Harrison, Hubert Henry

HARRISON, HUBERT HENRY (1883-1927). St. Croix, Virgin Islands, born and Harlem-based, Hubert Harrison was an autodidactic writer, orator, editor, educator, book reviewer, political activist, and radical internationalist on class and race. A. Philip Randolph described him as “the father of Harlem radicalism.”

Harrison played multiple, unique roles in the Left and the “New Negro”/Garveyite movement. A major influence on Randolph and on Marcus Garvey, he was read or heard widely by the intellectual “New Negroes” and ordinary Harlem residents of the 1910s-1920s. Considered the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals, Harrison personally provided a key link between the two great strands, labor and race nationalism.

Coming to New York in 1900, Harrison quickly broke from Christianity, entered Harlem intellectual circles, worked in the post office, and became the leading Black activist in the Socialist Party of the City. In 1911, he initiated the Colored Socialist Club and wrote a major five-part theoretical series on “The Negro and Socialism” in the New York Call. The following year, he wrote three major articles for the International Socialist Review, also spoke often for the Socialist presidential campaign of Eugene V. Debs, including a May Day rally of 50,000 in Union Square. In 1913, he spoke alongside Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “Big Bill” Haywood, and others to the Paterson silk strikers at the Botto House in Haledon, New Jersey.

Harrison insisted in 1911 that “politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea. The presence of the Negro puts our democracy to the test and reveals the falsity of it.” In 1912, he wrote that “. . . the mission of the Socialist Party is to free the working class from exploitation, and . . . the duty of the party to champion . . . [the Negro’s] cause is as clear as day. This is the crucial test of Socialism’s sincerity.” He left the Party in 1914, complaining that
Party leaders “insisted on [“white”] Race First and class after.”

Harrison taught at the Modern School and turned to concentrated work in the Black community. Beginning in 1916, he served as the intellectual guiding light of the militant “New Negro Movement” represented by his own newspaper, The Voice, and his new organization, the Liberty League. His work here laid the basis for the growth of the Garvey movement. When Woodrow Wilson proclaimed let us “make the world safe for democracy,” Harrison countered that Wilson actually meant “Make the South Safe for Democracy.” Harrison published The Negro and the Nation in 1917 and in 1918 co-chaired (with William Monroe Trotter) the Liberty Congress, a major Black national protest effort during the war. In 1919 he edited The New Negro Monthly (subtitled “an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races -- especially of the Negro race”). In 1920 he became principal editor of Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, re-shaping that paper as it swept the globe. He initiated “Book Review,” “Poetry for the People,” and “West Indian News Notes” sections, published When Africa Awakes: The “Inside Story” of the New Negro in the Western World, and, in 1921, wrote the important article “Wanted – A Colored International.”

After breaking with Garvey and leaving the Negro World, Harrison returned to his role as a prolific and wide-ranging writer, speaker, and “Free-Lance Educator.” He worked for several years as a public lecturer for the New York City Board of Education and in 1926, served as a regular columnist for the Boston Chronicle. His International Colored Unity League program of 1924 insisted that the “New Negroes” shape their own future in order to obtain “political equality, social justice, civic opportunity and economic power.” The Voice of the Negro, the League’s magazine sought to provide “information about what is taking place in every quarter of the colored world.” In his last years, Harrison worked briefly with the American Negro Labor Congress, continued writing and speaking on such topics as Africa, China, the Virgin Islands, Unity, Race Consciousness, literature, and “World Problems of Race” (a course he delivered at the Workers School, a function of the Communist Party). He died unexpectedly from an appendicitis related condition.

Harrison, Hubert H. When Africa Awakes: The “Inside Story” of the Stirring and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World (1920), ed. with new intro. and notes by Jeffrey B. Perry. New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2015.

Hubert H. Harrison Papers. Columbia Digital Library Collections (Columbia University Libraries) https://dlc.library.columbia.edu/sites/hubert_h_harrison

A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. and intro. by Jeffrey B. Perry. Middleton, Conn:Wesleyan University Press, 2001.

Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918-1927. New York: Columbia University Press, 2020.

Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008.