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"Scholars who explore the African American experience have long debated the relative importance of race and class and how black leaders addressed these issues. While W. E. B. Du Bois, Asa Philip Randolph, and Marcus Garvey have received considerable attention in this respect, Hubert Harrison has been curiously neglected. In this thorough account, independent scholar Perry, who preserved and inventoried the Harrison papers at Columbia University, restores Harrison to the pivotal place that he deserves. Harrison, an immigrant from St. Croix (former Danish West Indies), was self-educated and an early street orator in Harlem. A member of the Socialist Party, he broke with the Socialists after 1914 to advocate a race-first position. During WW I, he was, as Perry suggests, the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals. He advocated a mass-based New Negro Manhood Movement that preceded the Harlem Renaissance and the middle-class arts-based movement usually identified with Alain Locke. This critically important book will do for Harrison what David Levering Lewis did for Du Bois (W. E. B. Du Bois, 2 vols., 1993-2000; vol. 1, CH, May'94, 31-5079) and Arnold Rampersad did for Hughes (The Life of Langston Hughes, 2 vols.; CH, Feb'87; CH, Feb'89, 26-3155). Summing Up: Essential. All levels/libraries."
by W. Glasker
Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Camden
Reviewed in 2009, Nov. CHOICE.
47-1628 E185 2008-16976 CIP
Social & Behavioral Sciences History, Geography & Area Studies North America
Carole Boyce Davies
Review of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918
This meticulously-researched book fills an enormous gap in the knowledge of black activist intellectuals in the U.S. in the twentieth century and the tremendous work that went into delivering the African-American community from one of the most oppressive racist systems in the world. Hubert Harrison is thus relocated solidly, by these means, into the scheme of American history leading up to and ushering in the Harlem Renaissance. It was Harrison, we learn, who actually coined the term and provided the philosophical and argumentative basis for the "New Negro Movement," a fact that has been lost to most scholars of the Harlem Renaissance who are more apt to assign this role to Alain Locke, perhaps because of his edited collection titled by this name: The New Negro (New York: Atheneum, 1986, first published 1925). Robert Hayden says, for example, in the preface to the 1986 edition that it is "no exaggeration to say that this book helped to create the movement (ix)." While a book can possibly create a movement, we know from history that it is the activism and the diligent work of a series of actors who seize the historical moment that ushers in a movement.
Instead we learn from this that one of the principal actors in creating the conditions for the Harlem Renaissance was Hubert Harrison. Chapter 9, "Focus on Harlem. The Birth of the 'New Negro Movement' (1915–1917)" (243–80), provides that necessary piece of information:
By late 1916 and early 1917 his new focus was clear and his militant, race conscious lectures at the Temple of Truth" would signal the dawn of a new era—the birth of "The New Negro Manhood Movement," better known as the "New Negro Movement." It would be a race conscious, internationalist, mass-based movement for "political equality, social justice, civic opportunity, and economic power" geared toward "the negro common people" and urging defense of self, family and "race" in the face of lynching and white supremacy (243). Clearly the dates of the birth of "The New Negro Movement," which became known as the Harlem Renaissance, as this indicates, preceded Locke's 1925 collection. Although not to be minimized for its contribution, Locke can be credited with perhaps documenting and therefore providing intellectual shape and legitimacy, as most academic works do, to the creative side of a movement already in process.
One wonders then how and why Hubert Harrison, this father of Harlem radicalism, was so deliberately erased from major consideration. One of the values of this work by Jeffrey Perry is that it reinstates Harrison into his rightful place in the scheme of African-American history as well as the larger African Diaspora intellectual and activist history. We can even take it further to Caribbean radical intellectual history with its range of already recognized giants and consciously add Harrison. This proves again that there is so much we still do not know about this period and indeed our histories.
This particular book is the first of a two-volume project based on very careful and detailed research. This volume begins with the available research on his Afro-Caribbean background in St. Croix, the U.S. Virgin Islands, his early days there and migration to New York in 1900 at the age of seventeen, his attempts to finish his education in New York, and his friendships with major figures like A. Philip Randolph, J. A. Rogers, and Richard Moore. His development as a major orator, organizer, and agitator for black rights, his entry into the socialist party, his influence on Marcus Garvey, his struggles as a journalist, and his major organizing principles and vehicles, ending with his formation of the Liberty Congress in 1918, round out an amazing life.
