, Africa
, Asia
, the Islamic world, and the Caribbean
. Harrison repeatedly began his analysis of contemporary situations from an international perspective. Though a strong advocate of armed self-defense for African Americans, he also praised the mass-based non-violent efforts of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey
’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Over the next eight months, he developed it into the leading race-conscious, radical and literary publication of the day. By the August 1920 UNIA convention, Harrison had grown increasingly critical of Garvey. He did contribute to the UNIA’s 1920 “Declaration of the Negro Peoples of the World
".
Harrison criticized Garvey for exaggerations, financial schemes, and desire for empire. In contrast to Garvey, Harrison emphasized that African Americans' principal struggle was in the United States, not in Africa. Though Harrison continued to write for the Negro World into 1922, he looked to develop political alternatives to Garvey.
, and was one of the first to use radio to discuss topics in which he had expertise. In early July 1923, he spoke on "The Negro and The Nation" over New York station WEAF. His book and theater reviews and other writings appeared in many of the leading periodicals of the day—including the New York Times, New York Tribune
, Pittsburgh Courier
, Chicago Defender
, Amsterdam News, New York World
, Nation
, New Republic
, Modern Quarterly, Boston Chronicle, and Opportunity
magazine. He openly criticized the Ku Klux Klan
and the racist attacks of the "Tulsa Race Riot
" of 1921. He worked with various groups, including the Virgin Island Congressional Council, the Democratic Party
, the Farmer-Labor Party
, the single tax movement, the American Friends Service Committee
, the Urban League, the American Negro Labor Congress
, and the Workers (Communist) Party (the name at that time of the Communist Party USA
).
In 1924 Harrison founded the International Colored Unity League (ICUL), which was his most broadly unitary effort. The ICUL urged Black people to develop “race consciousness” as a defensive measure—to be aware of their racial oppression and to use that awareness to unite, organize, and respond as a group. The ICUL program sought political rights, economic power, and social justice; urged self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and cooperative efforts; and called for the founding of “a Negro state” in the U.S. (not in Africa, as Garvey advocated). In 1927 Harrison edited the ICUL’s Voice of the Negro until shortly before his death that year.
In his last lecture, Harrison told his listeners that he had appendicitis and would be getting surgery. Afterwards, he said he would be giving another lecture. Unfortunately, he died on the operating table, at the age of 44.
, who relied on white patrons and a Black political machine, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who focused on the “Talented Tenth of the Negro Race.” Harrison’s appeal (later identified with that of Garvey) was aimed directly at the masses. His class- and race-conscious radicalism, though neglected at some periods, laid out the contours of much subsequent debate and discussion of African-American social activists. It is being increasingly studied.
For many years after his 1927 death, Harrison was much neglected. However, recent scholarship on Harrison’s life and the Columbia University Library's acquisition of his papers show renewed interest. acquisition of the Hubert H. Harrison Papers, and publishing the "Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid", Columbia University plans to make Harrison's writings available on the internet. The forthcoming Columbia University Press two-volume Harrison biography also reflects the growing interest in Harrison’s life and thought.
) and the race/nationalist trend (identified with Garvey, and later with Malcolm X
).
He has been described as "the most distinguished, if not the most well-known, Caribbean radical in the United States in the early twentieth century" by the historian Winston James.
As an intellectual, Harrison was an unrivaled soapbox
orator, a featured lecturer for the New York City Board of Education
’s prestigious “Trend of the Times” series, a prolific and influential writer, and, reportedly, the first Black person to write regularly published book reviews in history. His efforts in these areas were lauded by both black and white writers, intellectuals, and activists such as Eugene O’Neill, James Weldon Johnson
, Henry Miller
, Hermie Huiswoud, William Pickens, Bertha Howe, Hodge Kirnon, and Oscar Benson. Harrison aided Black writers and artists, including Charles Gilpin
, Andy Razaf, J. A. Rogers, Eubie Blake
, Walter Everette Hawkins, Claude McKay
, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Lucian B. Watkins, and Augusta Savage
. He was a pioneer Black participant in the freethought
, atheist, and birth control
movements; a bibliophile and library popularizer. He created “Poetry for the People” columns in various publications, including the New Negro magazine (1919), Garvey’s Negro World
(1920), and the International Colored Unity League’s The Voice of the Negro (1927).
A sampling of his varied work and poetry appears in the edited collection A Hubert Harrison Reader (2001). His collected writings are found in the Hubert H. Harrison Papers (which also contain a detailed Finding Aid) at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. Other writings appear in his two books The Negro and the Nation (1917) and When Africa Awakes. A two-volume biography by Jeffrey B. Perry is being published by Columbia University Press
. The first volume, The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, was published in November 2008. (An excerpt is available online).
A. Philip Randolph
Asa Philip Randolph was a leader in the African American civil-rights movement and the American labor movement. He organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Negro labor union. In the early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the March on Washington...
as “the father of Harlem radicalism” and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers
Joel Augustus Rogers
Joel Augustus Rogers was a Jamaican-American author, journalist, and historian who contributed to the history of Africa and the African diaspora, especially the history of African Americans in the United States. His research spanned the academic fields of history, sociology and anthropology...
as “the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time.” John G. Jackson
John G. Jackson (writer)
John Glover Jackson was a Pan-Africanist historian, lecturer, teacher and writer. He promoted ideas of Afrocentrism, Black atheists, and Jesus Christ in comparative mythology....
of American Atheists
American Atheists
American Atheists is an organization in the United States dedicated to defending the civil liberties of atheists and advocating for the complete separation of church and state. It provides speakers for colleges, universities, clubs and the news media. It also publishes books and the monthly...
described him as "The Black Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
"
An immigrant from St. Croix at age 17, Harrison played significant roles in the largest radical class and race movements in the United States. In 1912-1914 he was the leading Black organizer in the Socialist Party of America
Socialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
. In 1917 he founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the race-conscious “New Negro
New Negro
New Negro is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation...
