Jeffrey B Perry - Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918

Further praise for HUBERT HARRISON

Perrys significant biography lives up to the promise of its title. Finally, the voice of this major Harlem Renaissance progressive is to be heard again loud and clear.

DAVID LEVERING LEWIS, NEW YORK UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF A TWO-VOLUME BIOGRAPHY OF W.E.B. DU BOIS

For decades a brilliant and critical voice of the Harlem Renaissance has been practically ignored by historians. At last that serious gap will be filled by Jeffrey B. Perry, who has thoroughly researched and carefully crafted a two-part definitive biography of the Father of Harlem Radicalism, Hubert H. Harrison. These volumes, along with his previously published collection of Harrisons writings, are a significant contribution because they reveal in rich detail and masterful treatment the life of one of the most unusual and influential African American thinkers of that time. The people of Harlem flocked to Harrisons university level street orations on a wide range of topics, but few knew of his numerous journal articles on society, science, and socialism. Perry was driven to conduct extensive research when he discovered Harrisons clarity of writing and perceptiveness of analysis. Surely his own clarity of writing, meticulous attention to events and other activists, and masterful analysis will prove in time to be essential for understanding the political movements of the period.

JOYCE MOORE TURNER, AUTHOR OF CARIBBEAN CRUSADERS AND THE HARLEM RENAISSANCE, AND COEDITOR, WITH W. BURGHARDT TURNER, OF RICHARD B. MOORE: CARIBBEAN MILITANT IN HARLEM

This monumental and acute biography becomes the best point of entry into the whole history of modern radicalism in the United States.

DAVID ROEDIGER, UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS, AND THE AUTHOR OF HOW RACE SURVIVED U.S. HISTORY

Hubert Harrison was one of the most gifted and creative intellectuals in the American Left and within Black America in the twentieth century. Perrys book presents a comprehensive analysis of the first phase of Harrisons remarkable public career. Before Marcus Garvey came to Harlem in 1916, Harrison had blazed the trail as the leading voice of Black radicalism. He founded the New Negro Movement and was a central antiwar leader during WWI. Perry captures Harrisons brilliance, energy, and leadership during a remarkable period in African-American history. The outstanding scholarship of his study will reawaken popular interest in this remarkable figure.

MANNING MARABLE, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR CONTEMPORARY BLACK HISTOR Y, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

[A] brilliant masterpiece.

WILLIAM J. MOSES, AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW

A magisterial piece of scholarship.

JOURNAL OF AMERICAN HISTORY

Perrys detailed research brings to life a transformative figure who has been little recognized for his contributions to progressive race and class politics.

BOOKLIST

Perrys clear prose allows access to a three-dimensional picture of Harrisons life.

LIBRARY JOURNAL

An excellent work and a great contribution to scholarship.... Perry must be applauded.

Z MAGAZINE

Offers profound insights on race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.

INDUSTRIAL WORKER

Through Perrys prodigious research Harrisons brilliance can once more engage a generation eager to find inspiration and renewed political spirit.

HERB BOYD, NEWORLD REVIEW

This critically important book will do for Harrison what David Levering Lewis did for Du Bois.... Essential.

CHOICE

This meticulously researched book fills an enormous gap in the knowledge of Black activist intellectuals in the U.S.

CAROL BOYCE DAVIES, WORKING USA

Rich and exhaustively researched.

CLARENCE LANG, AGAINST THE CURRENT

Perry has made a significant contribution to the history of Black radicalism through his biography of Hubert Harrison. With thorough research and compelling analysis, Perry offers the reader insight into a brilliant and under-studied activist and intellectual who played a major role in helping to shape the Black radical tradition. Hubert Harrison reads with a draw like that of a study of a long lost city, rediscovered and offering answers to an incomplete history.

BILL FLETCHER, JR., EXECUTIVE EDITOR, BLACKCOMMENTATOR.COM, COAUTHOR OF SOLIDARITY DIVIDED

Entrusted with the remains of Hubert Harrisons papers, Perry favors us with this meticulous chronicle of one of the centurys most influential voices for democracy and freedom. Harrison, island-born, colonial subject, and immigrant, stirred the masses in Harlem, at the time the center of Black radical thought, to a new race-consciousness and an apprehension of their powers and destiny in the United States and world. Hubert Harrison testifies to the remarkable durability of lives well lived and truths told straight.

GARY Y. OKIHIRO, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF ISLAND WORLD: A HISTORY OF HAWAII AND THE UNITED STATES

Hubert Harrison was in his lifetime the leading American Black intellectual socialist, but he receded from memory after his death. We are all in debt to Perry for his devoted and fastidious recuperation of Harrisons memory. This assiduously researched biography, an extraordinary feat of scholarship, restores Harrison to his proper standing in the pantheon of other Afro-Caribbeans, from Marcus Garvey to C. L. R. James, who contributed to reshaping American political thought in the twentieth century.

CHRISTOPHER PHELPS, OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY

One of the most significant twentieth-century African American philosophers, Perry finally accords Harrison his place among the forebears of modern African American political and cultural thought and also suggests the sweeping scope of Harrisons life and achievement.

PORTIA JAMES, CULTURAL RESOURCES MANAGER AND SENIOR CURATOR, ANACOSTIA COMMUNITY MUSEUM

Hubert Harrison is not simply an archaeological uncovering of a century-old Black icon. Harrisons life and his insights on race and class, especially during wartime, leap off the page. They particularly resonate today. Harrison challenged the governments hypocritical notion of sending Black men to fight and die to make the world safe for democracy in World War I while they were being lynched, segregated, and disenfranchised at home. I see Harrisons ghost on a Harlem soapbox today exposing the links between the destructive wars abroad and the need to expand the fight for civil liberties and civil rights and to forge a new global partnership with the worlds people. This is a ghost that needs to be listened to.

GENE BRUSKIN, NATIONAL CO-CONVENER, U.S. LABOR AGAINST THE WAR

A groundbreaking biography and act of historical recovery that restores Hubert Harrisons vital importance to African American history and politics during the New Negro era. Meticulously written and painstakingly researched, Hubert Harrison is a major work of scholarship that will transform understanding of Black life during the early twentieth century.

PENIEL E. JOSEPH, BRANDEIS UNIVERSITY, AUTHOR OF WAITING TIL THE MIDNIGHT HOUR: A NARRATIVE HISTORY OF BLACK POWER IN AMERICA

Hubert
Harrison

The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 18831918

Jeffrey B. Perry

Columbia University Press
New York

To
Charles Richardson, Ilva Harrison, Yvette Richardson, Becky Hom, and Perri Hom

and to the memory of Aida Harrison Richardson, William Harrison, and Theodore W. Allen

Columbia University Press
Publishers Since 1893
New York Chichester, West Sussex
cup.columbia.edu
Copyright 2009 Jeffrey B. Perry
Paperback edition, 2011
All rights reserved
E-ISBN 978-0-231-51122-3