A Hubert Harrison Reader

African American Review, Spring, 2003 by Eric Arnesen

A political nomad with no permanent organizational home, Harrison was something of a radical, race-first Renaissance man; few subjects escaped his interest or scrutiny. For much of his public career, he was a staunch advocate of education, especially self-education. Advancing the view that "knowledge is power," he contended that the task of the Talented Tenth was to share its knowledge widely among the common people. "To the masses of our people," Harrison advised, "Read! Read! Read!", "Get the reading habit," and put an end to a self-imposed group segregation from "that community of culture and knowledge that is as wide open to us as the winds of heaven and limitless as the eternal sea." Not only did Harrison unceasingly pursue his own self-education, but he participated in and did much to foster an intellectual milieu aimed at broad audiences of African Americans, workers as well as elites.

In his informative introduction and detailed headnotes to the Harrison collection, editor Jeffrey Perry provides the necessary context to appreciate the evolution and contours of Harrison's thinking. The considerable enthusiasm he brings to his project, though, at times reads like an uncritical endorsement of Harrison's perspectives and programs, and he occasionally exaggerates the importance of Harrison's activism and journalism. It is a bit much to say, for instance, that Harrison's criticisms of the Republican Party on the pages of Garvey's Negro World "played an important role in stimulating African American political independence and in fueling the Black community's break from the Republican Party in the 1920s." It is also impossible, from the material Perry presents, to assess realistically the impact of such Harrison-backed political groups as the Liberty League or the International Colored Unity League, although he is convinced that they played influential roles. Finally, the editor's overt political leanings lend an occasional but unnecessary stridency to his writing. Is it really necessary to describe the year 1900, when Harrison arrived in New York, as a time of "U.S. capitalism's ascent to new imperialist heights," or assert that the "political-economic system of the United States" was one in which "racial oppression was central to capitalist rule"? These quibbles notwithstanding, this impressive volume provides an invaluable service, making Harrison's evolving views on American racism, radicalism, black leadership, and the arts available to general readers. This book deserves a wide readership.