Jeffrey B. Perry

[Hubert] Harrison made his mark in the United States by struggling against class and racial oppression, by helping to create a remarkably rich and vibrant intellectual life among African Americans, and by working for the enlightened development of the lives of “the common people.” He consistently emphasized the need for working-class people to develop class consciousness; for “Negroes” to develop race consciousness, self-reliance, and self-respect; and for all those he reached to challenge white supremacy and develop modern, scientific, critical, and independent thought as a means toward liberation.

Harrison, who referred to himself as a “radical internationalist,” was extremely well-versed in history and events in Africa, Asia, the Middle East, the Americas, and Europe, and, according to Richard B. Moore, he was “above all” the militant Black socialists in his steady emphasis on “the liberation of the oppressed African and colonial peoples” as being a “vital aim.” He opposed capitalism and maintained that white supremacy was central to capitalist rule in the United States, and, more than any other political leader of his era, he combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness in a coherent political radicalism.

Harrison also understood both the abuse of and the potential of “democracy” in America. He emphasized that “politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea”; that “as long as the Color Line exists, all the perfumed protestations of Democracy on the part of the white race” were “downright lying”; that “the cant of ‘Democracy’ ” was “intended as dust in the eyes of white voters”; and that true democracy and equality for “Negroes” implied “a revolution . . . startling even to think of.”

Working from this theoretical framework, he was active with a wide variety of movements and organizations, and he played signal roles in the development of what were, up to that time, the largest class-radical movement (socialism) and the largest race-radical movement (the “New Negro”/​Garvey movement) in U.S. history.

His ideas on the centrality of the struggle against white supremacy anticipated the profound transformative power of the Civil Rights/​Black Liberation struggles of the 1960s, and his thoughts on “democracy in America” offer penetrating insights on the limitations and the potential of America in the twenty-first century.

Harrison served as the foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician in the Socialist Party of New York during its 1912 heyday; as the founder and leading figure of the militant, World War I–era New Negro movement; and as the editor of the "Negro World" and principal radical influence on the Garvey movement (described by the historian Randall K. Burkett as “the largest mass-based protest
movement in Black American history”) during its radical high point in 1920.

His views on race and class profoundly influenced a generation of New Negro militants, including the class-radical socialists A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, the future communists Cyril Briggs and Richard B. Moore, and the race-radical Marcus Garvey.