” movement. From his Liberty League and Voice came the core leadership of individuals and race-conscious program of the Garvey
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League...
movement.
Harrison was a seminal and influential thinker who encouraged the development of class consciousness
Class consciousness
Class consciousness is consciousness of one's social class or economic rank in society. From the perspective of Marxist theory, it refers to the self-awareness, or lack thereof, of a particular class; its capacity to act in its own rational interests; or its awareness of the historical tasks...
among working people, positive race consciousness among Black people
Black pride
Black pride is a slogan indicating pride in being black. Related movements include black nationalism and Afrocentrism.The slogan has been used in the United States by African Americans to celebrate heritage and personal pride. The black pride movement is closely linked with the developments of the...
, agnostic atheism
Agnostic atheism
Agnostic atheism, also called atheistic agnosticism, is a philosophical position that encompasses both atheism and agnosticism. Agnostic atheists are atheistic because they do not hold a belief in the existence of any deity and agnostic because they claim that the existence of a deity is either...
, secular humanism
Secular humanism
Secular Humanism, alternatively known as Humanism , is a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, justice, and the search for human fulfillment...
, social progressivism, and freethought
Freethought
Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...
. He was also a self-described "radical internationalist" and contributed significantly to the Caribbean radical tradition. Harrison profoundly influenced a generation of “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph
Asa Philip Randolph was a leader in the African American civil-rights movement and the American labor movement. He organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Negro labor union. In the early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the March on Washington...
, Chandler Owen
Chandler Owen
Chandler Owen was an African-American writer, editor and early member of the Socialist Party of America. Born in North Carolina, he studied and worked in New York, then moved to Chicago for much of his career. He established his own public relations company in Chicago and wrote speeches for...
, Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League...
, Richard Benjamin Moore, W. A. Domingo, Williana Burroughs
Williana Burroughs
Williana "Liane" Jones Burroughs was an American teacher, communist political activist, and politician. She is best remembered as one of the first African-American women to run for elective office in New York.-Early years:...
, and Cyril Briggs
Cyril Briggs
Cyril Valentine Briggs was an African Caribbean and African-American writer and communist political activist born in the West Indies. He was influenced by political ideas which emerged during and after the First World War.Briggs was born in 1888 in Nevis, a Caribbean island of the West Indies...
.
Early life
Hubert was born to Cecilia Elizabeth Haines, a working-class woman, on Estate Concordia, St. Croix, Danish West IndiesDanish West Indies
The Danish West Indies or "Danish Antilles", were a colony of Denmark-Norway and later Denmark in the Caribbean. They were sold to the United States in 1916 in the Treaty of the Danish West Indies and became the United States Virgin Islands in 1917...
. Harrison's biological father, Adolphus Harrison, was born enslaved. One account from the 1920s suggested that Harrison's father owned a substantial estate. Harrison's biographer, however, found no such landholding and writes that "there is no indication that Adolphus, a laborer his entire life, ever owned, or even rented, land". As a youth, Harrison knew poverty but also learned of African customs and the Crucian people’s rich history of direct action mass struggles. Among his schoolmates was his life-long friend, the future Crucian labor leader and social activist, D. Hamilton Jackson
D. Hamilton Jackson
David Hamilton Jackson was a resident of the United States Virgin Islands. At the time of his birth, the Territory was under the rule of Danish West Indies. Jackson was an important figure in the struggle for increased civil liberties and workers' rights on the islands...
.
In later life Harrison worked with many Virgin Islands-born activists, including James C. Canegata, Anselmo Jackson, Rothschild Francis, Elizabeth Hendrikson, Casper Holstein
Casper Holstein
Casper Holstein was a prominent New York mobster involved in the Harlem "numbers rackets" during the Harlem Renaissance. He, along with his occasional rival Stephanie St. Clair, was responsible for bringing back illegal gambling to the neighborhood after an eight-year absence following the...
, and Frank Rudolph Crosswaith
Frank Rudolph Crosswaith
Frank Rudolph Crosswaith was a longtime socialist politician and activist and trade union organizer in New York City. Crosswaith is best remembered as the founder and chairman of the Negro Labor Committee, which was established on July 20, 1935 by the Negro Labor Conference.-Early years:Frank R....
. He was especially active in Virgin Island causes after the March 1917 U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands, and subsequent abuses under the U.S. naval occupation of the islands.
Emigration and education
Harrison came to New York in 1900 as a seventeen-year old orphan and joined his older sister. He confronted a racial oppression unlike anything he previously knew, as only the United States had such a binary color line. In the Caribbean, social relations were more fluid. Harrison was especially “shocked” by the virulent white-supremacy typified by lynchingLynching
Lynching is an extrajudicial execution carried out by a mob, often by hanging, but also by burning at the stake or shooting, in order to punish an alleged transgressor, or to intimidate, control, or otherwise manipulate a population of people. It is related to other means of social control that...
s, which were reaching a peak in these years in the South
Southern United States
The Southern United States—commonly referred to as the American South, Dixie, or simply the South—constitutes a large distinctive area in the southeastern and south-central United States...
. They were a horror that had not existed in St. Croix or other Caribbean islands. In addition, the fact that in most places blacks and people of color far outnumbered whites meant they had more social spaces in which to operate away from the oversight of whites.
In the beginning, Harrison worked low-paying service jobs while attending high school at night. For the rest of his life, Harrison continued to study as an autodidact. While still in high school, his intellectual gifts were recognized. He was described as a “genius” in The World, a New York daily newspaper. At age 20, he had an early letter published by the New York Times in 1903. He became an American citizen and lived in the United States the rest of his life.
