Hubert Harrison

Hubert Henry Harrison
File:Harrison-hubert.jpg
Born	April 27, 1883 Estate Concordia, St. Croix, Danish West Indies (now U.S. Virgin Islands)
Died	December 17, 1927 New York, NY, USA
Spouse	Irene Louise Horton
Children	Frances Marion (b. 1910), Alice (b. 1911), Aida Mae (b. 1912), Ilva Henrietta (b. 1914), and William (b. 1920)
Parent(s)	Ceclia Elizabeth Haines and William Adolphus Harrison

Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 - December 17, 1927), a St. Croix, Virgin Islands-born and Harlem-based writer, orator, educator, critic, and radical political activist was described by the 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.”

Harrison uniquely played significant roles in the largest class radical and the largest race radical movements of his era. From 1912-1914 he was the leading Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician in the Socialist Party of America and in 1917 he founded the Liberty League and the The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the militant, race conscious “New Negro” movement. From his Liberty League and Voice came the core leadership individuals and race conscious program of the Garvey (Marcus Garvey) movement.

Harrison was a seminal and influential thinker who encouraged the development of class consciousness among working people, anti white-supremacist race consciousness among Black people, secular humanism, modern thinking, and a critical intellectual independence. He was also an internationalist who advocated that African Americans develop ties with Caribbean, African, Latin, Asian, and Arab peoples and who contributed significantly to the Caribbean radical tradition. He 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. His 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” and he emphasizes that Harrison is a key unifying link 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.) and the race/nationalist trend (identified with Garvey, and later with Malcolm X).

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 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 was also an aid to 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; a pioneer Black participant in the freethought and birth control movements; a bibliophile and library popularizer, and a developer of “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 good sampling of his writings, talks, reviews, and poetry appear in the edited collection A Hubert Harrison Reader (2001). An extraordinary collection of his writings are found in The Hubert 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 forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Early life

Hubert was born to Cecilia Elizabeth Haines, a laboring class woman, on Estate Concordia, St. Croix, Danish West Indies. Little is known about his biological father. As a youth he knew poverty and learned of African customs and the Crucian people’s rich history of direct action mass struggles including the 1848 emancipation effort led by “Buddhoe” and “The Great Fireburn” of 1878 for better labor conditions led by “Queen Mary” Thomas and others. 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 and 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.

Harrison arrived in New York in 1900 as a seventeen-year old orphan and confronted a racial oppression unlike anything he previously knew. The color line was drawn differently in St. Croix than in the United States and Harrison was “shocked” by the virulent white-supremacy (typified by lynching, a horror which did not exist in St. Croix) that he encountered in the U.S. He worked low-paying service jobs, and, after attending high school at night, continued to study as a life-long autodidact. While still in high school he was described as a “genius” in The World, a New York daily newspaper.

In his first decade in New York Harrison started writing letters to the editor of the New York Times on topics such as lynching, Charles Darwin, and literary criticism. He also began lecturing on such subjects as the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Reconstruction. As part of his efforts at deep involvement in the Black community Harrison worked with St. Benedicts Lyceum (along with bibliophile Arthur Schomburg, journalist John E. Bruce, and activist Samuel Duncan), the St. Mark’s Lyceum (along 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 utilization of scientific methods and thought free of religious dogma. He broke from Christianity and became an agnostic similar to Thomas Huxley and his new worldview placed humanity, not god at its center. In 1907 Harrison obtained work as a clerk with the United States Post Office and in 1909 he married Irene Louise Horton with whom he subsequently had four daughters and one son.

Harrison was an early supporter of the protest philosophies of W.E.B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter and, 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 developed criticisms of the prominent Black leader Booker T. Washington, whose political philosophy he considered to be one of subservience. In 1910 Harrison wrote two letters to the New York Sun that were critical of statements by Washington and he soon lost his postal employment through the efforts of Washington’s powerful “Tuskegee Machine” in a series of 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 and became America’s leading Black Socialist. He lectured widely against capitalism, campaigned for the party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1912, founded the Colored Socialist Club (the Socialist’s first special effort at reaching African Americans); and 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 increasingly moved to the left in the Socialist Party and supported the socialistic, egalitarian, and militantly radical Industrial Workers of the World. 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 and he commended the interracial, IWW-influenced, Brotherhood of Timber Workers efforts in the Deep South.

