A Hubert Harrison Reader. (Reviews).

Jeffrey B. Perry, ed. A Hubert Harrison Reader. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2001. 504 pp. $24.95.

In the first quarter of the twentieth century, Hubert Harrison emerged as one of the most creative, wide-ranging, biting, and perceptive students of race and race relations in the United States. He was, historian Joel A. Rogers once insisted, "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time." Yet, Jeffrey B. Perry observes, Harrison has been "all but forgotten"; he is "one of the truly important, yet neglected, figures of early twentieth-century America," one who inspired such programmatically and stylistically diverse activists as A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey. Perry, with his new and valuable collection of Harrison's writings drawn from the privately held Harrison papers (in the possession of two of Harrison's children), restores Harrison to the center of African American political thought and organizing in the early twentieth century.

Born in St. Croix in the Danish West Indies in 1883, Harrison permanently settled in New York in 1900, where he attended high school at night and worked a variety of unskilled day jobs. He eventually procured a position with the U.S. Postal Service, but that came to an end following his publication of several letters critical of Booker T. Washington in 1910. Harrison gravitated to the Socialist Party, becoming a full-time organizer and its most prominent African-American member from 1911 to 1914. He founded the Colored Socialist Club and wrote extensively on the "Negro and Socialism" in a variety of left-wing periodicals. Although he would retain aspects of his critique of capitalism, Harrison grew disillusioned with white socialists, who sanctioned segregated locals in the South and, in Harrison's words, put the white "race first and class after." Following a brief involvement with the radical Industrial Workers of the World, Harrison advanced his own "race-first" perspective from Harlem soapboxes--he was co nsidered a "brilliant and unrivaled" soapbox speaker--and in The Voice, a journal he founded. By the World War I years, Perry argues, Harrison became the initiator and "guiding light of the 'New Negro Manhood Movement.'"

Over the next decade, until his death in 1927, Harrison remained politically engaged and journalistically active, but found no permanent organizational home. He founded a number of short-lived associations. The Liberty League, established in 1917 as a radical alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), advocated armed self-defense, full equality, "race-first" policies, trade unionism, and anti-imperialism. And in 1924 he created an International Colored Unity League to oppose racist laws and advocate cooperatives, scholarship programs, and a "Black homeland in America," possibly somewhere in the mountain West. In between these two unsuccessful ventures, Harrison briefly edited Negro World, the official newspaper of Marcus Garvey's United Negro Improvement Association. And from the 1910s until his death, Harrison wrote countless articles for the African American press on political strategy, the state of American race relations, and the development of black theatre, po etry, and literature, among numerous other subjects.

The published and unpublished essays in this reader reveal Harrison to be an "inveterate critic" -- a term Harrison applied to himself -- one who was insightful, eminently readable, and often scathing. In his articles in the white socialist press, he identified the Party's weakness on issues of race, making an eloquent (if unheeded) case that it was the duty of the Socialist Party to champion blacks' fight against disfranchisement and other forms of oppression. During and after World War I, he excoriated black leaders for conservatism and timidity. Although the NAACP "has done much good work for Negroes--splendid Work--in fighting lynching and segregation," African Americans "cannot... abdicate our right to shape more radical policies for ourselves." The NAACP's appeal to the "minds of white people" and dependence upon "co-operative action of white people" inhibited the mobilization of black political, economic, and intellectual power.

Among the most fascinating of Harrison's writings are his diary entries during his associate editorship of Negro World in 1920. If Harrison and Garvey shared a "race-first" perspective, the similarity ended there. Harrison saw his goal as improving the paper's make-up. He privately lambasted the paper's "almost endless" editorials, its excessive publication of bad poetry, its sloppy layout, and its false accounts of UNIA events. But his assessment of Garvey's personality, abilities, and program ensured an eventual break. Garvey was, he confided to his diary, "bombastic, conceited and arrogant," living in an "atmosphere of exaggerations and falsehoods." The "big defect" in "Mr. Garvey's make-up," wrote Harrison, "is a defect in the size of his soul. He is spiritually as well as intellectually a little man," one who "lies to the people magniloquently." When Garvey boasted 25,000 delegates in attendance at a UNIA rally, Harrison put the actual number closer to 103. When Garvey was finally convicted and imprisone d, Harrison concluded in print that the trial had been a fair one.

A political nomad with no permanent organizational home, Harrison was something of a radical, race-first Renaissance man; few subjects escaped his interest or scrutiny. For much of his public career, he was a staunch advocate of education, especially self-education. Advancing the view that "knowledge is power," he contended that the task of the Talented Tenth was to share its knowledge widely among the common people. "To the masses of our people," Harrison advised, "Read! Read! Read!", "Get the reading habit," and put an end to a self-imposed group segregation from "that community of culture and knowledge that is as wide open to us as the winds of heaven and limitless as the eternal sea." Not only did Harrison unceasingly pursue his own self-education, but he participated in and did much to foster an intellectual milieu aimed at broad audiences of African Americans, workers as well as elites.

In his informative introduction and detailed headnotes to the Harrison collection, editor Jeffrey Perry provides the necessary context to appreciate the evolution and contours of Harrison's thinking. The considerable enthusiasm he brings to his project, though, at times reads like an uncritical endorsement of Harrison's perspectives and programs, and he occasionally exaggerates the importance of Harrison's activism and journalism. It is a bit much to say, for instance, that Harrison's criticisms of the Republican Party on the pages of Garvey's Negro World "played an important role in stimulating African American political independence and in fueling the Black community's break from the Republican Party in the 1920s." It is also impossible, from the material Perry presents, to assess realistically the impact of such Harrison-backed political groups as the Liberty League or the International Colored Unity League, although he is convinced that they played influential roles. Finally, the editor's overt political leanings lend an occasional but unnecessary stridency to his writing. Is it really necessary to describe the year 1900, when Harrison arrived in New York, as a time of "U.S. capitalism's ascent to new imperialist heights," or assert that the "political-economic system of the United States" was one in which "racial oppression was central to capitalist rule"? These quibbles notwithstanding, this impressive volume provides an invaluable service, making Harrison's evolving views on American racism, radicalism, black leadership, and the arts available to general readers. This book deserves a wide readership.