Marriage and family
In 1909 Harrison married Irene Louise Horton. They had four daughters and one son.Career
In his first decade in New YorkNew York
New York is a state in the Northeastern region of the United States. It is the nation's third most populous state. New York is bordered by New Jersey and Pennsylvania to the south, and by Connecticut, Massachusetts and Vermont to the east...
, Harrison started writing letters to the editor of the New York Times on topics such as lynching, Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution, and literary criticism
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
. He also began lecturing on such subjects as the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar
Paul Laurence Dunbar was a seminal African American poet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Dunbar gained national recognition for his 1896 "Ode to Ethiopia", one poem in the collection Lyrics of Lowly Life....
and Reconstruction. As part of his civic efforts, Harrison worked with St. Benedict's Lyceum (along with bibliophile Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico
Puerto Rico , officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico , is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean, east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.Puerto Rico comprises an...
, journalist John E. Bruce, and activist Samuel Duncan); St. Mark's Lyceum (with bibliophile George Young, educator/activist John Dotha Jones, and actor/activist Charles Burroughs); the White Rose Home (along with educator/activist Frances Reynolds Keyser), and the Colored YMCA
YMCA
The Young Men's Christian Association is a worldwide organization of more than 45 million members from 125 national federations affiliated through the World Alliance of YMCAs...
.
In this period, Harrison also became interested in the freethought
Freethought
Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...
movement, which encouraged use of the scientific method
Scientific method
Scientific method refers to a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge. To be termed scientific, a method of inquiry must be based on gathering empirical and measurable evidence subject to specific principles of...
and thought devoid of theistic dogma
Dogma
Dogma is the established belief or doctrine held by a religion, or a particular group or organization. It is authoritative and not to be disputed, doubted, or diverged from, by the practitioners or believers...
. He experienced a deconversion from Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
and became an agnostic atheist similar to Thomas Huxley
Thomas Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS was an English biologist, known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution....
. His new worldview placed humanity, not a god, at its center (secular humanism
Secular humanism
Secular Humanism, alternatively known as Humanism , is a secular philosophy that embraces human reason, ethics, justice, and the search for human fulfillment...
). In 1907 Harrison obtained work as a clerk with the United States Post Office.
Harrison, like Huxley, became vocal in his opposition to organized religion, remarking famously that any black man who believed Biblical material must be insane. He called the Christian religion a slave-making faith, citing passages that allegedly justify slavery in the Bible. He also said that the only Blacks
Blacks
Blacks may refer to:* All Blacks, New Zealand rugby union team* Black people* Blacks Leisure Group, owner of Blacks and Millets in the United Kingdom* The Blacks , a play by Jean Genet* Zamora, California, formerly called Blacks...
in Christianity were the devil
Devil
The Devil is believed in many religions and cultures to be a powerful, supernatural entity that is the personification of evil and the enemy of God and humankind. The nature of the role varies greatly...
and his demons; Jesus, God, and his angels were white. For these reasons, Harrison preferred remaining black and going to hell. Harrison regularly offered rebuttals to the bible and god's existence in his commentary on faith. Naturally, theists condemned his remarks, and riots often broke out at his lectures as a result of his antitheism. One such incident involved a religious extremist attacking him with a crowbar, whom Harrison disarmed and chased out. He was arrested by a policeman (who let the attacker escape) for assault, but later acquitted by a judge, who said Harrison had acted in self-defense
Self-defense
Self-defense, self-defence or private defense is a countermeasure that involves defending oneself, one's property or the well-being of another from physical harm. The use of the right of self-defense as a legal justification for the use of force in times of danger is available in many...
and that the cop had arrested the wrong person. Harrison had been arguing (at the meeting) for birth control
Birth control
Birth control is an umbrella term for several techniques and methods used to prevent fertilization or to interrupt pregnancy at various stages. Birth control techniques and methods include contraception , contragestion and abortion...
, and castigating churches for superstition, ignorance, and poverty.
Harrison was an early supporter of the protest philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter was a newspaper editor and real estate business man, and an activist for African-American civil rights. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key...
. Particularly after the Brownsville Affair
Brownsville Affair
The Brownsville Affair was a racial incident that arose out of tensions between black soldiers and white citizens in Brownsville, Texas, in 1906. When a white bartender was killed and a police officer wounded by gunshot, townspeople accused the members of the 25th Regiment, an all-black unit...
, he became an outspoken critic of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore Roosevelt
Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt was the 26th President of the United States . He is noted for his exuberant personality, range of interests and achievements, and his leadership of the Progressive Movement, as well as his "cowboy" persona and robust masculinity...
and William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft
William Howard Taft was the 27th President of the United States and later the tenth Chief Justice of the United States...
, and of the Republican Party
Republican Party (United States)
The Republican Party is one of the two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Democratic Party. Founded by anti-slavery expansion activists in 1854, it is often called the GOP . The party's platform generally reflects American conservatism in the U.S...
.
He also criticized the prominent Black leader Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
, whose political philosophy Harrison considered subservient. In 1910 Harrison wrote two letters to the New York Sun
New York Sun
The New York Sun was a weekday daily newspaper published in New York City from 2002 to 2008. When it debuted on April 16, 2002, adopting the name, motto, and masthead of an otherwise unrelated earlier New York paper, The Sun , it became the first general-interest broadsheet newspaper to be started...
that were critical of statements by Washington. Harrison lost his postal employment through what he said were efforts of Washington’s powerful “Tuskegee Machine”, in events that involved the prominent Black Republican Charles W. Anderson, Washington’s assistant Emmett Scott, and New York Postmaster Edward M. Morgan.