Despite his efforts Socialist Party practice and positions including segregated locals in the South and racist positions on Asian immigration led Harrison to conclude 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 control, evolution, literature, 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 and paved the way for others 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 outdoor lectures and after receiving other encouragement, Harrison decided to concentrate his work in Harlem’s Black community. His decision was finalized after 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 to analyze the psychology of the “Negro” and how it called attention to color consciousness within the African American community.

Then, in response to the “white first” attitude of the organized labor movement and the Socialists, Harrison responded with a “race first” political perspective. With this “race first” approach 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, 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 a-political movement associated with Locke.

In 1917, as the World War raged and African Americans and others were asked to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy” while race riots, lynchings, segregation, discrimination, and white-supremacist ideology continued at home, Harrison founded the Liberty League and the Voice, as a more radical alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Liberty League was not dependent on “whites” and aimed beyond “The Talented Tenth” at the Black masses. Its program advocated internationalism, political independence, and class and race consciousness and it called for full equality, federal anti-lynching legislation (which the NAACP did not call for), enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, 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) and chaired the Negro-American Liberty Congress (co-headed by William Monroe Trotter), which was the major wartime protest effort of African Americans. The Liberty Congress pushed demands against discrimination and racial segregation in the United States and submitted a petition to the U. S. Congress for federal anti-lynching legislation, which the NAACP did not demand at that time. As Harrison pointed out, commenting on both domestic and international aspects of the war, in words that resonate eighty years later--“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 involved 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 were important 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 and 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 and, though a strong advocate of armed self-defense for African Americans, also praised the mass-based efforts of Mohandas K. Gandhi.

The Garvey Movement

In January 1920 Harrison became principal editor of the Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Over the next eight months he was the person primarily responsible for developing it into the leading race-conscious, radical and literary publication of the day. By the August 1920 UNIA convention, however, though he was a major radical influence on the UNIA’s 1920 “Declaration of the Negro Peoples of the World., Harrison had grown increasingly critical of Garvey. He disagreed with his exaggerations, his financial schemes, and his desire for empire. In contrast to Garvey he emphasized that African Americans principal struggle was in the United States, not in Africa. Though he 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 Education. 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 on the Tulsa, Oklahoma, Black community during the "Tulsa Race Riot" of 1921, and 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 unexpected appendicitis-related death in December of that year.

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 and was qualitatively different from the approaches of Booker T. Washington, 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 much neglected, laid out the contours of much subsequent debate and discussion of African American social activists and is coming under increasing study.

Neglect and recent interest

For many years after his 1927 death Harrison was much neglected. The reasons are many--he was Black, poor, and a Caribbean immigrant (all groups that have faced serious neglect); he was radical on matters of race, class, religion, and birth control; he had no long term relationship with any one organization; he was a forthright critic of many individuals and organizations that might have preserved his memory; he died young (and was not martyred) and his life of prolific writing and speaking was cut short.

This neglect is now ending. Recent scholarship on Harrison’s life, the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University [1] acquiring The Hubert H. Harrison Papers [2] and publishing the “Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid,” [3] Columbia University’s plans to make his writings available on the internet, and the forthcoming Columbia University Press two-volume Harrison biography all reflect the growing interest in Harrison’s life and thought.

Events

1890s

1883

• Born April 27 in Concordia, Saint Croix, Danish West Indies

1900s

1900

• Arrives in New York City

1903

• Has first of many letters published in the New York Times

1905-1910

• Active with St. Benedict’s and St. Mark’s Lyceum, White Rose Home, YMCA, and Postal Worker Study Group

1909

• Marries Irene Louise Horton

1910s

1911

• Fired from post office through efforts of Booker T. Washington’s “Tuskegee Machine.”

