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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
Reprinted with permission from CHOICE copyright by the American Library Association.
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).
Reprinted with permission from WORKING USA, Immanuel Ness, editor.
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