Hubert Harrison

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Hubert Harrison
U.S. Virgin Islands
)
DiedDecember 17, 1927(1927-12-17) (aged 44)
New York City, US
SpouseIrene Louise Horton (m. 1909-1927; his death)
Children5

Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927) was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, race and class conscious political activist, and radical internationalist based in

Harlem, New York. He was described by activist A. Philip Randolph as "the father of Harlem radicalism" and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers as "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time." John G. Jackson of American Atheists described him as "The Black Socrates".[1][2]

An immigrant from

St. Croix at the age of 17, Harrison played significant roles in the largest radical class and race movements in the United States. In 1912–14, he was the leading Black organizer in the Socialist Party of America. In 1917 he founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the race-conscious "New Negro" movement. From his Liberty League and Voice came the core leadership of individuals and race-conscious program of the Garvey movement.[3]

Harrison was a seminal and influential thinker who encouraged the development of

.

Early life

Hubert was born to Cecilia Elizabeth Haines, a working-class woman, on Estate Concordia,

St. Croix, Danish West Indies. His biological father, Adolphus Harrison, was born enslaved. One account from the 1920s suggested that Harrison's father owned a substantial estate.[4] Harrison's biographer, however, found no such landholding and writes that "there is no indication that Adolphus, a laborer his entire life, ever owned, or even rented, land".[5] As a youth, Harrison knew poverty but also learned of African customs and the Crucian people's rich history of direct action mass struggles. Among his schoolmates was his lifelong friend, the future Crucian labor leader and social activist, D. Hamilton Jackson
.

In later life Harrison worked with many Virgin Islands-born activists, including James C. Canegata, Anselmo Jackson,

Virgin Island
causes after the March 1917 U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands, and subsequent abuses under the U.S. naval occupation of the islands.

Emigration and education

Harrison came to New York in 1900 as a 17-year-old orphan and joined his older sister. He confronted a racial oppression unlike anything he previously knew, as only the United States had such a binary color line. In the Caribbean, social relations were more fluid. Harrison was especially "shocked" by the virulent white-supremacy typified by lynchings, which were reaching a peak in these years in the South. They were a horror that had not existed in St. Croix or other Caribbean islands. In addition, the fact that in most places blacks and people of color far outnumbered whites meant they had more social spaces in which to operate away from the oversight of whites.

In the beginning, Harrison worked low-paying service jobs while attending high school at night. For the rest of his life, Harrison continued to study as an

autodidact. While he was still in high school, his intellectual gifts were recognized. He was described as a "genius" in The World, a New York daily newspaper. At age 20, he had an early letter published by The New York Times in 1903.[6]
He became an American citizen and lived in the United States the rest of his life.

Marriage and family

In 1909 Harrison married Irene Louise Horton. They had four daughters and one son.

Career

In his first decade in New York, Harrison started writing letters to the editor of The New York Times on topics such as lynching,

Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico, journalist John Edward Bruce, and activist Samuel Duncan); St. Mark's Lyceum (with bibliophile George Young, educator/activist John Dotha Jones, and actor/activist Charles Burroughs); the White Rose Home (with educator/activist Frances Reynolds Keyser), and the Colored YMCA
.

In this period, Harrison also became interested in the

Thomas Huxley, one of his influences. Harrison's new worldview placed humanity, not god, at its center
.

Like Huxley, Harrison became a relentless foe of theism and

the existence of God in his sociopolitical commentary. Theists, incensed at his outspoken disbelief, often rioted during his lectures and public speeches. During one such incident, Harrison disarmed and chased off a religious extremist who attacked him with a crowbar. A policeman arrested Harrison for assault, letting the assailant get away. A judge found Harrison innocent on grounds of self-defense and admonished the officer for detaining the wrong person. Harrison had been arguing at his event for birth control, and castigating Churches for advancing racism, superstition, ignorance, and poverty
.

Harrison was a firm advocate for

taxation of religious organizations, and teaching evolution in schools. He said that Caucasians were more like apes than black people, having straight hair and fair skin. He also famously remarked, "Show me a population that is deeply religious, and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, contumely and the gibbet, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction."[7] Harrison wrote in his 1914 book The Negro Conservative that "It should seem that Negroes, of all Americans, would be found in the Free-thought fold, since they have suffered more than any other class of Americans from the dubious blessings of Christianity."[8]

In 1907 Harrison obtained a job at the

United States Post Office
.