1911

• Leading Black Activist in Socialist Party of New York; writes series on "The Negro and Socialism" in The Call

1912

• Organizes Colored Socialist Club; writes on “Socialism and the Negro” in the International Socialist Review

1913

• Speaks at Paterson Silk Strike of 1913

1914

• Leaves Socialist Party; teaches at the Ferrer Modern School; starts Radical Forum

1915-1917

• Speaks on racial significance of World War I, does reviews of early Black Theater

1917

• Founds the Liberty League and The Voice; publishes The Negro and the Nation

1918

• Works as [American Federation of Labor] organizer; co-chairs National Liberty Congress

1919

• Edits New Negro magazine

1920s

1920

• Serves as managing editor of the Negro World; publishes When Africa Awakes

1920-1922

• Contributing editor and book reviewer for the Negro World

1922

• Begins employment as staff lecturer for New York Board of Education; writes for the New York World, the Negro Times, the New York Age, the New York Tribune, and the New York Times

1923

• Challenges Ku Klux Klan in Paterson, N.J.; writes for the The Nation," the New York Tribune, the Amsterdam News, the New York World, the New Republic, and the National Star

1924

• Writes for New York Inter-State Tattler, Boston Chronicle, and Indianapolis Freeman; founds the International Colored Unity League

1925-1926

• Helps found New York Public Library Negro Collection (which developed into the world famous Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture; joins American Negro Labor Congress; writes for Modern Quarterly, the Negro Champion, Opportunity, and the Amsterdam News

1927

• Writes for the West Indian Statesman, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Chicago Defender; edits and publishes Embryo of the Voice of the Negro and The Voice of the Negro; dies suddenly (December 17) at Bellevue Hospital Center from appendicitis-related complications.

Supplemental readings

Writings by Hubert H. Harrison

• A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. with introduction and notes by Jeffrey B. Perry (Westport, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001)[4]

• “Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid,” Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.[5] This has an extensive 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.” [6] 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. [7]

• Harrison, Hubert, The Black Man’s Burden, [1915] [8]

• Harrison, Hubert H., The Negro and Nation (New York: Cosmo-Advocate Publishing Company, 1917).

• 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, 2003. [9]

Biographical sketches by those who knew Harrison

• Jackson, John G., “Hubert Henry Harrison: The Black Socrates,” American Atheists, February, 1987. [10]

• 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. [11]

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. [12] See also Inniss, Patrick in AAH Examiner, vol. 4, no. 4, Winter, 1994[13]

• 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. [14]

• Perry, Jeffrey B. “Hubert Harrison: “The Father of Harlem Radicalism,” Vol. 1 of 2, Columbia University Press, forthcoming 2008.

• 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 [15]

• Samuels, Wilfred David, Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture (Boulder: Belmont Books a Division of Cockburn Publishing, 1977), 27-41.

External links

Web

• Allan, John, “The Socialism of Hubert Harrison,” News & Letters, January 2004
• Allen, Ernest, Jr., “The New Negro: Explorations in Identity and Social Consciousness, 1910-1922,” in 1915: The Cultural Moment, eds. Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1991 ), 48-68
• 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
• Arnesen, Eric. Review of A Hubert Harrison Reader, African American Review, Spring 2003*
• Brown, Egbert Ethelred, Papers Description (discusses Hubert Harrison Memorial Church), Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library
• Fletcher, Bill, Jr., “Radicals Known and Unknown,” Monthly Review, December 2001
• “Fellow Worker Hubert Harrison,” Industrial Workers of the World (IWW)
• “From A Hubert Harrison Reader by Jeffrey B. Perry’,” Excerpts, University Press of New England
• “The Hubert Harrison Center,” C. L. R. James Institute
• “Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid,” Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
• Jackson, John G. “The Black Atheists of the Harlem Renaissance,” talk given at 1984 American Atheists convention
• Munro, John, “Roots of Whiteness,” Labour/Le Travail, Fall 2004
• Perry, Jeffrey B., A Hubert Harrison Reader, (Westport: Wesleyan University Press, 2001.)
• Ragland, John, “No More Ham,” American Atheists, February 1987
• Ruff, Allen, “The Vital Legacy of Hubert Harrison,” Against the Current, January/February 2004, no. 108 and in Solidarity
• Smollett, Sara, “Harlem’s Virgin Islanders,” November 19, 2005

Video

• “On Hubert Harrison" Historian Jeffrey B. Perry talks about his book, The Hubert Harrison Reader, Interview by Stella Winston, Straight Up!