Jeffrey B. Perry

A Key to the Study of Class Consciousness in the U.S.

"The ten million Negroes of America form a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group . . . and the Negro was . . . [under slavery] the most thoroughly exploited of the American proletariat, . . . the most thoroughly despised."
Hubert Harrison
"Socialism and the Negro,"
International Socialist Review, 1912

"The South, after the [Civil] war, presented the greatest opportunity for a real national labor movement which the nation ever saw or is likely to see for many decades. Yet the [white] labor movement, with but few exceptions, never realized the situation. It never had the intelligence or knowledge, as a whole, to see in black slavery and Reconstruction, the kernel and the meaning of the labor movement in the United States."
W.E.B. Du Bois
Black Reconstruction, 1935

"Given this understanding of slavery in Anglo-America as capitalism, and of the slaveholders as capitalists, it follows that the chattel bond-laborers were proletarians. Accordingly, the study of class consciousness as a sense the American workers have of their own class interests, must start with recognition of that fact."
Theodore W. Allen
"On Roediger's The Wages of Whiteness,'" 2001


The quotes are from “The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights From Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight Against White Supremacy” available in PDF format at the TOP LEFT Here
or at “Cultural Logic” HERE



For a NEW VIDEO of a Slide Presentation/Talk on HUBERT HARRISON the “Father of Harlem Radicalism”
HERE
(Note: The slides are very clear.)


For a shorter video of a Slide Presentation/Talk on Hubert Harrison see HERE



For “Theodore W. Allen and ‘The Invention of the White Race’” slide presentation/talk by Jeffrey B. Perry at a June 2016 “Multiracial Organizing Conference” against white supremacy in Greensboro, NC see
HERE
(Slides in this video are very clear).

For a widely viewed video on Theodore W. Allen’s “The Invention of the White Race” see HERE


HERE

and see
HERE


For information on "A Hubert Harrison Reader" (Wesleyan University Press) see HERE


For information on the new, expanded, Diasporic Africa Press edition of Hubert H. Harrison's “When Africa Awakes: The 'Inside Story’ of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World” see HERE


For a shorter video of a Slide Presentation/Talk on Hubert Harrison see HERE


For articles, audios, and videos by and about Hubert Harrison see HERE




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Hubert H. Harrison
The Negro and the Nation
(Cosmo-Advocate Publishing Company
2305 Seventh Avenue, New York
1917

In August 1917, shortly after founding the first organization (The Liberty League) and the first newspaper (The Voice) of the “New Negro Movement,” Hubert Harrison completed his first book -- The Negro and the Nation.

The book was published by the Cosmo-Advocate Publishing Company, which was headed by Barbados-born Orlando M. Thompson (a future Vice-President of the Black Star Line) and included Barbados-born Richard B. Moore (a Socialist and bibliophile and future Communist and Scottsboro Boys orator) as a part owner.

Harrison was at a highpoint in popularity and the book's "Introductory" described in detail how the World War had quickened the development of race consciousness. The book then reprinted some of Harrison's early articles -- "The Black Man's Burden" (1912), "Socialism and the Negro" (c. 1912), "The Real Negro Problem" (c. 1912), "On A Certain Conservatism in Negroes" (1914), "What Socialism Means To Us" (1912), and "The Negro and the Newspapers" (c. 1910-1912).

In the "Preface" Harrison explained that the reprinted articles helped to describe “the present situation of the Negro in present day America” and showed” how that situation re-acts upon the mind of the Negro." He emphasized that such exposure was the "Negro's" immediate "great need."

In the “Preface" he also indicated that he planned, in the near future, to write a book "on the New Negro" which would "set forth the aims and ideals” of the new movement “which has grown out of the international crusade 'for democracy -- for the right to have A VOICE in their own government' -- as President Wilson so sincerely put it."

In 1919 Harrison would edit The New Negro: A Monthly Magazine of a Different Sort -- “intended as an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races -- especially of the Negro race.”

Then, in 1920, Harrison did complete that second book -- When Africa Awakes: The “Inside Story” of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World (The Porro Press, 513 Lenox Ave, New York, August 1920). In the “Introductory” to that work Harrison writes: “It is hardly necessary to point out that the AFRICA of the title is to be taken in its racial rather than its geographical sense.”

To read The Negro and the Nation CLICK HERE

For additional information by and about Hubert Harrison CLICK HERE
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