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The relation between white supremacy and class consciousness offers insights into one of the most important questions in U.S. left history-what German scholar Werner Sombart asked in 1906- "Why is there no socialism in the United States?" The answer that Harrison repeatedly suggested was that there was no socialism because whites, particularly white socialists and white workers, put race first before class. Over time Harrison would stress that race conscious- ness among African Americans was necessary, not only as a measure of self-defense, but also as a means of challenging white supremacy (which was the principal roadblock to class consciousness among European Americans).³¹

At the 1912 National Convention the Socialist Party not only took its "white race" first position on the immigration question; it also, as historian Sally M. Miller has explained, "abruptly terminated" activities of its woman's sector "by an arbitrary decision by the party's executive committee." After years of intensive work, the Woman's National Committee "was phased out by the National Executive Committee" of the party. In the period after the convention, woman's work was increasingly denied financial assistance and "meetings were discouraged while further propaganda or organizational work were simply suspended." It was in some ways similar to the treatment afforded to the Colored Socialist Club earlier. Harrison considered "the Negro [as] the touchstone of the modern democratic idea" and, in fact, the demise of the Woman's Clubs had been preceded by, and was similar to, the demise of the Colored Socialist Club, the party's effort at special work among African Americans.³²

Socialist Party theory and practice as well as a number of personal incidents contributed to Harrison's move toward the more egalitarian, militant, action-oriented, Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was a featured speaker (along with the IWW leaders "Big Bill" Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and Patrick Quinlan) and the only Black speaker at the historic 1913 Paterson silk strike. He also publicly defended Haywood against attack by the right wing of the Socialist Party on the issue of "sabotage." SP leaders soon moved to restrict Harrison's speaking, however, and as their attacks on both his political views and his principal means of livelihood intensified, his disenchantment grew, he was suspended, and he then left the Socialist Party.

After leaving the Socialist Party, Harrison took what he reveal- ingly described in his "Diary" as the first truly self-initiated step of his life-the founding of the Radical Forum. The forum was an effort at drawing together radicals from various different move- ments who were "sick of the insincerities of cults and creeds" and desired to receive "the awakening breath of the larger liberalism, from which all alike may draw inspiration." In this same period he began teaching at the Modern School (along with some of America's foremost artists and intellectuals) and he lectured indoors and out on birth control, the racial aspects of World War I, religion, science, evolution, sex, literature, and education.³³

Harrison's outdoor lectures pioneered the tradition of militant street-corner oratory in Harlem. As a soap-box orator he was brilliant and unrivalled. He had a charismatic presence, wide-ranging intel- lect, remarkable memory, impeccable diction, and wonderful mas- tery of language. Factual and interactive, he utilized humor, irony, and a biting sarcasm. With his popular outdoor style he paved the way for those who followed-including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey-and, much later, Malcolm X.³⁴

By 1915-1916 his experiences with the racial oppression, glaring racial inequality, and white supremacy of U.S. society as well as with the "white first" attitude of the organized labor movement and the Socialists, led Harrison, the former leading Black socialist, to respond with a "race first" political perspective.³⁵ Important steps in this direction were made through the frontier of art as Harrison wrote several theater reviews in which he described how the "Negro Theatre" revealed the "social mind ... of the Negro."³⁶

During the summer of 1917, as the "Great War" raged abroad, along with race riots, lynchings, segregation, discrimination, and white-supremacist ideology at home, Harrison founded the Liberty League and The Voice. They were, respectively, the first organization and the first newspaper of the "New Negro" movement. The Liberty League was called into being, he explained, by "the need for a more radical policy" than that of existing civil rights organizations such as the NAACP. Harrison felt that the NAACP limited itself to paper protests, was dominated by white people's conceptions of how Black people should act, concentrated too much on "The Talented Tenth," and repeatedly stumbled over the problem of "white" minds that remained "unaffected" and refused "to grant guarantees of life and liberty." In contrast to the NAACP, the Liberty League encouraged direct action, was not dependent on "whites," and aimed beyond "The Talented Tenth" at the "common people" of "the Negro race." Its program emphasized internationalism, political independence, and class and race consciousness. In response to white supremacy, The Voice called for a "race first" approach, full equality, federal anti-lynching legislation (which the NAACP did not support at that time), enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support of socialist and anti-imperialist causes, and armed self-defense in the face of racist attacks. It stressed that new Black leadership would emerge from the masses.³⁷

As Harrison later explained, he had grown dissatisfied with strategies such as those advocated by the NAACP that sought "to secure certain results by affecting the minds of white people" when, in fact, African Americans had "no control" over those minds and had "absolutely no answer to the question, 'What steps do you propose to take if those minds at which you are aiming remain unaffected?'" As an alternate strategy he began to advocate "the mobilizing of the Negro's political power, pocket book power and intellectual power," which were "within the Negro's control" in order "to do for the Negro the things which the Negro needs to have done." This would be accomplished "without depending upon or waiting for the co-operative action of white people." Though interracial cooperation, whenever it came, would be "a boon" which "no Negro, intelligent or unintelligent" would "despise," he emphasized that Blacks could not "afford to predicate the progress of the Negro upon such co-operative action," because such action "may not come."³⁸

With this race conscious approach Harrison served as the founder and intellectual guiding light of the "New Negro" Movement. This race and class conscious, internationalist, mass-based, autonomous, militantly assertive movement sought political equality, social justice, civic opportunity, and economic power, and laid the basis for the Garvey movement. It also encouraged mass involvement with literature and the arts and contributed mightily to the vibrant literary climate leading to the 1925 publication of Alain Locke's well-known The New Negro.³⁸

