Hubert Henry Harrison

Abstract

This chapter invites a greater appreciation of one of Black history’s most important yet underappreciated figures within the Black radical tradition. Hubert Henry Harrison (1883–1927) was a Caribbean-born journalist, educator, and community organiser whose historical restoration requires us to expand the frame of Black political and intellectual culture in the twentieth century. He was also the first Black leader of the Socialist Party of America to articulate a historical materialist analysis of the ‘Negro Question’, to organise a Black-led party organisation, and to systematically and publicly challenge the party’s racial prejudices. At the height of the Jim Crow era, he spearheaded the New Negro movement by founding the Liberty League of Negro Americans and The Voice newspaper. In the era of the First World War and the Russian Revolution, Harrison also developed an anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and race-conscious ‘colored internationalism’. His people-centred and mass-movement-oriented model of leadership catalysed the rise to prominence of Marcus Garvey and the Garvey movement. Despite Harrison’s wide-ranging influence on a whole generation of Black leaders, from W.E.B. Du Bois to A. Philip Randolph, his impact and legacy have been largely forgotten. As a result, unearthing and recovering Harrison requires us to rethink multiple histories – the white left, the New Negro movement, Garveyism, the ‘Harlem Renaissance’ – which have marginalised him, despite his unique theoretical and practical contributions to all of them. Despite being marginalised historiographically, Harrison exerted a unique influence on twentieth-century Black intellectual and political life.