Socialism
In 1911, after his postal firing, Harrison began full-time work with the Socialist Party of AmericaSocialist Party of America
The Socialist Party of America was a multi-tendency democratic-socialist political party in the United States, formed in 1901 by a merger between the three-year-old Social Democratic Party of America and disaffected elements of the Socialist Labor Party which had split from the main organization...
and became America’s leading Black Socialist. He lectured widely against capitalism, campaigned for the party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs
Eugene V. Debs
Eugene Victor Debs was an American union leader, one of the founding members of the International Labor Union and the Industrial Workers of the World , and several times the candidate of the Socialist Party of America for President of the United States...
in 1912, and founded the Colored Socialist Club (the Socialist’s first effort at reaching African Americans). He developed two important and pioneering theoretical series on “The Negro and Socialism” for the socialist newspaper the New York Call and for the socialist monthly International Socialist Review
International Socialist Review
International Socialist Review may refer to:*International Socialist Review *International Socialist Review *International Socialist Review...
. He maintained that it was the principal “duty” of the Socialists to “champion the cause of the African American and that the Socialists should undertake special efforts to reach African Americans as they had done with foreigners and women.” Perhaps most importantly, he emphasized that “Politically, the Negro is the touchstone
Touchstone
A touchstone is a small tablet of dark stone such as fieldstone, slate, or lydite, used for assaying precious metal alloys. It has a finely grained surface on which soft metals leave a visible trace.-History:The touchstone was used in ancient Greece...
of the modern democratic idea” and that true democracy and equality implies “a revolution... startling even to think of.”
Harrison moved to the left in the Socialist Party. He supported the socialistic, egalitarian, and militantly radical Industrial Workers of the World
Industrial Workers of the World
The Industrial Workers of the World is an international union. At its peak in 1923, the organization claimed some 100,000 members in good standing, and could marshal the support of perhaps 300,000 workers. Its membership declined dramatically after a 1924 split brought on by internal conflict...
(IWW). He was a prominent speaker along with IWW leaders Bill Haywood
Bill Haywood
William Dudley Haywood , better known as "Big Bill" Haywood, was a founding member and leader of the Industrial Workers of the World , and a member of the Executive Committee of the Socialist Party of America...
, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn was a labor leader, activist, and feminist who played a leading role in the Industrial Workers of the World . Flynn was a founding member of the American Civil Liberties Union and a visible proponent of women's rights, birth control, and women's suffrage...
, Carlo Tresca
Carlo Tresca
Carlo Tresca was an Italian-born American newspaper editor, orator, and labor organizer who was a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World during the decade of the 1910s. Tresca is remembered as a leading public opponent of fascism, stalinism, and Mafia infiltration of the trade union movement...
, and Patrick Quinlan
Patrick Quinlan
Patrick Quinlan is a critically acclaimed American author, political activist, fundraiser, and former Maine Green Independent Party candidate for Governor of Maine in the 2010 election . In the fall of 2009, he informed the Maine Ethics Commission that he was no longer seeking...
at the historic 1913 Paterson Silk Strike of 1913
Paterson Silk Strike of 1913
The 1913 Paterson silk strike was a work stoppage involving silk mill workers in Paterson, New Jersey. The strike, which involved demands for establishment of an eight-hour day and improved working conditions. The strike began on February 1, 1913, and ended six months later, on July 28.-History:The...
. He also supported IWW advocacy of direct action
Direct action
Direct action is activity undertaken by individuals, groups, or governments to achieve political, economic, or social goals outside of normal social/political channels. This can include nonviolent and violent activities which target persons, groups, or property deemed offensive to the direct action...
and sabotage
Sabotage
Sabotage is a deliberate action aimed at weakening another entity through subversion, obstruction, disruption, or destruction. In a workplace setting, sabotage is the conscious withdrawal of efficiency generally directed at causing some change in workplace conditions. One who engages in sabotage is...
. He commended the interracial, IWW-influenced, Brotherhood of Timber Workers efforts in the Deep South
Deep South
The Deep South is a descriptive category of the cultural and geographic subregions in the American South. Historically, it is differentiated from the "Upper South" as being the states which were most dependent on plantation type agriculture during the pre-Civil War period...
.
Despite his efforts, Socialist Party practice and positions included segregated locals in the South and racist positions on Asian immigration. Harrison concluded that Socialist Party leaders, like organized labor, put the white “Race first and class after.”
Race radicalism and the New Negro Movement
In 1914-15, after withdrawing from the Socialist Party, Harrison began work with freethinkers, the freethought/anarchist-influenced Modern School Movement (started by the martyred Spanish anarchist/educator Francisco Ferrer), and his own Radical Forum. He also spoke widely on topics such as birth controlBirth control
Birth control is an umbrella term for several techniques and methods used to prevent fertilization or to interrupt pregnancy at various stages. Birth control techniques and methods include contraception , contragestion and abortion...
, evolution
Evolution
Evolution is any change across successive generations in the heritable characteristics of biological populations. Evolutionary processes give rise to diversity at every level of biological organisation, including species, individual organisms and molecules such as DNA and proteins.Life on Earth...
, literature, nonbelief, and the racial aspects of World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
. His outdoor talks and free speech efforts were instrumental in developing a Harlem tradition of militant street corner oratory. He paved the way for those who followed, including A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph
Asa Philip Randolph was a leader in the African American civil-rights movement and the American labor movement. He organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Negro labor union. In the early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the March on Washington...
, Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League...
, Richard B. Moore, and (later) Malcolm X
Malcolm X
Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...
.