In my own work, Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Duke, 2008), on another influential figure who was also erased from a variety of histories, I demonstrate that there were a number of radical intellectuals who saw socialism as not being able to deliver fully because of the inability of its theorists and activists to deal with race. Some major black socialists and communists would leave the party for this reason, finding it not radical enough for the kind of work that needed to be done to liberate black communities. Hubert Harrison is definitely one of these figures—clearly an active socialist involved in party work in the Socialist Party, which would later on become the Communist Party USA by the time of Claudia Jones. Harrison is identified as writing a review that challenged the leading Marxist theoretician of the time. According to Perry, Harrison's review showed clearly that he had a deep and subtle understanding of Marxism. He was neither blindly dogmatic nor rigidly mechanical. . . . The review also demonstrated that Harrison, who had openly criticized a leading party theoretician, was clearly an independent individual who could and would challenge party leaders (197).
It is significant as well that Harrison also worked with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, speaking on the same platform with her on May 19, 1913 during the Silk Strike in Paterson, New Jersey. A photograph of Harrison in the company of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn appears, and a description of their joint activities in union organizing around this strike is available (203–4). Elizabeth Gurley Flynn and Claudia Jones would later work together on the Women's Commission and would actually be incarcerated in Alderson W. Virginia together. In this way, Gurley Flynn provides a necessary link between a Claudia Jones and a Hubert Harrison, knowing and working with both of these Afro-Caribbean intellectual-activists over the span of her very dynamic life. Harrison is identified as being gender conscious and is on record as speaking on behalf of women's rights on several occasions.
What is most wonderful about this work is that it provides many of the missing links in our piecing together of this period and the kind of detail that clarifies at every turn. One major clarification it provides is around the "race first" formulation, which had been hitherto assigned to Marcus Garvey and is clearly identified as originating with Harrison and in some ways co-opted and made to serve the Garvey Movement's singular emphasis on black nationalism. Harrison's argument for "race first" was based on his reasoning that white people, including socialists, always put their race first, and therefore until that changed, black people were obligated to put their race first as well.
At first, in the early stages from perhaps 1915 through around 1920, Harrison advocated the propagandistic doctrine of race first. He considered it "propaganda" and described it as a "response to the Class First of the Socialists" and the "America First" put forth by Woodrow Wilson. Harrison emphasized to the socialists: "We say Race First, because you have all along insisted on [white] Race First and class after when you didn't need our help" (277). Thus, J. A. Rogers explained that since white American socialists "habitually thought 'White First,' Harrison's slogan "became 'Race First'—in opposition to his earlier socialist one of 'Class First.' " Though he still considered himself a socialist at this time—he simply refused to put "either Socialism or the [the Socialist] party above the call of his race" (277–8).
Harrison, unlike Garvey, saw race consciousness as a self-defense measure against capitalist white supremacy and not an end itself. Harrison's activism among black communities prior to Marcus Garvey is significantly documented in this book, which provides additional complexity to what is often reduced to the struggle between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois over the nature and future of black people's way out of racial doldrums. Harrison, we learn, ran afoul of the Booker T. Washington machine in his critique of Washington's conservatism and even lost his livelihood through the machinations of the Washington machine.
But in the end, he was also very critical of W. E. B. Du Bois because Du Bois was then trying to get a commission as a captain in Military Intelligence (385) and also because he found Du Bois' "talented tenth" position untenable. Harrison would write about this in a piece called "The Descent of Dr. Du Bois," an exposé that correctly challenged this retrogressive move of one of the nation's major black leaders.
Interestingly as well, prior to this, Harrison initially saw himself as a major supporter of Du Bois but became disenchanted with Du Bois's then "talented tenth" orientation. Thus, advancing a position that married socialism with race consciousness, Harrison was able to attain legitimacy as a leader and thinker who had more political credibility than both of these men; thus, by 1918, he would be recognized as "the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals (394)." Relocating Hubert Harrison in this period further interrupts the facile limitation to only Booker T and W. E. B. and provides additional contours to this movement, adding as well an important Caribbean contribution to black activism in the U.S. Harrison is another Afro-Caribbean who saw the U.S. as the major site of struggle for black rights internationally.
Jeffrey Perry's work performs a worthy service here. It is painstaking, well-documented archival work which as good history has copious sources available. Additionally, the writer does not gloss over Harrison's personal foibles as his private family life is identified as always neglected, his children sometimes hungry, his wife frustrated and angry. Several affairs are also identified and Harrison never seemed to be able to make it financially, his newspaper The Voice suffering at times because of his principles, at times because of poor financial management.
