Hubert Harrison (1883-1927): Race Consciousness and the Struggle for Socialism

By Jeffrey B. Perry

The historian Joel A. Rogers, in World's Great Men of Color, describes the brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist Hubert Harrison (1883-1927) as "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time" and "one of America's greatest minds." Rogers adds (amid chapters on Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Marcus Garvey), "No one worked more seriously and indefatigably to enlighten his fellow-men" and "none of the Afro-American leaders of his time had a saner and more effective program."¹

Variants of Rogers' lavish praise were offered by other contemporaries. William Pickens, field secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a former college dean, and an oratory prize winner at Yale, described Harrison as "a plain black man who can speak more easily, effectively, and interestingly on a greater variety of subjects than any other man I have ever met in the great universities." Pickens added that it made "no difference" whether he spoke about "Alice in Wonderland or the most extensive work of H.G. Wells; about the lightest shadows of Edgar Allen Poe or the heaviest depths of Kant; about music, or art, or science, or political history."² The novelist Henry Miller, a socialist in his youth, remembered Harrison on a soapbox as his "quondam idol" and as an unrivaled, electrifying speaker.³ Eugene O'Neill, America's leading playwright and a future Nobel Prize winner for literature, lauded Harrison's ability as a critic and considered his review of the ground-breaking play The Emperor Jones to be "one of the very few intelligent criticisms of the piece that have come to my notice."⁴ W. A. Domingo, one of the early Black socialists and the first editor of Marcus Garvey's Negro World, emphasized the fact that Garvey, A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Cyril Briggs, Grace Campbell, Richard B. Moore and the other leading Black activists of their generation, "all followed Hubert Harrison."⁵ Hodge Kirnon, a freethinker and one of those activists in Harlem, praised the fact that Harrison "lived with and amongst his people," "taught the masses," and was "the first Negro whose radicalism was comprehensive enough to include racialism, politics, theological criticism, sociology and education in a thorough-going and scientific manner."⁶

Despite such high praise from his contemporaries and despite being rated "one of the 20th century's major thinkers" by the double Pulitzer Prize winning Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis, Harrison is, as Harvard University's Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes, "a major but neglected figure in our history." While his name has an "almost mythical character" to activists such as Black Radical Congress co-chair Bill Fletcher, he is largely a "forgotten" and "un- known" radical. Historian Gerald C. Horne considers him "a scandalously ignored thinker and activist." Columbia University's Winston James, placing this neglect in perspective, observes: "Seldom has a person been so influential, esteemed, even revered in one period of history" and within a matter of years become "so thoroughly unremembered."⁷

The effects of this historical neglect were again brought home at the 2003 Socialist Scholars Conference, where discussions with participants made clear that many progressive activists and intellectuals remain unaware of Harrison's life and work. There is great loss in this since his life was one of remarkable contributions; since he exerted major influence on a generation of early 20^th-century activists and "common people"; since many of his views, as historian James points out, became "the stock-in-trade of the black left" in the 20th century; and since his writings and speeches offer profound insights on the struggle against white supremacy, on socialism and democracy in America, and on a wide range of other subjects.⁸

Harrison's class and race conscious political message merits special attention. More than any other political leader of his era he combined class consciousness and (anti-white supremacist) race consciousness in a coherent political radicalism. He opposed white supremacy, capitalism, and imperialism; challenged the idea that racism was innate; developed a socio-historical as opposed to a religious or biological understanding of race; maintained that white supremacy was central to capitalist rule in the United States; argued that racism and racist practices were not in workers' class interests; and urged "Negroes" not to wait on white Americans while struggling to shape their future.

This message was combined with a consistent internationalism, a scientific approach to social problems, and an impressive grasp of history, science, politics, religion, freethought, literature, and the arts. His militant, mass-based approach broke from the patron-based leadership of Booker T. Washington and the "Talented Tenth"-based leadership of W.E.B. Du Bois and profoundly influenced a generation of activists that included Randolph and Garvey. Harrison was more race conscious than Randolph and more class conscious than Garvey; he is the key ideological link in the two great trends of 20th-century African American struggle-the labor and civil rights trend associated with Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr. and the race and nationalist trend associated with Garvey and Malcolm X.

Harrison's political message, repeatedly delivered to the masses, enabled him to uniquely play signal roles in the development of what were, up to that time, the largest class-radical movement (socialism) and the largest race-radical movement (the "New Negro"/Garvey movement) in U.S. history. Harrison served as the foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician in the Socialist Party (SP) of New York during its 1912 heyday; as the founder and leading figure of the militant World War I-era "New Negro" movement; and as the editor of the Negro World and principal radical influence on the Garvey movement during its radical high point in 1920. He also worked with the Industrial Workers of the World, the Communist Party, the Farmer Labor Party, the American Negro Labor Congress and a number of other radical and progressive organizations. Such efforts, during the period when Harlem became the "international Negro Mecca" and "the center of radical Black thought," led Randolph and others to revere him as "The Father of Harlem Radicalism."⁹

Harrison was not only a radical activist, however. He was also an immensely popular orator and freelance educator; a highly praised journalist, editor, literary critic, and book reviewer (who initiated the first "regular book-review section known to Negro newspaperdom"); a promoter and aide to Black writers and artists (including writers J.A. Rogers and Claude McKay, actor Charles Gilpin, musician Eubie Blake, and sculptor Augusta Savage); a pioneer Black activist in the freethought and birth control movements; and a bibliophile and library popularizer (who helped to found and develop the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture known today as the Schomburg Center). In his later years he was the leading Black lecturer for the New York City Board of Education when such lectures served as a principal form of adult education in the city.¹⁰