In 1915-16, after a New York Age editorial by James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his leadership within the NAACP, as well as for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and...
praised his street lectures, Harrison decided to concentrate his work in Harlem’s Black community. He wrote reviews on the developing Black Theatre and the pioneering Lafayette Players of the Lafayette Theatre (Harlem)
Lafayette Theatre (Harlem)
The Lafayette Theatre, also known as "the House Beautiful," was an entertainment venue located at 132nd Street and 7th Avenue in Harlem, New York. It was the first New York theater to desegregate, as early as 1912. Here, African-American theatergoers were allowed to sit in orchestra seats instead...
. He emphasized how the “Negro Theater” helped express the psychology of the “Negro” and how it called attention to color consciousness within the African-American community.
In response to the “white first” attitude of the organized labor movement and the Socialists, Harrison provided a “race first” political perspective. He founded the “New Negro Movement,” as a race-conscious, internationalist, mass-based, radical movement for equality, justice, opportunity, and economic power. This “New Negro” movement laid the basis for the Garvey movement. It encouraged mass interest in literature and the arts, and paved the way for publication of Alain Locke’s well-known The New Negro eight years later. Harrison’s mass-based political movement was noticeably different from the more middle-class and apolitical movement associated with Locke.
In 1917, African Americans and others were asked to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy” by fighting during World War I. In the United States, lynchings, racial segregation and discrimination, and white-supremacist ideology continued. Harrison founded the Liberty League and the Voice, as a radical alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, usually abbreviated as NAACP, is an African-American civil rights organization in the United States, formed in 1909. Its mission is "to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons and to...
(NAACP). The Liberty League aimed at the Black masses beyond “The Talented Tenth”. Its program advocated internationalism, political independence, and class and race consciousness. It called for full equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendment
Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution
The Fifteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits each government in the United States from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citizen's "race, color, or previous condition of servitude"...
s, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, armed self-defense, and mass-based political efforts.
In 1918 Harrison briefly served as an organizer for the American Federation of Labor
American Federation of Labor
The American Federation of Labor was one of the first federations of labor unions in the United States. It was founded in 1886 by an alliance of craft unions disaffected from the Knights of Labor, a national labor association. Samuel Gompers was elected president of the Federation at its...
(AFL). He chaired the Negro-American Liberty Congress (co-headed by William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter
William Monroe Trotter was a newspaper editor and real estate business man, and an activist for African-American civil rights. He earned his undergraduate and graduate degrees at Harvard University, and was the first man of color to earn a Phi Beta Kappa key...
.) The latter was the major wartime protest effort of African Americans. The Liberty Congress pushed demands against discrimination and racial segregation in the United States
Racial segregation in the United States
Racial segregation in the United States, as a general term, included the racial segregation or hypersegregation of facilities, services, and opportunities such as housing, medical care, education, employment, and transportation along racial lines...
. It submitted a petition to the U. S. Congress for federal anti-lynching legislation, which the NAACP did not demand at that time. Harrison commented on domestic and international aspects of the war, writing, “During the war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world, mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims... [however]. those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending the limits or the applications of ‘democracy.’”
The autonomous Liberty Congress effort was undermined by the U.S. Army’s anti-radical Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB) in a campaign that targeted NAACP leader Joel E. Spingarn, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington
Booker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
’s former assistant, Emmett Scott. The Liberty Congress protest efforts in wartime can be seen as precursors to the A. Philip Randolph
A. Philip Randolph
Asa Philip Randolph was a leader in the African American civil-rights movement and the American labor movement. He organized and led the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, the first predominantly Negro labor union. In the early civil-rights movement, Randolph led the March on Washington...
-led March on Washington Movement during World War II, and to the Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the...
-led March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom
The March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom was the largest political rally for human rights in United States history and called for civil and economic rights for African Americans. It took place in Washington, D.C. on Wednesday, August 28, 1963. Martin Luther King, Jr...
during the Vietnam War
Vietnam War
The Vietnam War was a Cold War-era military conflict that occurred in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia from 1 November 1955 to the fall of Saigon on 30 April 1975. This war followed the First Indochina War and was fought between North Vietnam, supported by its communist allies, and the government of...
.
In 1919 Harrison edited the monthly New Negro
New Negro
New Negro is a term popularized during the Harlem Renaissance implying a more outspoken advocacy of dignity and a refusal to submit quietly to the practices and laws of Jim Crow racial segregation...
magazine, which was “intended as an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races--especially of the Negro race.” Harrison’s concentration on international matters continued. Over the next several years, he wrote many powerful pieces critical of imperialism and supportive of internationalism. His writings and talks over his last decade revealed a deep understanding of developments in India
India
India , officially the Republic of India , is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by geographical area, the second-most populous country with over 1.2 billion people, and the most populous democracy in the world...
, China
China
Chinese civilization may refer to:* China for more general discussion of the country.* Chinese culture* Greater China, the transnational community of ethnic Chinese.* History of China* Sinosphere, the area historically affected by Chinese culture...
, Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
, Asia
Asia
Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...
, the Islamic world, and the Caribbean
Caribbean
The Caribbean is a crescent-shaped group of islands more than 2,000 miles long separating the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean Sea, to the west and south, from the Atlantic Ocean, to the east and north...
. Harrison repeatedly began his analysis of contemporary situations from an international perspective. Though a strong advocate of armed self-defense for African Americans, he also praised the mass-based non-violent efforts of Mohandas K. Gandhi.
The Garvey Movement
In January 1920 Harrison became principal editor of the Negro WorldNegro World
Negro World was a weekly newspaper, established in January 1918 in New York City, which served as the voice of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, an organization founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914...
, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey
Marcus Garvey
Marcus Mosiah Garvey, Jr., ONH was a Jamaican publisher, journalist, entrepreneur, and orator who was a staunch proponent of the Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism movements, to which end he founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League...