What is significant is of course his major contribution to the activism that ushered in and surrounded the Harlem Renaissance and his life as a Harlem organizer and a popular soap box orator. Additionally this work provides important information on the early generation of Caribbean migrants to the U.S. and the coterie of activists that they formed and above all their instantaneous identifications with black struggles in the U.S. Hubert Harrison. The Voice of Harlem Radicalism 1883–1918 is a welcome addition to the pool of literature that documents that period in African-American history.
Perry, Jeffrey B. Hubert Harrison. The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918. Columbia University Press, 2008. 624 pp. US$ 37.50 (hardcover).
Larry A. Greene“The Life and Times of Hubert Harrison: A Forgotten Synthesis of African-American Socialism and Black Nationalism,” Review of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 by Jeffrey B. Perry (Columbia University Press, 2009), New Politics, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Whole Number 49, 150-154.
Hubert Harrison emerged in the first two decades of the twentieth century as one of the leading voices of Harlem radicals rejecting American claims to an egalitarian democratic heritage and commitment to such a future based on the undeniable persistence of massive racial and class inequalities. Jeffrey Perry’s exhaustive biography of Hubert Harrison elevates the lesser-known Harrison to the stature he so richly deserves as one of America’s most perceptive public intellectuals on the critically intertwined issues of American democracy, race relations, and class structure. Harrison, a St. Croix immigrant from the Virgin Islands, was one of the first to combine the divergent strands of socialism and Black Nationalism. Hubert Harrison emerges as the principal black spokesman for the Socialist Party in its heyday in the early twentieth century. His ability to articulate a coherent philosophy synthesizing essentially a class and racial analysis was unique among Harlem radicals and “soap box orators” on its major thoroughfare of 125th Street. A future second volume will explore Harrison’s life from 1919 through the apex of the Garvey movement and the Harlem Renaissance till his death in 1927.
In this volume, Perry explores the interaction, cooperation, and conflicts between intellectuals and radicals such as A. Philip Randolph, John E. Bruce, Arturo Schomburg, Cyril Briggs, and others in pre-Marcus Garvey Harlem. Against this background of contending local leaders and intellects in the cultural capital of black America, Harrison will distinguish himself as a preeminent thinker analyzing the philosophical and tactical positions of nationally known black leaders like the Harvard trained historian W.E.B. Du Bois and the president of Tuskegee Institute, Booker T. Washington. He examines the protest-oriented philosophy of Du Bois and the less militant, more accommodating approach of Washington to segregation, political disfranchisement, and lynching. While critical of the Du Bois concept of the “Talented Tenth” of a college educated elite leading the black masses into the promised land, Harrison was even more critical of the accommodationist approach of Washington, which he saw as little more than collaborationist. Harrison, throughout his debates with his Harlem counterparts and the “Tuskegee Machine,” remained true to his core beliefs of socialism, race consciousness, and committed “free thinker” unfettered from the confines of orthodox religious thought. As Perry so cogently notes, Harrison was “more race conscious than Randolph [a socialist] and more class conscious than Garvey [a nationalist]” and was the “key link in the ideological unity of the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement — the labor and civil rights trend associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the race and nationalist trend associated with Malcolm X.” (p.5)
Harrison became the chief black organizer, activist, and theoretician of the Socialist Party in New York City during its peak in the 1912 election. He was the only black speaker at the landmark Patterson Silk strike that had such leftists and International Workers of the World (IWW) notables as “Big Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and Patrick Quinlan. Eventually, Harrison will part company with the Socialist Party over their failure to aggressively address the issue of white racism both within the party and nationally as well as their indifference to the recruitment of black workers into the party. As Winston James noted in his excellent study of Caribbean radicalism in twentieth century America, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia, “American socialism did not keep faith with Hubert Harrison, Harrison kept faith with socialism.”1 The Socialist Party, according to James, “did not keep faith with the radical egalitarianism of Marx,” and for some black socialists like Harrison, “black nationalism was the last resort of a black socialist in a racist land where race is elevated above social class in politics as well as in social life.”2 One of the many strengths of the Perry biography is the detailed exposition of the transformation of Harrison from a socialist to both a socialist and Black Nationalist, who while not rejecting socialism will put race first in the organizing of black workers and the black community.
