Hubert Harrison: Key Link in the Two Great Trends of the Black Liberation Movement

Despite the logic of Harrison’s analysis of the intertwined race and class problem in America, the Socialist Party was moving in a more conservative and even racist direction. The Socialist Party right wing triumphed over the left IWW members in the party, ended the Colored Socialist Club in New York, pushed through majority and minority reports at the 1912 party convention, which banned Asian immigration, and refused to take aggressive action in support of African-American recruitment. Southern white socialists supported segregated organizing and Harrison’s relentless denunciation of what he called “southernisms” placed him on the collision course with the party.

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From this experience, Harrison will enter a Black Nationalistic phase in his political evolution in which he will place “Race first” before class as an organizing principle in the black community. Harrison will play a founding role in the organization of the Liberty League and its weekly publication, The Voice. He will embrace black self-determination, organizational autonomy, and black leadership for black organizations, unlike the predominantly white-led National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). Harrison’s involvement in the “New Negro Manhood Movement,” a belated precursor to the Harlem Renaissance, as a cultural theorist and literary reviewer is examined by the author.
Perry’s work covers new ground in demonstrating Harrison’s role in establishing some of the ideological principles of Harlem newcomers and fellow public orators, Marcus Garvey, and his nationalistic Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and young socialists, A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen. Garvey’s Negro World newspaper and the Randolph and Owen magazine, The Messenger, both borrow from Harrison. Harrison will be eclipsed by the more dynamic Garvey and although for a time will assume an editorial role at the Negro World, Harrison will continue to harbor some repressed resentment at being superseded by Garvey in the hearts of the Harlem masses.

 
“Southern white socialists supported segregated organizing.”

 
The author, in exploring with great thoroughness the political evolution of Hubert Harrison from Socialist Party spokesman and organizer to Black Nationalist activist, has raised significant questions about the ineffectiveness of the left in America and the estrangement of some its more devoted followers.

 

Harrison’s suspension and disconnect from the Socialist Party parallels the estrangement of later black intellectuals like George Padmore and Harold Cruse from the Communist Party. Caribbean radicals did not arrive in New York with a socialist orientation. It was the more blatant and intense racism that they experienced in the United States as they moved from a majority status to a minority status compared to the Caribbean that steered many in this direction and generated the desire to form ethnic political alliances, according to Joyce Moore Turner in her highly informative study of Caribbean activists in Harlem.

 

Certainly, the 1910s and World War I years were radical times of assertive dissent. Yet, the estrangement of black socialists and later black communists suggest that the left did not always hear their black members, either out of a myopic ideological commitment to a political analysis that did not consider the interplay of both class and race factors in shaping the American political landscape, or a kind of racial arrogance that relegated black members to the periphery of the policy making process. For some black members, this estrangement resulted in the integration into the American political mainstream, and for others, it meant the pursuit of another strain of political radicalism, Black Nationalism. Harrison is different from some of the disillusioned in that his embrace of Black Nationalism did not mean a rejection of socialism, but a rejection of the Socialist party.

 

Scholars and students of Harlem, Afro-American, and Afro-Caribbean history in the United States are indeed indebted to Jeffrey Perry for this magisterial study of Hubert Harrison whom A. Philip Randolph called the “Father of Harlem Radicalism.”

                                                                                                                                                 

Volume one of this biography should be read in conjunction with Perry’s edited volume of Harrison’s writings, A Hubert Harrison Reader.4

Readers will eagerly await volume two of Perry’s biography as he takes the Hubert Harrison saga from 1919 to his death in 1927, covering Harrison involvement with Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance, and other political and cultural currents in black America.

Larry A. Greene is professor of history at Seton Hall University. A Fulbright Fellow at the University of Muenster in Germany during 2005-2006, he is the co-editor of Slavery: Its Origins and Legacy, co-author of The New Jersey African-American Curriculum Guide, co-editor of the forthcoming book, German and African-American Encounters.

NOTES:

1. Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London: Verso, 1998), 126.

2. Ibid., 127,128.

3. Joyce Moore Turner, Caribbean Crusaders and the Harlem Renaissance (Urbana, Illinois: University of Illinois Press, 2005), 43.

4. Jeffrey Perry, ed., A Hubert Harrison Reader (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001

 

Editor’s Note….. For more info about Hubert Harrison, the place to visit is http://jeffreybperry.net, the web site of Dr. Jeffrey B. Perry. Perry is author of the definitive collection of Harrison’s works, as well as the first volume of his biography. We wish him health, energy and a long enough life to finish the second volume.

 

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