A Hubert Harrison Reader

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Eric Arnesen

Jeffrey B. Perry, ed. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 504 pp. $24.95.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Hubert Harrison emerged as one of the most creative, wide-ranging, biting, and perceptive students of race and race relations in the United States. He was, historian Joel A. Rogers once insisted, "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time." Yet, Jeffrey B. Perry observes, Harrison has been "all but forgotten"; he is "one of the truly important, yet neglected, figures of early twentieth-century America," one who inspired such programmatically and stylistically diverse activists as A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey. Perry, with his new and valuable collection of Harrison's writings drawn from the privately held Harrison papers (in the possession of two of Harrison's children), restores Harrison to the center of African American political thought and organizing in the early twentieth century.

Born in St. Croix in the Danish West Indies in 1883, Harrison permanently settled in New York in 1900, where he attended high school at night and worked a variety of unskilled day jobs. He eventually procured a position with the U.S. Postal Service, but that came to an end following his publication of several letters critical of Booker T. Washington in 1910. Harrison gravitated to the Socialist Party, becoming a full-time organizer and its most prominent African-American member from 1911 to 1914. He founded the Colored Socialist Club and wrote extensively on the "Negro and Socialism" in a variety of left-wing periodicals. Although he would retain aspects of his critique of capitalism, Harrison grew disillusioned with white socialists, who sanctioned segregated locals in the South and, in Harrison's words, put the white "race first and class after." Following a brief involvement with the radical Industrial Workers of the World, Harrison advanced his own "race-first" perspective from Harlem soapboxes--he was co nsidered a "brilliant and unrivaled" soapbox speaker--and in The Voice, a journal he founded. By the World War I years, Perry argues, Harrison became the initiator and "guiding light of the 'New Negro Manhood Movement.'"

Over the next decade, until his death in 1927, Harrison remained politically engaged and journalistically active, but found no permanent organizational home. He founded a number of short-lived associations. The Liberty League, established in 1917 as a radical alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), advocated armed self-defense, full equality, "race-first" policies, trade unionism, and anti-imperialism. And in 1924 he created an International Colored Unity League to oppose racist laws and advocate cooperatives, scholarship programs, and a "Black homeland in America," possibly somewhere in the mountain West. In between these two unsuccessful ventures, Harrison briefly edited Negro World, the official newspaper of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association. And from the 1910s until his death, Harrison wrote countless articles for the African American press on political strategy, the state of American race relations, and the development of black theatre, po etry, and literature, among numerous other subjects.

The published and unpublished essays in this reader reveal Harrison to be an "inveterate critic" -- a term Harrison applied to himself -- one who was insightful, eminently readable, and often scathing. In his articles in the white socialist press, he identified the Party's weakness on issues of race, making an eloquent (if unheeded) case that it was the duty of the Socialist Party to champion blacks' fight against disfranchisement and other forms of oppression. During and after World War I, he excoriated black leaders for conservatism and timidity. Although the NAACP "has done much good work for Negroes--splendid Work--in fighting lynching and segregation," African Americans "cannot... abdicate our right to shape more radical policies for ourselves." The NAACP's appeal to the "minds of white people" and dependence upon "co-operative action of white people" inhibited the mobilization of black political, economic, and intellectual power.

Among the most fascinating of Harrison's writings are his diary entries during his associate editorship of Negro World in 1920. If Harrison and Garvey shared a "race-first" perspective, the similarity ended there. Harrison saw his goal as improving the paper's make-up. He privately lambasted the paper's "almost endless" editorials, its excessive publication of bad poetry, its sloppy layout, and its false accounts of UNIA events. But his assessment of Garvey's personality, abilities, and program ensured an eventual break. Garvey was, he confided to his diary, "bombastic, conceited and arrogant," living in an "atmosphere of exaggerations and falsehoods." The "big defect" in "Mr. Garvey's make-up," wrote Harrison, "is a defect in the size of his soul. He is spiritually as well as intellectually a little man," one who "lies to the people magniloquently." When Garvey boasted 25,000 delegates in attendance at a UNIA rally, Harrison put the actual number closer to 103. When Garvey was finally convicted and imprisone d, Harrison concluded in print that the trial had been a fair one.