’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Over the next eight months, he developed it into the leading race-conscious, radical and literary publication of the day. By the August 1920 UNIA convention, Harrison had grown increasingly critical of Garvey. He did contribute to the UNIA’s 1920 “Declaration of the Negro Peoples of the World
".
Harrison criticized Garvey for exaggerations, financial schemes, and desire for empire. In contrast to Garvey, Harrison emphasized that African Americans' principal struggle was in the United States, not in Africa. Though Harrison continued to write for the Negro World into 1922, he looked to develop political alternatives to Garvey.
Later years
In the 1920s, after breaking with Garvey, Harrison continued public speaking, writing, and organizing. He lectured on politics history, science, literature, social sciences, international affairs, and the arts for the New York City Board of EducationNew York City Board of Education
The New York City Board of Education is the governing body of the New York City Department of Education. The members of the board are appointed by the mayor and by the five borough presidents.-Rise, fall and return of Mayoral Control:...
, and was one of the first to use radio to discuss topics in which he had expertise. In early July 1923, he spoke on "The Negro and The Nation" over New York station WEAF. His book and theater reviews and other writings appeared in many of the leading periodicals of the day—including the New York Times, New York Tribune
New York Tribune
The New York Tribune was an American newspaper, first established by Horace Greeley in 1841, which was long considered one of the leading newspapers in the United States...
, Pittsburgh Courier
Pittsburgh Courier
The Pittsburgh Courier was an American newspaper published in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, which was published from 1907 to 1965. Once the country's most widely circulated Black newspaper, the legacy and influence of the Pittsburgh Courier is unparalleled.A pillar of the Black Press, it rose...
, Chicago Defender
Chicago Defender
The Chicago Defender is a Chicago based newspaper founded in 1905 by an African American for primarily African American readers.In just three years from 1919–1922 the Defender also attracted the writing talents of Langston Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks....
, Amsterdam News, New York World
New York World
The New York World was a newspaper published in New York City from 1860 until 1931. The paper played a major role in the history of American newspapers...
, Nation
Nation
A nation may refer to a community of people who share a common language, culture, ethnicity, descent, and/or history. In this definition, a nation has no physical borders. However, it can also refer to people who share a common territory and government irrespective of their ethnic make-up...
, New Republic
The New Republic
The magazine has also published two articles concerning income inequality, largely criticizing conservative economists for their attempts to deny the existence or negative effect increasing income inequality is having on the United States...
, Modern Quarterly, Boston Chronicle, and Opportunity
Opportunity
Opportunity may refer to:*Opportunity International - An International microfinance network that lends to the working poor*Opportunity NYC is the experimental Conditional Cash Transfer program being launched in New York City...
magazine. He openly criticized the Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan
Ku Klux Klan, often abbreviated KKK and informally known as the Klan, is the name of three distinct past and present far-right organizations in the United States, which have advocated extremist reactionary currents such as white supremacy, white nationalism, and anti-immigration, historically...
and the racist attacks of the "Tulsa Race Riot
Tulsa Race Riot
The Tulsa race riot was a large-scale racially motivated conflict, May 31 - June 1st 1921, between the white and black communities of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in which the wealthiest African-American community in the United States, the Greenwood District also known as 'The Negro Wall St' was burned to the...
" of 1921. He worked with various groups, including the Virgin Island Congressional Council, the Democratic Party
Democratic Party (United States)
The Democratic Party is one of two major contemporary political parties in the United States, along with the Republican Party. The party's socially liberal and progressive platform is largely considered center-left in the U.S. political spectrum. The party has the lengthiest record of continuous...
, the Farmer-Labor Party
Farmer-Labor Party
The first modern Farmer–Labor Party in the United States emerged in Minnesota in 1918. Economic dislocation caused by American entry into World War I put agricultural prices and workers' wages into imbalance with rapidly escalating retail prices during the war years, and farmers and workers sought...
, the single tax movement, the American Friends Service Committee
American Friends Service Committee
The American Friends Service Committee is a Religious Society of Friends affiliated organization which works for peace and social justice in the United States and around the world...
, the Urban League, the American Negro Labor Congress
American Negro Labor Congress
The American Negro Labor Congress was established in 1925 by the Communist Party as a vehicle for advancing the rights of African-Americans, propagandizing for communism within the black community and recruiting African-American members for the party...
, and the Workers (Communist) Party (the name at that time of the Communist Party USA
Communist Party USA
The Communist Party USA is a Marxist political party in the United States, established in 1919. It has a long, complex history that is closely related to the histories of similar communist parties worldwide and the U.S. labor movement....
).
In 1924 Harrison founded the International Colored Unity League (ICUL), which was his most broadly unitary effort. The ICUL urged Black people to develop “race consciousness” as a defensive measure—to be aware of their racial oppression and to use that awareness to unite, organize, and respond as a group. The ICUL program sought political rights, economic power, and social justice; urged self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and cooperative efforts; and called for the founding of “a Negro state” in the U.S. (not in Africa, as Garvey advocated). In 1927 Harrison edited the ICUL’s Voice of the Negro until shortly before his death that year.
In his last lecture, Harrison told his listeners that he had appendicitis and would be getting surgery. Afterwards, he said he would be giving another lecture. Unfortunately, he died on the operating table, at the age of 44.
Intellectual and educational work
Harrison’s appeal was both mass and individual. His race-conscious mass appeal utilized newspapers, popular lectures, and street-corner talks. This was in contrast to the approaches of Booker T. WashingtonBooker T. Washington
Booker Taliaferro Washington was an American educator, author, orator, and political leader. He was the dominant figure in the African-American community in the United States from 1890 to 1915...