Harrison was an early supporter of the protest philosophies of

Brownsville Affair, Harrison became an outspoken critic of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and of the Republican Party
.

Harrison expressed disapproval of

Tuskegee Machine" led by Washington, Harrison lost his postal job. The sequence of events involved Charles W. Anderson, a prominent Black Republican, Emmett Scott, Washington's assistant, and Edward M. Morgan, the New York Postmaster.[9]

Socialism

Harrison was an early advocate of the Georgist economic philosophy and later clarified that he had believed Georgism was the same thing as socialism.[10] In 1911, after his postal firing, Harrison began full-time work with the Socialist Party of America and became America's leading Black Socialist. He lectured widely against capitalism, campaigned for the party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1912, and founded the Colored Socialist Club (the Socialist's first effort at reaching African Americans). He developed two important and pioneering theoretical series on "The Negro and Socialism" for the socialist newspaper the New York Call and for the socialist monthly International Socialist Review. In these articles Harrison outlined a materialist analysis of racism, arguing that it resulted from "the fallacy of economic fear" and economic competition, and that capitalists had an interest in maintaining economic discrimination based on racism, as "they can always use it as a club for the other workers".[11] He maintained that it was the principal "duty" of the Socialists to "champion the cause of the African American and that the Socialists should undertake special efforts to reach African Americans as they had done with foreigners and women." Perhaps most importantly, he emphasized that "Politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea" and that true democracy and equality implies "a revolution... startling even to think of."[12]

Harrison moved to the left in the Socialist Party. He supported the socialistic, egalitarian, and militantly radical

Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. He also supported IWW advocacy of direct action and sabotage. He commended the interracial, IWW-influenced, Brotherhood of Timber Workers efforts in the Deep South
.

Despite his efforts, Socialist Party practice and positions included segregated locals in the South and racist positions on Asian immigration. Harrison's position in the Party was also affected by his alignment with its left-wing and the IWW, who were engaged in factional struggle with its right-wing faction: many leftists exited after Haywood (who had been a member of the SPA's executive committee) was expelled from the Party in 1912. The

Race radicalism and the New Negro Movement

In 1914–15, after withdrawing from the Socialist Party, Harrison began work with freethinkers, the freethought/

nonbelief, and the racial aspects of World War I. His outdoor talks and free speech efforts were instrumental in developing a Harlem tradition of militant street corner oratory. He paved the way for those who followed, including A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Richard B. Moore, and (later) Malcolm X
.

In 1915–16, after a New York Age editorial by James Weldon Johnson praised his street lectures, Harrison decided to concentrate his work in Harlem's Black community. He wrote reviews on the developing Black Theatre and the pioneering Lafayette Players of the Lafayette Theatre (Harlem). He emphasized how the "Negro Theater" helped express the psychology of the "Negro" and how it called attention to color consciousness within the African-American community.

In response to the "white first" attitude of the organized labor movement and the Socialists, Harrison provided a "race first" political perspective. He founded the "

Alain Locke
's well-known The New Negro eight years later. Harrison's mass-based political movement was noticeably different from the more middle-class and apolitical movement associated with Locke.

In 1917, African Americans and others were asked to 'Make the World Safe for Democracy" by fighting during World War I. In the United States, lynchings, racial segregation and discrimination continued. Harrison founded the Liberty League and the Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro, as a radical alternative to the

skin lighteners, and due to poor financial management.[11] Harrison pointed to Ireland and the Irish Home Rule movement as an example to emulate.[16]
: 70 

In 1918 Harrison briefly served as an organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He chaired the Negro-American Liberty Congress (co-headed by William Monroe Trotter.) The latter was the major wartime protest effort of African Americans. The Liberty Congress pushed demands against discrimination and racial segregation in the United States. It submitted a petition to the U. S. Congress for federal anti-lynching legislation, which the NAACP did not demand at that time. Harrison commented on domestic and international aspects of the war, writing: "During the war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world, mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims... [however] those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending the limits or the applications of 'democracy.'"[17]

The autonomous Liberty Congress effort was undermined by the U.S. Army's anti-radical Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB) in a campaign that included NAACP leader

March on Washington Movement during World War II, and to the Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr.-led March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during the Vietnam War
.