Hubert Henry Harrison was born at Estate Concordia, St. Croix, Danish West Indies, on April 27, 1883. Little is known with certainty about his parents. Rogers writes that they were of "unmixed African ancestry" and church records indicate that his mother was a poor, laboring-class woman, who was not formally married at the time of Hubert's birth, had several other children, and died in 1899.¹¹

Harrison's first seventeen years on St. Croix provided a firm foundation for his future work. In St. Croix he became familiar with important traditions "rooted in the African communal system" (including free public gardens and Saturday markets) which mitigated some of the oppressive pressures of the capitalist economy on laboring families. He learned of the Crucian people's rich history of direct action mass struggle including the 1848 enslaved-led emancipation victory and the 1878, week-long, island-wide, labor protest known as "The Great Fireburn" (led by rebel leaders "Queen Mary" Thomas, "Queen Agnes" and "Queen Matilda"). He also came to know poverty, and that experience, he said, helped to keep his "heart open to the call of those who are down" and kept him from developing "such airs as might make a chasm between myself and my people."¹²

Interestingly and instructively, Harrison claimed that as a youth he knew nothing of the "doctrine of chromatic inferiors and superiors" which was "violently thrust upon the islanders" by the occupying U.S. Navy after the United States purchased the Danish West Indies in 1917. Due to different historical particulars, class struggle, and social control, the color line and "race relations" in St. Croix differed from those in the United States. In St. Croix there was a historic policy of promotion of a sector of the African-descended population (under slavery, Crucian "coloreds" were the key to the social control force, served in the militia, and were extended an edict of full equality in 1834). In the United States laboring "whites," not "coloreds," were the historic key social control force, and the general rule under slavery (as described in the 1857 Dred Scott decision) was one of severe racial proscription for the African-descended popu- lation (African Americans "had no rights which the white man was bound to respect"). The extension and development of these differences took such form that the St. Croix of Harrison's youth did not have the lynching, formal segregation, virulent white supre- macy, or severe racial proscriptions against advancement for those of African descent that Harrison would encounter in the United States.¹³

These differences help to explain why Harrison was provided more encouragement to pursue his educational interests in St. Croix than was afforded the overwhelming majority of African American youth in the southern United States. He used the library at St. John's Episcopal Church in Christiansted, studied under one of the island's best teachers (Wilfurd Jackson, whose son, D. Hamilton Jackson, was Harrison's friend and schoolmate, and became the island's foremost labor leader), and excelled enough as a student that he was chosen as a teaching assistant. These differences also help to explain why Harrison would challenge the virulent white supremacy he encountered in the United States. When he left for the U. S., though virtually penniless, the fires of learning were burning and Harrison believed he was the equal of any other.¹⁴

Shortly after his mother died Harrison immigrated to the United States, arriving in 1900 as a 17-year-old orphan. His move from the rural, agricultural island of St. Croix to the teeming urban/industrial metropolis of New York was truly a move from the 19th into the 20th century. His arrival coincided with U.S. capitalism's ascent to new imperialist heights, with the period of intense racial oppression of African Americans known as the "nadir," and with the era of critical writing and muckraking journalism that, according to one social commentator, produced "the most concentrated flowering of criticism in the history of American ideas." These factors would play an important part in shaping the remainder of his life.¹⁵

Over the next twenty-seven years, until his unexpected death at age 44 (from appendicitis-related complications), Harrison made his mark in the United States by struggling against class exploitation and racial oppression; by participating in and helping to create a remarkably rich and vibrant intellectual life; and by working for the enlightened development of the lives of "the common people." His political/educational work 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 develop modern, scientific, critical, and independent thought as a means toward liberation. His work was especially marked by his focus on education of the masses, for which he utilized indoor and outdoor talks and mass oriented publications.

Soon after his arrival in New York he began working low-paying service jobs and attending high school at night. He finished school, read constantly, and, after several years, obtained postal employment, married Irene Louise Horton (whose family came from Antigua, Demerara, and Puerto Rico), and started to raise a family that eventually included five children born between 1910 and 1920. His insatiable thirst for knowledge and his critical mind led him to break from "orthodox and institutional Christianity" and to develop an "agnostic" "philosophy-of-life" that stressed rationalism, modern science, and evolution and placed humanity at the center of its worldview. In his "Diary" Harrison wrote that he would never "be anything but an honest Agnostic" because "I prefer... to go to the grave with my eyes open."¹⁶

During his first decade in New York Harrison set out to write a "History of the Negro in America" and he began to participate in the vibrant intellectual life that was created by working-class Black New Yorkers. He was active in church lyceums, the YMCA and YWCA, the White Rose Home social work center, a postal worker study circle, and a press club. He befriended working-class scholar/activists such as bibliophiles Arthur Schomburg and George Young, the journalist John E. Bruce, the actor Charles Burroughs, and the social worker/educator/activist Frances Reynolds Keyser. Harrison's approach, especially his efforts at getting "in full-touch with the life of my people" as an aid "to understanding them better," makes clear that he was what Antonio Gramsci would later describe as an "organic intellectual."¹⁷

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