Contemporaries readily acknowledged that Harrison's work laid the groundwork for the Garvey movement. From the Liberty League and The Voice came the core progressive ideas and leaders later utilized by Marcus Garvey in both the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and the Negro World (this included two presidents of the UNIA, the secretary of the New York local of the UNIA, the first three editors of the Negro World, the president of the Ladies Division, and the originator of the idea for, president, and vice-president of the Black Star Line). Harrison himself claimed, with considerable basis, that from the Liberty League "Garvey appropriated every feature that was worthwhile in his movement" and that the secret of Garvey's success was that he "[held] up to the Negro masses those things which bloom in their hearts-racialism, race-consciousness, racial solidarity-things taught first in 1917 by The Voice and The Liberty League."⁴⁰

After The Voice ceased publication in early 1918, Harrison briefly served as an organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and then chaired the Negro-American Liberty Congress. The June 1918 Liberty Congress (co-headed by the long-time activist William Monroe Trotter) issued wartime demands against discrimination and segregation and petitioned the U.S. Congress for federal anti-lynching legislation. This autonomous and militant effort was undermined by the U.S. Army's anti-radical Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB) in an ominous foreshadowing of future government tactics.

The Military Intelligence campaign was spearheaded by the prominent NAACP founder and leader Joel E. Spingarn who enlisted the support of Emmett Scott (Booker T. Washington's former chief assistant) and the NAACP's Du Bois in speedily calling a preemptive June Editors Conference of more moderate leaders to undermine the Liberty Congress and support President Woodrow Wilson's war effort. During this period Du Bois attempted to secure a commission in Military Intelligence (that branch of government which monitored radicals and the African American community) and wrote what was probably the most controversial editorial of his life-"Close Ranks"-which appeared in the July 1918 issue of the Crisis. It urged African Americans, "while this war lasts," to "forget our special grievances and close ranks shoulder to shoulder with our own white fellow citizens and allied nations that are fighting for democracy."⁴¹

Following the Liberty Congress, Harrison initiated "New Negro" criticism of Du Bois for urging African Americans to forget justifiable grievances, for "closing ranks" behind President Woodrow Wilson's war effort, and for following Spingarn's lead and seeking a captaincy in Military Intelligence. Harrison's exposé, "The Descent of Dr. Du Bois," was a principal reason that Du Bois was denied the captaincy he sought in Military Intelligence and, more than any other document, it marked the significant break between the "New Negroes" and the older leadership.⁴² Harrison's Liberty Congress strategy of pushing wartime demands for equality, rather than Du Bois's infamous "Close Ranks" and "forget our special grievances" approach, was a clear forerunner of the A. Philip Randolph-led March on Washington Movement (MOWM) during World War II and of the 1963 Randolph/Martin Luther King, Jr.-led March on Washington during the Vietnam War.⁴³

This was Harrison's most forceful critique of Du Bois, but over the years he developed others. He was particularly critical of Du Bois's notion of "The Talented Tenth"-the "educated and gifted" group whose members "must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people" in order to lead African Americans forward. Harrison, in contrast, emphasized education of, and self-development of the masses, the so-called "common people." He also increasingly equated "The Talented Tenth" concept with the concept of "Colored" [or "Mulatto"] leadership of the "Negro race." He did not think that such a "Talented Tenth" was in any way preordained to lead the "Negro race"; nor did he think that it had effectively done so. Harrison rejected the white domination that unchallenged acceptance of such leadership implied. As he ex- plained, for two centuries African Americans "have been told by white Americans that we cannot and will not amount to anything except in so far as we first accept the bar sinister of their mixing with us." Thus, "always when white people had to select a leader for Negroes they would select some one who had in his veins the blood of the selector." Under slavery, according to Harrison, "it was those whom Denmark Vesey of Charleston described as 'house niggers' who got the master's cut-off clothes, the better scraps of food and culture which fell from the white man's table, who were looked upon as the Talented Tenth of the Negro race." Historically, "the opportunities of self-improvement, in so far as they lay within the hand of the white race, were accorded exclusively to this class of people who were the left-handed progeny of the white masters."⁴⁴

Harrison's differences with Du Bois extended beyond domestic protests for equality and redress of grievances during World War I, the "Talented Tenth," relations with "white friends," and the NAACP program. Other differences over the years included those on the question of lynchers and lynching (Harrison called for armed self-defense and federal anti-lynching legislation when Du Bois and the NAACP did not); on the Socialist Party's approach to African Americans (Harrison had called for a special effort, the Colored Socialist Club, which Du Bois opposed); on the 1912 presidential election (Harrison had supported the Socialist candidate Debs while Du Bois left the Socialists in order to support Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson); and on segregated military camps during World War I (Harrison had opposed them, while Du Bois supported them). By the end of the war Harrison's core differences with Du Bois were clear. Whereas, to Harrison, Du Bois's strategy revolved around "The Talented Tenth," paper protests, and hoped for inter-racial cooperation, Harrison increasingly advocated the alternate strategy of "mobilizing of the Negro's political power, pocket book power and intellectual power" rather than "depending upon or waiting for the co-operative action of white people."⁴⁵

During the First World War Harrison was deeply concerned with international matters and the racial implications of the conflict. In particular, he opposed the imperialist and white-supremacist aims of the major war powers, the imperialist oppression of nations, the imperial powers' designs on Africa, and the use of working people as cannon fodder. He also explained that the conflict was destroying many resources of the "white world," facilitating contact among oppressed peoples, and providing the oppressed an opportunity to press their demands and improve their conditions. After the war he offered instructive comments on the white supremacist aims of the disarmament sought by the U.S. and European powers.⁴⁶

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