In 1919 Harrison edited the monthly

The Garvey Movement

In January 1920 Harrison became principal editor of the

Universal Negro Improvement Association
(UNIA). Over the next eight months, he developed it into the leading race-conscious, radical and literary publication of the day. By the August 1920 UNIA convention, Harrison had grown increasingly critical of Garvey. Harrison criticized Garvey for exaggerations, financial schemes, and desire for empire. In contrast to Garvey, Harrison emphasized that African Americans' principal struggle was in the United States, not in Africa. Harrison did however contribute to the UNIA's 1920 "Declaration of the Negro Peoples of the World". Though Harrison continued to write for the Negro World into 1922, he looked to develop political alternatives to Garvey.

Later years

In the 1920s, after breaking with Garvey, Harrison continued public speaking, writing, and organizing. He lectured on politics history, science, literature, social sciences, international affairs, and the arts for the

Urban League, the American Negro Labor Congress, and the Workers (Communist) Party (the name at that time of the Communist Party USA
).

In 1924 Harrison founded the International Colored Unity League (ICUL), which was his most broadly unitary effort. The ICUL urged Black people to develop "race consciousness" as a defensive measure—to be aware of their racial oppression and to use that awareness to unite, organize, and respond as a group. The ICUL program sought political rights, economic power, and social justice; urged self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and cooperative efforts; and called for the founding of "a Negro state" in the U.S. (not in Africa, as Garvey advocated). In 1927 Harrison edited the ICUL's Voice of the Negro until shortly before his death that year.

In his last lecture, Harrison told his listeners that he had appendicitis and would be getting surgery. Afterwards, he said he would be giving another lecture. He died on the operating table, at the age of 44.

Intellectual and educational work

Harrison's appeal was both mass and individual. His race-conscious mass appeal utilized newspapers, popular lectures, and street-corner talks. This was in contrast to the approaches of

Talented Tenth
of the Negro Race". Harrison's appeal (later identified with that of Garvey) was aimed directly at the masses. His class- and race-conscious radicalism, though neglected at some periods, laid out the contours of much subsequent debate and discussion of African-American social activists. It is being increasingly studied.

For many years after his 1927 death, Harrison was much neglected. However, recent scholarship on Harrison's life and the Columbia University Library's acquisition of his papers show renewed interest.[20][21] Columbia published the "Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid",[22] and plans to make Harrison's writings available on the internet. The forthcoming Columbia University Press two-volume Harrison biography also reflects the growing interest in Harrison's life and thought.

Legacy and honors

Biographer Jeffrey B. Perry[23] writes that, among the African-American leaders of his era, Harrison was "the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals." Perry emphasized that Harrison was a key unifying figure between two major trends of African-American struggle—the labor/civil rights trend (identified with Randolph and Owen, and later with Martin Luther King Jr.) and the race/nationalist trend (identified with Garvey, and later with Malcolm X).[24]

Harrison has been described as "the most distinguished, if not the most well-known, Caribbean radical in the United States in the early twentieth century" by historian Winston James.[25]

As an intellectual, Harrison was an unrivaled

bibliophile and library popularizer. He created "Poetry for the People" columns in various publications, including the New Negro magazine (1919), Garvey's Negro World (1920), and the International Colored Unity League's The Voice of the Negro (1927).[26]

A sampling of his varied work and poetry appears in the edited collection A Hubert Harrison Reader (2001). His collected writings are found in the Hubert H. Harrison Papers (which also contain a detailed Finding Aid) at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. Other writings appear in his two books The Negro and the Nation (1917) and When Africa Awakes. A two-volume biography by Jeffrey B. Perry is being published by Columbia University Press. The first volume, The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918,[27] was published in November 2008 (an excerpt is available online).[27]

In 2005 Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library acquired Harrison's papers and the digitalized papers were made available through Columbia's Digital Library Collections website in 2020 .[28][29]

Other reading

Writings by Hubert H. Harrison

  • A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. with introduction and notes by Jeffrey B. Perry (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001).[30]
  • "Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid," Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University.[22] A list of Harrison's writings available at Columbia. On Columbia's acquisition of the Papers see "Rare Book and Manuscript Library Acquires the Papers of Hubert Harrison."[21] The Father of Harlem Radicalism," Columbia University Library News. Columbia also plans to put Harrison's Writings online.
  • Harrison, Hubert H., "A Negro on Chicken Stealing", Letter to the editor, The New York Times, December 11, 1904, p. 6.[31]
  • Harrison, Hubert, The Black Man's Burden [1915].[32]
  • Harrison, Hubert H., The Negro and Nation (New York: Cosmo-Advocate Publishing Company, 1917).[33]
  • Harrison, Hubert, "On A Certain Condescension in White Publishers," Negro World, March 1922.[34]
  • Harrison, Hubert H., When Africa Awakes: The "Inside Story" of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World (New York: Porro Press, 1920), New Expanded Edition, edited with notes and a new introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry (New York: Diasporic Africa Press, 2015).
  • "Transfer Day: Hubert Harrison's Analysis"[permanent dead link], Virgin Islands Daily News, March 31.

