zuky:
schomburgcenter:
Today is the anniversary of the death of Hubert Harrison in 1927 at age 44.
Hubert Harrison (1883-1927) was one of the truly important figures of early 20th century America. A brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist, he was described by the historian Joel A. Rogers, in “World’s Great Men of Color” as “the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time.” Labor and Civil Rights leader A. Philip Randolph described Harrison as “the father of Harlem Radicalism.” Harrison’s friend and pallbearer Arturo Schomburg, fully aware of his popularity, eulogized to the thousands attending Harrison’s Harlem funeral that he was also “ahead of his time.”
Born in St. Croix, Danish West Indies, in 1883, to a Bajan mother and a Crucian father, Harrison arrived in New York as a 17-year-old orphan in 1900. He 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.
A self-described “radical internationalist,” Harrison was extremely well versed in history and events in Africa, Asia, the Mideast, the Americas, and Europe. More than any other political leader of his era, he combined class-consciousness and anti-white supremacist race consciousness in a coherent political radicalism.
For information on vol. 1 of his biography, visit Jeffery Perry’s website.
For writings by and about Hubert Harrison click here.
Author Credit: Jeffrey B. Perry (Schomburg Researcher)
Photo Credit: NYPL Digital Gallery
One of my idols. I wrote a post about him in May 2010.
Hubert Harrison is a titanic figure in Harlem radical struggle and anti-racism who, like so many others, is simply not well known, probably at least partly because he was overshadowed in his time by his intellectual rival Booker T. Washington, for reasons that become quite clear as you study these two men. Washington garnered favour and funding from white upper-class society, while Harrison repudiated and openly criticized such tactics. Harrison was self-taught and had no formal education, a true working class hero who worked as a clerk for the US Post Office until two of his letters to the editor ran in the New York Sun criticizing Washington’s white patronage, compelling Washington to pull the strings of his influence and get Harrison fired.
Here’s more of what I wrote about him a few years ago:
Although Harrison was generally an admirer of W.E.B. DuBois, he differed from DuBois on the matter of “The Talented Tenth” and favored populist mass education to elite institution-building. His renowned Harlem street-corner oratory is said to have influenced Malcolm X. He spoke about politics, science, religion, poetry, and theater — he was an important advocate for the development of Harlem theater.
For a time he was the leading Black organizer of the Socialist Party of America, and he opposed US involvement in World War I based on his race and class analyses. He founded the Liberty League as a radical alternative to the NAACP. He also served a brief but influential tenure as chief editor of Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association. However, he eventually broke with Garvey because although he was a fervent internationalist, Harrison believed that the front line of Black people’s struggle for freedom was not in Africa but in the US.
In his later years, Harrison focused on deepening his internationalist perspective, writing about events in China, India, Africa, the Middle East. He became a frequent lecturer for the New York City Board of Education on subjects ranging from evolution to literature and the arts. He died of appendicitis at the age of 44.