The Perry study is a comprehensive biography of Harrison which explores his genealogical and educational roots in St. Croix and his early intellectual development in St. Benedict’s Lyceum, a Roman Catholic church, with an interracial congregation and St. Mark’s Lyceum, a black Methodist Episcopal church, after his 1900 arrival in New York. It was through the lyceums that Harrison deepened his exposure to the philosophical and historical traditions of Europe, America, and Africa. Through Perry’s detailed analysis of the Harrison critique of capitalism and racism in the United States, we witness the maturation of a serious working class intellect and his intellectual evolution toward socialism. Of particular importance is a five part series of articles beginning in 1911 that Harrison wrote for the Call, the Socialist Party newspaper in New York, which contains some of his most trenchant writings on racism, capitalism, and socialism.
In his first article entitled, “The Negro and Socialism,” Harrison asserts that the so-called “Negro Problem” is not one of “social adjustment” or social control of relationships, and he rejected the argument of a biological basis for racism based on the idea of superior and inferior groups. Rather, Harrison found the roots of racism, like that of the class struggle, in economic relationships related to the means of production. Harrison clearly asserts a “materialist” basis for the emergence of white supremacy ideology rooted in slavery and the need to rationalize that exploitative superior ordinate and subordinate nature of black-white relationships derived from that institution. The contradictions between the democratic rhetoric of the Enlightenment as manifested in the founding documents of American republic — the Declaration of Independence and Constitution — necessitated the designation of blacks as racial inferiors undeserving of the democratic and egalitarian rights of the nation and consigned by God and nature to slavery.
In his second article, “Race Prejudice,” Harrison argued that racism had economic causes and that capitalists deliberately fostered race prejudice, which divided workers along racial lines to the benefit of capitalism and the detriment of workers. It was in the interest of employers to maintain the inferior economic status of African-American workers and to use them as a source of cheap low wage labor to threaten the unionization and striking tactics of white labor. This pitting of black and white workers against each other, according to Harrison, kept the wage level as low as possible. In asserting this line of analysis, Harrison challenged the defenders of white supremacy who maintained that racial prejudice was innate and based on a natural aversion of the superior white race to the intellectual and moral degeneracy of the inferior races as seen in African-Americans. Certainly, this belief system was manifest in the speeches of southern politicians like James K. Vardaman, writers like Thomas Dixon in his novel, The Clansman (1902), and in D.W. Griffith’s movie, Birth of a Nation (1915).
Harrison’s third article, “The Duty of the Socialist Party,” in the Call series called upon the party to condemn racial prejudice and reject what he termed “southernisms” or the ideology of Southern Jim Crow with its demands for racial segregation, disfranchisement of black voters, and anti-black pogroms throughout the South. The historic mission of the Socialist Party was to unite all workers across racial, ethnic, and religious lines. This duty involved the reeducation of white workers about the threats to their economic well being from racism, and it dictated that the party reach out to and aggressively recruit black workers. Harrison did not believe that socialism would immediately remove all racial prejudice, but he did think it would reduce the oppression on white workers and their susceptibility to racist propaganda and use as a tool to repress blacks. Perry cogently notes, Harrison considered this “duty” of the Socialist Party to be sacred and virtually a litmus test of sincerity, commitment, and ideology. In a following article, “How to Do It — And How Not,” Harrison gave advice warning against paternalism and condescension in addressing and recruiting black workers and urged party members to treat them as they would any white workers. In “Summary and Conclusion,” the fifth and concluding article in the series, Harrison believed that a trans-racial workingclass movement held out the promise of a socialist victory over capitalism and racism. In 1911, Harrison was optimistic and saw social, economic, and racial justice on the horizon. Perry’s close reading of the writings of Hubert Harrison results in a clear and through analysis of his political philosophy.
In the following presidential election year of 1912, Perry explores the evolving political thought of Harrison in a discussion of a new set of articles by Harrison which appeared in the Chicago based International Socialist Review amid a growing, but not fully manifest tension between Harrison and the Socialist Party, which masked his simmering disillusionment with the party. In an article taking off on Rudyard Kipling’s 1899 poem, “The White Man’s Burden,” Harrison’s “Black Man’s Burden” depicted the suffering of African-Americans under white over-lordship. Over eight million African-Americans were disfranchised in sixteen Southern states by fraud and force, lacking political rights to protect their economic rights (i.e. property and jobs). Part two of the “Black Man’s Burden” demonstrated how the southern state school segregation laws contributed to the underfunding, creation of industrial education or “labor-caste schools” and miseducation of African-Americans. In these two articles, Harrison aimed a devastating critique at the accommodationist philosophy of Booker T. Washington, which publicly eschewed voting rights and a liberal arts college/university education. Washington’s lieutenants had successfully conspired to obtain the removal of Harrison from his $1,000 a year job at the post office for two anti-Washington articles in the New York Sun newspaper, thus causing great economic hardship to Harrison’s family. Harrison’s final article in the International Socialist Review, “Socialism and the Negro,” was based on an earlier pro-IWW speech, in which he asserted African-Americans rather than constituting a reactionary hindrance to socialism, as some socialist theorists like Algie Simmons and Charles Vail claimed, were indeed the key component in the struggle by the American proletariat without which socialism in America stood little chance.