Personal biographical sketches

  • Jackson, John G., "Hubert Henry Harrison: The Black Socrates", American Atheists, February 1987.
  • Moore, Richard B., "Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927)", in
    Rayford W. Logan
    and Michael R. Winston (eds), Dictionary of American Negro Biography (New York: W. W. Norton, 1982), 292–93.
  • Rogers, Joel A., "Hubert Harrison: Intellectual Giant and Free-Lance Educator", in Joel A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color, ed. John Henrik Clarke, 2 vols (1946–47; New York: Collier Books, 1972), 2:432-42.[35]

Main biographical portraits

  • Foner, Philip S., "Local New York, the Colored Socialist Club, Hubert H. Harrison, and W. E. B. Du Bois", in Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1977), 202–19.
  • Innis, Patrick, "Hubert Henry Harrison: Great African American Freethinker", Secular Subjects (St. Louis: Rationalist Society of St. Louis, 1992), rpt. in American Atheists Examiner.[36] See also Inniss, Patrick in AAH Examiner, vol. 4, no. 4, Winter 1994.[36]
  • James, Portia, "Hubert H. Harrison and the New Negro Movement", Western Journal of Black Studies, 13, no. 2 (1989): 82–91.
  • James, Winston, "Dimensions and Main Currents of Caribbean Radicalism in America: Hubert Harrison, the African Blood Brotherhood, and the UNIA," in Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-Century America (New York: Verso, 1998), 122–84.
  • Perry, Jeffrey B., "The Developing Conjuncture and Some Insights from Hubert Harrison and Theodore W. Allen on the Centrality of the Fight against White Supremacy," Cultural Logic, 2010.
  • Perry, Jeffrey, "An Introduction to Hubert Harrison, 'The Father of Harlem Radicalism,'" Souls, 2, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 38–54.
  • Perry, Jeffrey B., "Hubert Harrison: Race Consciousness and the Struggle for Socialism", Socialism and Democracy, vol. 17, no. 2 (Summer–Fall 2003), 103–30.[37]
  • Perry, Jeffrey B., "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Early 20th Century Harlem Radicalism," BlackPast.org, October 2008.[38]
  • Perry, Jeffrey B., Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008),
  • Perry, Jeffrey B., "Hubert Henry Harrison 'The Father of Harlem Radicalism': The Early Years—1883 Through the Founding of the Liberty League and The Voice in 1917" (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1986), includes an extensive bibliography (pp. 711–809).
  • Perry, Jeffrey B., "On Hubert Harrison's Importance"[permanent dead link], Virgin Islands Daily News, February 18, 2003.
  • Perry, Jeffrey B.: Hubert Harrison: the struggle for equality, 1918-1927, New York : Columbia University Press, [2021],
  • Samuels, Wilfred David, Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture (Boulder: Belmont Books a Division of Cockburn Publishing, 1977), 27–41.

