Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918-1927

by Jeffrey B. Perry

Overview

The St. Croix–born, Harlem-based Hubert Harrison (1883–1927) was a brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and activist who combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a potent political radicalism. Harrison’s ideas profoundly influenced “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his work is a key link in the two great strands of the Civil Rights/Black Liberation struggle: the labor- and civil-rights movement associated with Randolph and Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist movement associated with Garvey and Malcolm X.

In this second volume of his acclaimed biography, Jeffrey B. Perry traces the final decade of Harrison’s life, from 1918 to 1927. Perry details Harrison’s literary and political activities, foregrounding his efforts against white supremacy and for racial consciousness and unity in struggles for equality and radical social change. The book explores Harrison’s role in the militant New Negro Movement and the International Colored Unity League, as well as his prolific work as a writer, educator, and editor of the New Negro and the Negro World. Perry examines Harrison’s interactions with major figures such as Garvey, Randolph, J. A. Rogers, Arthur Schomburg, and other prominent individuals and organizations as he agitated, educated, and organized for democracy and equality from a race-conscious, radical internationalist perspective. This magisterial biography demonstrates how Harrison’s life and work continue to offer profound insights on race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780231552424
Publisher:	Columbia University Press
Publication date:	12/22/2020
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	90 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Jeffrey B. Perry is an independent scholar and archivist. He is the author of Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 (Columbia, 2008) and the editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader (2001), and he preserved and placed Harrison’s papers. He is also the literary executor for Theodore W. Allen, preserved and placed his papers, and edited and introduced the expanded 2012 edition of Allen’s two-volume The Invention of the White Race.

Table of Contents

A Note on Usage
Introduction
Part I: “New Negro Movement” Editor and Activist
1. Return to Harlem and Resurrection of The Voice (July–December 1918)
2. Political Activities in Washington and Virginia (January–July 1919)
3. New Negro Editor and Agitator (July–December 1919)
Part II: Editor of the Negro World
4. Reshaping the Negro World and Comments on Garvey (December 1919–May 1920)
5. Debate with The Emancipator (March–April 1920)
6. Early Negro World Writings (January–July 1920)
7. The 1920 UNIA Convention and Influence on Garvey (August–November 1920)
8. Post-Convention Meditations, Writings, and Reviews (September–December 1920)
9. Early 1921 Negro World Writings and Reviews (January–April 1921)
10. The Liberty League, Tulsa, and Mid-1921 Writings (May–September 1921)
11. Negro World Writings and Reviews (September 1921–April 1922)
12. The Period of Garvey’s Arrest (October 1921–March 1922)
Part III: “Free-lance Educator”
13. Lecturer, Book Reviewer, and Citizenship (March 1922–June 1923)
14. The KKK, Garvey’s Conviction, Speaking, Virgin Islands, and Reviews (1923)
15. Boston Chronicle, Board of Ed, and the New Negro (January–June 1924)
Part IV: The Struggle for International Colored Unity
16. ICUL, Midwest Tour, Board of Ed, NYPL, and 1925 (March 1924–December 1925)
17. NYC Talks, Workers School, and Modern Quarterly (January–September 1926)
18. Lafayette Theatre Strike, Nigger Heaven, and Garvey Divorce (June–December 1926)
19. The Pittsburgh Courier and the Voice of the Negro (January–April 1927)
20. Last Months and Death (May–December 1927)
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Notes
Index

Editorial Reviews

Hubert Harrison was a profoundly prolific writer and activist with a bottomless reservoir of insight. Perry, in this second volume, continues his deep dive into Harrison’s work, surfacing with fresh illumination of his legacy. J. A. Rogers said Harrison worked tirelessly to enlighten others, and those words characterize Perry’s pursuit.

Herb Boyd

Perry’s magnificent achievement reaffirms that the life and work of Hubert Harrison stood at the center of the New Negro movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and American life and thought in general. This excellent book should broaden the prevailing conceptions of the history of ideas, sociology of knowledge, and intellectual history. Anyone who peruses this biography will experience a revelation, with respect to content, interpretation, and methods, and an epiphany respecting the professional ethos.

Wilson J. Moses

Hubert Harrison is one of those historical transformative figures who demands full revelation. Perry’s meticulous scholarship continues that process from which future studies can only benefit.

Carole Boyce Davies

[Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918-1927] ultimately illustrates the continued relevance of Harrison's insights on various topics including race, class, and social change.

Princeton Alumni Weekly

This book offers an unparalleled explication of Harrison’s courageous journalism, perspicacious theoretical writings, electric oratory, wide-ranging political activity, persistent organization building, expansive mentorship and influence, and radical commitment to Black and working-class liberation. Equal in rigor, insight, and erudition to the first volume, this book completes the biography that the father of Harlem radicalism demands and deserves.

Charisse Burden-Stelly

Perry’s book symbolically captures the heavy weight of history. His close and meticulous examination of Harrison’s life sheds light on this ‘renaissance man,’ restoring Harrison’s career and removing it from the shadow of Marcus Garvey’s legacy. Perry lifts the veil off the face of history and documents the genius of a man.

E. Ethelbert Miller

Reading When Africa Awakes as an undergrad introduced me to Hubert Harrison. I have remained an ardent fan of Harrison since, motivated by his insistence, in When Africa Awakes, we should study Africa and Africans because they have much to teach us. Jeffrey B. Perry's two-volume biography of this activist-intellectual and polyglot rewards, and even exceeds, why many of us have been so drawn to Harrison's life and work. Harrison's political and intellectual acumen made him a multiverse, skilled at numerous things, packaged into one exceptionally gifted individual, all brought to life in Perry's deeply researched and carefully-written volumes, reintroducing Harrison to a new generation who will no doubt become awestruck as I did many years ago.

Kwasi Konadu

Jeffrey B. Perry’s much-anticipated second volume on Hubert Harrison forces scholars to rethink the history of the Black radical tradition, the New Negro movement, and African American social movements. Through this magnificent exploration of Harrison’s life, Perry establishes Harrison’s centrality to early twentieth-century Black nationalist, pan-African, and socialist thought.

Ousmane Power-Greene

Jeffrey B Perry has done a great service with his epic, two-part biography.

International Socialism

The brilliant radical educator and activist Hubert Harrison has found in Jeffrey B. Perry a meticulous and indefatigable champion. Perry serves as both a perceptive guide to Harrison’s immense literary output and as Harrison’s partner in setting the historical record straight. For scholars who want to understand this once-hidden parent of Harlem radicalism, Perry’s work is the essential starting point.

Brian Jones

[Perry's] presentation of the life and character of Harrison will stand as an original contribution to history of the Harlem Renaissance, a milestone in intellectual archeology, and a milestone in our progress toward an appreciation of working-class genius in the early twentieth century.

Journal of African American History

This long-awaited final volume guides us through the last decade of Harrison’s life, when he played a major role in the political upheavals and cultural transformations that shaped Harlem in the wake of the First World War. Thanks to Perry’s definitive portrait, it will no longer be possible to overlook the fierce and flinty polymath who was arguably the most brilliant Black radical intellectual of his generation.

Brent Hayes Edwards