, who relied on white patrons and a Black political machine, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who focused on the “Talented Tenth of the Negro Race.” Harrison’s appeal (later identified with that of Garvey) was aimed directly at the masses. His class- and race-conscious radicalism, though neglected at some periods, laid out the contours of much subsequent debate and discussion of African-American social activists. It is being increasingly studied.
For many years after his 1927 death, Harrison was much neglected. However, recent scholarship on Harrison’s life and the Columbia University Library's acquisition of his papers show renewed interest. acquisition of the Hubert H. Harrison Papers, and publishing the "Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid", Columbia University plans to make Harrison's writings available on the internet. The forthcoming Columbia University Press two-volume Harrison biography also reflects the growing interest in Harrison’s life and thought.
Legacy and honors
Biographer Jeffrey B. Perry writes that, among the African-American leaders of his era, Harrison was “the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals.” Perry emphasized that Harrison was a key unifying figure between two major trends of African-American struggle—the labor/civil rights trend (identified with Randolph and Owen, and later with Martin Luther King, Jr.Martin Luther King, Jr.
Martin Luther King, Jr. was an American clergyman, activist, and prominent leader in the African-American Civil Rights Movement. He is best known for being an iconic figure in the advancement of civil rights in the United States and around the world, using nonviolent methods following the...
) and the race/nationalist trend (identified with Garvey, and later with Malcolm X
Malcolm X
Malcolm X , born Malcolm Little and also known as El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz , was an African American Muslim minister and human rights activist. To his admirers he was a courageous advocate for the rights of African Americans, a man who indicted white America in the harshest terms for its...
).
He has been described as "the most distinguished, if not the most well-known, Caribbean radical in the United States in the early twentieth century" by the historian Winston James.
As an intellectual, Harrison was an unrivaled soapbox
Soapbox
A soapbox is a raised platform on which one stands to make an impromptu speech, often about a political subject. The term originates from the days when speakers would elevate themselves by standing on a wooden crate originally used for shipment of soap or other dry goods from a manufacturer to a...
orator, a featured lecturer for the New York City Board of Education
New York City Board of Education
The New York City Board of Education is the governing body of the New York City Department of Education. The members of the board are appointed by the mayor and by the five borough presidents.-Rise, fall and return of Mayoral Control:...
’s prestigious “Trend of the Times” series, a prolific and influential writer, and, reportedly, the first Black person to write regularly published book reviews in history. His efforts in these areas were lauded by both black and white writers, intellectuals, and activists such as Eugene O’Neill, James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson
James Weldon Johnson was an American author, politician, diplomat, critic, journalist, poet, anthologist, educator, lawyer, songwriter, and early civil rights activist. Johnson is remembered best for his leadership within the NAACP, as well as for his writing, which includes novels, poems, and...
, Henry Miller
Henry Miller
Henry Valentine Miller was an American novelist and painter. He was known for breaking with existing literary forms and developing a new sort of 'novel' that is a mixture of novel, autobiography, social criticism, philosophical reflection, surrealist free association, and mysticism, one that is...
, Hermie Huiswoud, William Pickens, Bertha Howe, Hodge Kirnon, and Oscar Benson. Harrison aided Black writers and artists, including Charles Gilpin
Charles Sidney Gilpin
Charles Sidney Gilpin became one of the most highly regarded actors of the 1920s. He played in critical debuts in New York: in the 1919 premier of John Drinkwater’s Abraham Lincoln and played the lead role of Brutus Jones in the 1920 premier of Eugene O'Neill's The Emperor Jones, also touring...
, Andy Razaf, J. A. Rogers, Eubie Blake
Eubie Blake
James Hubert Blake was an American composer, lyricist, and pianist of ragtime, jazz, and popular music. In 1921, Blake and long-time collaborator Noble Sissle wrote the Broadway musical Shuffle Along, one of the first Broadway musicals to be written and directed by African Americans...
, Walter Everette Hawkins, Claude McKay
Claude McKay
Claude McKay was a Jamaican-American writer and poet. He was a seminal figure in the Harlem Renaissance and wrote three novels: Home to Harlem , a best-seller which won the Harmon Gold Award for Literature, Banjo , and Banana Bottom...
, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Lucian B. Watkins, and Augusta Savage
Augusta Savage
Augusta Savage, born Augusta Christine Fells was an African-American sculptor associated with the Harlem Renaissance. She was also a teacher and her studio was important to the careers of a rising generation of artists who would become nationally known...
. He was a pioneer Black participant in the freethought
Freethought
Freethought is a philosophical viewpoint that holds that opinions should be formed on the basis of science, logic, and reason, and should not be influenced by authority, tradition, or other dogmas...
, atheist, and birth control
Birth control
Birth control is an umbrella term for several techniques and methods used to prevent fertilization or to interrupt pregnancy at various stages. Birth control techniques and methods include contraception , contragestion and abortion...
movements; a bibliophile and library popularizer. He created “Poetry for the People” columns in various publications, including the New Negro magazine (1919), Garvey’s Negro World
Negro World
Negro World was a weekly newspaper, established in January 1918 in New York City, which served as the voice of the Universal Negro Improvement Association and African Communities League, an organization founded by Marcus Garvey in 1914...
(1920), and the International Colored Unity League’s The Voice of the Negro (1927).
A sampling of his varied work and poetry appears in the edited collection A Hubert Harrison Reader (2001). His collected writings are found in the Hubert H. Harrison Papers (which also contain a detailed Finding Aid) at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. Other writings appear in his two books The Negro and the Nation (1917) and When Africa Awakes. A two-volume biography by Jeffrey B. Perry is being published by Columbia University Press
Columbia University Press
Columbia University Press is a university press based in New York City, and affiliated with Columbia University. It is currently directed by James D. Jordan and publishes titles in the humanities and sciences, including the fields of literary and cultural studies, history, social work, sociology,...