Further reading

References

  1. ^ Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973), 79, and Joel. A. Rogers, "Hubert Harrison: Intellectual Giant and Free-Lance Educator (1883–1927)", in World's Great Men of Color, ed. John Henrik Clarke, 2 vols (1947; New York: reprint, Collier Books, 1972), 2:432–42, esp. 432–33.
  2. ^ John G., Jackson. Hubert Henry Harrison: The Black Socrates. www.atheists.org. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  3. ^ A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. with an introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 1-2. This work (pp. 1–30) is used for general background on Harrison's life.
  4. ^ Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-century America Archived 2014-06-29 at the Wayback Machine, New York: Verso, 1998, p. 123.
  5. ^ Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 41.
  6. New York Times
    , June 28, 1903, p. 8.
  7. ^ Harrison, Hubert H. "The Negro and the nation". New York, Cosmo-advocate publishing co. Retrieved 5 April 2020.
  8. ^ Harrison, Hubert (27 April 1980). "Hubert Harrison - Freedom from Religion Foundation".
  9. ^ Hubert Harrison to the editor, NYS, December 8, 1910, p. 8, and December 19, 1910, p. 8; and Charles William Anderson to Booker T. Washington, September 10, 1911, and October 30, 1911, in Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (eds). The Booker T. Washington Papers, 13 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972-1984), 11: pp. 300 Archived 2009-01-07 at the Wayback Machine-301 Archived 2005-01-16 at the Wayback Machine and 351. Archived 2011-05-11 at the Wayback Machine
  10. ^ .
  11. ^ a b c d Heideman, Paul (29 June 2019). "The Most Important Black Radical You've Never Heard Of". Jacobin. Retrieved 29 June 2019.
  12. ^ Hubert Harrison, "The Negro and Socialism: 1--The Negro Problem Stated," New York Call, November 28, 1911, p. 6, repr. in A Hubert Harrison Reader, 52-55, quotes p. 54.
  13. ^ https://industrialworker.org/hubert-harrison-wobbly-socialist-black-socrates/
  14. ^ Perry, Jeffrey (2009). Hubert Harrison the voice of Harlem radicalism, 1883-1918. New York: Columbia University Press. p. 120.
  15. ^ Hubert Harrison, "Race First Versus Class First", Negro World, March 27, 1920, repr. in A Hubert Harrison Reader, 107–09, quote p. 109.
  16. .
  17. ^ Hubert H. Harrison, "Introductory", August 15, 1920, in Hubert H. Harrison, When Africa Awakes: The "Inside Story" of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World (New York: The Porro Press, 513 Lenox Avenue, 1920), pp. 5–8, quote p. 5.
  18. ^ Hubert H. Harrison, "The Descent of Dr. Du Bois," August 15, 1920, in Hubert H. Harrison, When Africa Awakes: The "Inside Story" of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World (New York: The Porro Press, 513 Lenox Avenue, 1920), pp. 66–70, esp. p. 68.
  19. ^ Hubert H. Harrison, "Announcement", New Negro, III (August 1919), 3.
  20. ^ Rare Book and Manuscript Library Archived 2007-12-16 at the Wayback Machine at www.columbia.edu
  21. ^ a b "Rare Book and Manuscript Library Acquires Papers of Hubert Harrison, Father of Harlem Radicalism". Archived from the original on 2007-08-16. Retrieved 2007-11-18.
  22. ^ a b "Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid". Archived from the original on 2007-08-16. Retrieved 2007-11-18.
  23. ^ "www.jeffreybperry.net". Archived from the original on 2010-03-05. Retrieved 2010-02-03.
  24. ^ A Hubert Harrison Reader, p. 2.
  25. ^ James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia Archived 2011-05-11 at the Wayback Machine, 1998, p. 134.
  26. ^ Hubert Harrison Papers, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University
  27. ^ a b Jeffrey B. Perry, Jeffrey B. Perry, "Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918" Archived 2008-12-22 at the Wayback Machine, Vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, November, 2008).
  28. ^ "The Harlem Digital Archive: A Television, Education, and Library Project". Columbia Center for New Media Teaching and Learning (CCNMTL) | Columbia University.
  29. ^ "Hubert H. Harrison papers". Digital Library Collections | Columbia University. Retrieved 2021-01-12.
  30. ^ A Hubert Harrison Reader, Hubert Henry Harrison, Book - Barnes & Noble at search.barnesandnoble.com
  31. ^ A Negro on Chicken Stealing, NYT archive
  32. ^ The Black Man's Burden (A Reply to Rudyard Kipling) Archived 2007-08-13 at the Wayback Machine at www.expo98.msu.edu
  33. ^ [1] Archived 2017-10-20 at the Wayback Machine The Negro and the Nation, eBook at https://studenthandouts.com/texts/nonfiction/hubert-harrison-the-negro-and-the-nation.html
  34. ^ "On A Certain Condescension in White Publishers" Archived 2014-06-28 at the Wayback Machine, in Henry Louis Gates (Jr.) and Gene Andrew Jarret (eds), The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938, Princeton University Press, 2007, pp. 373-4.
  35. ^ Marcus Garvey – Hubert Henry Harrison – Great People of Color Archived 2007-11-29 at the Wayback Machine at www.marcusgarvey.com
  36. ^ a b AAH Examiner article Archived 2007-11-06 at the Wayback Machine at www.secularhumanism.org
  37. ^ Socialism and democracy Archived 2007-10-17 at the Wayback Machine at www.sdonline.org
  38. ^ "Hubert Harrison" Archived 2013-08-14 at the Wayback Machine, BlackPast.

External links

Archive

  • Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893–1927, Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University

Audio

Video