Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927

Abstract

Four decades ago, Jeffrey Perry embarked on a project to chronicle the life and work of Hubert Henry Harrison, one of the most important and understudied Black intellectuals of the twentieth century. Perry worked with Harrison's family to collect, preserve, and inventory surviving writings, correspondence, scrapbooks, and diaries, then collaborated with staff at Columbia University to establish a Harrison archive and a Harrison website. He published two important books that did much to revitalize scholarly interest in Harrison: an edited collection of Harrison's writings, and a biography that chronicles Harrison's life from his birth in St. Croix in 1883 to the height of his leadership of the New Negro movement in 1918. The volume under review here comprises a second and final biography of Harrison, leading readers up to his death in 1927. It secures Perry's legacy as the preeminent chronicler of Harrison's life.By 1918, when this volume opens, Harrison had already cemented his role as “the most class conscious of the race radicals, and the most race conscious of the class radicals” (Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, 46). Ardently anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, Harrison emerged as the most important Black organizer for the Socialist Party by 1912, before leaving in frustration over the party's racial chauvinism. In 1917, Harrison launched the Liberty League and inaugurated what he coined the “New Negro movement,” the race-conscious, radical edge of Black American politics during and after World War I.The second volume of the biography begins during a moment of transition, as the mantle of New Negro leadership passed from Harrison to the Jamaican-born activist Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). One of the great strengths of the book is Perry's comprehensive examination of the relationship between Harrison, Garvey, and the UNIA. Perry argues, as he and others have done previously, that Garvey lifted much of the platform of the Liberty League and used it to relaunch his own struggling organization. In this volume, Perry also ascribes Harrison a central role in building the UNIA itself. Hired in early 1920 as the managing editor of the Negro World, the UNIA's key propaganda tool, Harrison overhauled the paper and stewarded its rise as the most important Black newspaper of its time.Just as Harrison was a major influence in sparking Garvey's radical turn during the UNIA's rise, he served as a radical and independent voice within the organization during the UNIA's peak institutional years in the United States (1920–22). Despite his association with the Negro World, Harrison maintained a distance from Garvey and grew increasingly frustrated with the UNIA leader's lack (in his view) of a constructive political program. By the time Garvey was arrested for mail fraud in 1922, Harrison was thoroughly disillusioned with Garvey's “swindle” and joined many New York–based Black intellectuals in providing statements and evidence to federal authorities.Reading Perry's text, one can see why Harrison, from his vantage point in New York, believed that Garvey was doing more damage than good. The volume carefully reconstructs the mounting financial troubles of the UNIA, Garvey's recklessness with his followers’ money, and the organization's use of intimidation and violence to silence enemies and quash dissent. One can also read into Harrison's private diary entries a jealousy that Garvey, not he, was steering the course of the New Negro movement. In 1925, when Harrison engaged in a brief affair with Amy Ashwood Garvey, Marcus Garvey's estranged first wife (and cofounder of the UNIA), Harrison noted exuberantly in his diary that he was “getting a glorious revenge” (629).Harrison was a towering intellectual, a fluent lecturer on seemingly any subject, able to dazzle audiences equally on street corners and in lecture halls, deeply admired by his peers. The second volume of his biography offers a valuable portrait of Harrison's mature thought. Of particular interest is the program for his short-lived International Colored Unity League (ICUL), which offers insight into the type of movement Harrison would have marshaled in Garvey's stead: a pan-Africanism that, like Garveyism, demanded the restoration of Black political, economic, cultural, and social autonomy, but that viewed the central fight for Black Americans as residing in America itself. Harrison's demand for a Black state-within-a-state in 1924 preceded the far more famous “black belt” thesis issued by the Comintern, and later calls for a Black state issued by organizations like the Republic of New Afrika. Reading Harrison's thought in the 1920s, one can glimpse the emerging contours of the radical pan-Africanism that would peak in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s.In Perry's portrait of Harrison, the reader also witnesses the independent streak, the intellectual chauvinism, and the refusal to compromise that hampered Harrison's ambitions as a political activist. Harrison disdained the mass-based politics of Garvey, which he viewed as little more than empty and insincere pyrotechnics. He distanced himself from the Black church, the social center of the Black community. Harrison was most comfortable and most successful in the role of critic, educator, writer, and intellectual.Harrison's story, indeed, reveals in stark detail the tragedy of the Black intellectual in the early twentieth century. Denied entry to prestigious institutions like Columbia University, Harrison was forced to lecture on street corners, for the New York Board of Education, and wherever he could get a gig. Unwilling to accept the compromises that came with white patronage and advertisers, which had sustained and propelled to wider fame many of his intellectual peers, Harrison was unable to maintain his influential newspapers and struggled to publish his books. If Harrison's life was defined by his brilliant intellectual production, it was also shaped by the poverty that he and his family constantly faced. It has taken this long for a biography on Harrison precisely because of the overlapping racial and class oppressions that Harrison spent his whole life fighting.That life was cut short in 1927, after Harrison suffered complications following appendix surgery. Despite the best efforts of contemporaries like J. A. Rogers, memory of his contributions faded. “With the completion of this two-volume biography of Hubert Harrison,” writes Perry, “it is hoped that his extraordinary life of activism and his brilliant writing and thinking will increasingly be made available—and be of use—to current and future generations” (768). Thanks to Perry's herculean work, this is all but assured.