Perry’s detailed description of the Socialist Party failure to confront racism within its own ranks and nationally is quite convincing and explains Harrison’s continued criticism and his eventual suspension by the party in 1914. Despite the logic of Harrison’s analysis of the intertwined race and class problem in America, the Socialist Party was moving in a more conservative and even racist direction. The Socialist Party right wing triumphed over the left IWW members in the party, ended the Colored Socialist Club in New York, pushed through majority and minority reports at the 1912 party convention, which banned Asian immigration, and refused to take aggressive action in support of African-American recruitment. Southern white socialists supported segregated organizing and Harrison’s relentless denunciation of what he called “southernisms” placed him on the collision course with the party.
From this experience, Harrison will enter a Black Nationalistic phase in his political evolution in which he will place “Race first” before class as an organizing principle in the black community. Harrison will play a founding role in the organization of the Liberty League and its weekly publication, The Voice. He will embrace black self-determination, organizational autonomy, and black leadership for black organizations, unlike the predominantly white-led National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Harrison’s involvement in the “New Negro Manhood Movement,” a belated precursor to the Harlem Renaissance, as a cultural theorist and literary reviewer is examined by the author. Perry’s work covers new ground in demonstrating Harrison’s role in establishing some of the ideological principles of Harlem newcomers and fellow public orators, Marcus Garvey, and his nationalistic Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and young socialists, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. Garvey’s Negro World newspaper and the Randolph and Owen magazine, The Messenger, both borrow from Harrison. Harrison will be eclipsed by the more dynamic Garvey and although for a time will assume an editorial role at the Negro World, Harrison will continue to harbor some repressed resentment at being superseded by Garvey in the hearts of the Harlem masses.
The author, in exploring with great thoroughness the political evolution of Hubert Harrison from Socialist Party spokesman and organizer to Black Nationalist activist, has raised significant questions about the ineffectiveness of the left in America and the estrangement of some its more devoted followers. Harrison’s suspension and disconnect from the Socialist Party parallels the estrangement of later black intellectuals like George Padmore and Harold Cruse from the Communist Party. Caribbean radicals did not arrive in New York with a socialist orientation. It was the more blatant and intense racism that they experienced in the United States as they moved from a majority status to a minority status compared to the Caribbean that steered many in this direction and generated the desire to form ethnic political alliances, according to Joyce Moore Turner in her highly informative study of Caribbean activists in Harlem.3 Certainly, the 1910s and World War I years were radical times of assertive dissent. Yet, the estrangement of black socialists and later black communists suggest that the left did not always hear their black members, either out of a myopic ideological commitment to a political analysis that did not consider the interplay of both class and race factors in shaping the American political landscape, or a kind of racial arrogance that relegated black members to the periphery of the policy making process. For some black members, this estrangement resulted in the integration into the American political mainstream, and for others, it meant the pursuit of another strain of political radicalism, Black Nationalism. Harrison is different from some of the disillusioned in that his embrace of Black Nationalism did not mean a rejection of socialism, but a rejection of the Socialist party.
Scholars and students of Harlem, Afro-American, and Afro-Caribbean history in the United States are indeed indebted to Jeffrey Perry for this magisterial study of Hubert Harrison whom A. Philip Randolph called the “Father of Harlem Radicalism.” Volume one of this biography should be read in conjunction with Perry’s edited volume of Harrison’s writings, A Hubert Harrison Reader.4 Readers will eagerly await volume two of Perry’s biography as he takes the Hubert Harrison saga from 1919 to his death in 1927, covering Harrison involvement with Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance, and other political and cultural currents in black America.
NOTES
1. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London: Verso, 1998), 126.
2. Ibid., 127,128.
3. Joyce Moore Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 43.
4. Jeffrey Perry, ed., A Hubert Harrison Reader (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).
LARRY A. GREENE is professor of history at Seton Hall University. A Fulbright Fellow at the University of Muenster in Germany during 2005-2006, he is the co-editor of Slavery: Its Origins and Legacy, co-author of The New Jersey African-American Curriculum Guide, co-editor of the forthcoming book, German and African-American Encounters.
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