. The first volume, The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, was published in November 2008. (An excerpt is available online).
Writings by Hubert H. Harrison
- A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. with introduction and notes by Jeffrey B. Perry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001)
- “Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid,” Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University. A list of Harrison’s writings available at Columbia. On Columbia’s acquisition of the Papers see "Rare Book and Manuscript Library Acquires the Papers of Hubert Harrison." The Father of Harlem Radicalism,” Columbia University Library News. Columbia also plans to put Harrison’s Writings online.
- Harrison, Hubert H. “A Negro on Chicken Stealing, Letter to the editor, New York Times, December 11, 1904, p. 6.
- Harrison, Hubert, The Black Man’s Burden, [1915]
- Harrison, Hubert H., The Negro and Nation (New York: Cosmo-Advocate Publishing Company, 1917).
- Harrison, Hubert, "On A Certain Condescension in White Publishers," Negro World, March 1922
- Harrison, Hubert H., When Africa Awakes: The “Inside Story” of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World (New York: Porro Press, 1920).
- "Transfer Day: Hubert Harrison’s Analysis", Virgin Islands Daily News, March 31, www.virginislandsdailynews.com.
Personal biographical sketches
- Jackson, John G., “Hubert Henry Harrison: The Black Socrates,” American Atheists, February, 1987.
- Moore, Richard B., “Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927),” in Dictionary of American Negro Biography, ed. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 292-93.
- Rogers, Joel A., “Hubert Harrison: Intellectual Giant and Free-Lance Educator", in Joel A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color, ed. John Henrik Clarke, 2 vols. (1946–47; New York: Collier Books, 1972), 2:432-42.
Main biographical portraits
- Foner, Philip S. “Local New York, the Colored Socialist Club, Hubert H. Harrison, and W. E. B. Du Bois,” in Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 202-19.
- Innis, Patrick, “Hubert Henry Harrison: Great African American Freethinker,” Secular Subjects (St. Louis: Rationalist Society of St. Louis, 1992), rpt. in American Atheists Examiner. See also Inniss, Patrick in AAH Examiner, vol. 4, no. 4, Winter, 1994
- James, Portia James, “Hubert H. Harrison and the New Negro Movement,” Western Journal of Black Studies, 13, no. 2 (1989): 82-91.
- James, Winston, “Dimensions and Main Currents of Caribbean Radicalism in America: Hubert Harrison, the African Blood Brotherhood, and the UNIA,” in Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998), 122-84.
- Perry, Jeffrey, “An Introduction to Hubert Harrison, ‘The Father of Harlem Radicalism,’” Souls, 2, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 38-54.
- Perry, Jeffrey B. “Hubert Harrison: Race Consciousness and the Struggle for Socialism,” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 17 no. 2 (Summer-Fall, 2003), 103-30.
- Perry, Jeffrey B. "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Early 20th Century Harlem Radicalism," BlackPast.org, October 2008.
- Perry, Jeffrey B. “Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism," Vol. 1 of 2 (New York, Columbia University Press, 2009)
- Perry, Jeffrey B. “Hubert Henry Harrison ‘The Father of Harlem Radicalism’: The Early Years—1883 Through the Founding of the Liberty League and The Voice in 1917” (Ph. D. diss., Columbia University, 1986), includes an extensive bibliography (pp. 711–809).
- Perry, Jeffrey B. "On Hubert Harrison’s Importance", Virgin Islands Daily News, February 18, 2003 at www.virginislandsdailynews.com.
- Samuels, Wilfred David, Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture (Boulder: Belmont Books a Division of Cockburn Publishing, 1977), 27-41.
External links
- List of recent and future public Events related to Hubert Harrison
- Allan, John, “The Socialism of Hubert Harrison,” News & Letters, January 2004
- Anderson, Charles William to Booker T. Washington, September 10, 1911 and October 30, 1911 in Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, eds. The Booker T. Washington Papers, 13 vols.(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972-1984), 11: 300-01 and 351
- Brown, Egbert Ethelred, Papers Description (discusses Hubert Harrison Memorial Church), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
- Boyd, Herb, Review of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, Neworld Review, May 19, 2009.
- Fletcher, Bill, Jr., “Radicals Known and Unknown,” Monthly Review, December 2001
- “The Hubert Harrison Center,” C. L. R. James Institute
- “Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid,” Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
- McLemee, Scott, Harrison Redux, Columbia Journalism Review, May 6, 2009
- McWhorter, John, "Dead End: Hubert Harrison’s militant, unproductive racial politics," City Journal online, 2-06-2009
- Munro, John, “Roots of Whiteness,” Labour/Le Travail, Fall 2004
- Perry, Jeffrey B. Discusses Hubert Harrison in "Rediscovering Hubert Harrison" Interview conducted by Scott McLemeee in December 10, 2008 "Inside Higher Ed."
- Perry, Jeffrey B. “Hubert Harrison: Race Consciousness and the Struggle for Socialism,” Socialism and Democracy, vol. 17 no. 2 (Summer-Fall, 2003), 103-30.
- Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008)
- Phelps, Christopher, "The Rediscovered Brilliance of Hubert Harrison", review of A Hubert Harrison Reader, Science and Society, Vol. 68, no. 2 (Summer 2004), 223-230.
- Ruff, Allen, “The Vital Legacy of Hubert Harrison,” Against the Current, January/February 2004, no. 108 and in Solidarity
Audio
- "Jeffrey Perry Discusses Hubert Harrison", Podcast Interview, Inside Higher Ed., December 10, 2008
Video
- Jeffrey B. Perry, “On Hubert Harrison", Interview by Stella Winston, TV show "Straight Up!"
- Book TV, CSPAN-2 Discussion of Hubert Harrison by Jeffrey B. Perry, Komozi Woodard, and Mark Naison.