Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927) was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, race and class conscious political activist, and radical internationalist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by activist A. Philip Randolph as "the father of Harlem radicalism" and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers as "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time". John G. Jackson of American Atheists described him as "The Black Socrates".Jervis Anderson, A. Philip Randolph: A Biographical Portrait (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1973), 79, and Joel. A. Rogers, "Hubert Harrison: Intellectual Giant and Free-Lance Educator (1883–1927)", in World's Great Men of Color, ed. John Henrik Clarke, 2 vols (1947; New York: reprint, Collier Books, 1972), 2:432–42, esp. 432–33.
An immigrant from St. Croix at the age of 17, Harrison played significant roles in the largest radical class and race movements in the United States. In 1912–14, he was the leading Black organizer in the Socialist Party of America. In 1917 he founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the race-conscious "New Negro" movement. From his Liberty League and Voice came the core leadership of individuals and race-conscious program of the Garvey movement.A Hubert Harrison Reader, ed. with an introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 1–2. This work (pp. 1–30) is used for general background on Harrison's life.
Harrison was a seminal and influential thinker who encouraged the development of class consciousness among workers, black pride, agnostic atheism, secular humanism, social progressivism, and freethought. He was also a self-described "radical internationalist" and contributed significantly to the Caribbean radical tradition. Harrison profoundly influenced a generation of "New Negro" militants, including A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Marcus Garvey, Richard Benjamin Moore, W. A. Domingo, Williana Burroughs, and Cyril Briggs.
Early life Hubert was born to Cecilia Elizabeth Haines, a working-class woman, on Estate Concordia, St. Croix, Danish West Indies. His biological father, Adolphus Harrison, was born enslaved. One account from the 1920s suggested that Harrison's father owned a substantial estate.Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-century America , New York: Verso, 1998, p. 123. Harrison's biographer, however, found no such landholding and writes that "there is no indication that Adolphus, a laborer his entire life, ever owned, or even rented, land".Jeffrey B. Perry, Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918, New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 41. As a youth, Harrison knew poverty but also learned of African customs and the Crucian people's rich history of direct action mass struggles. Among his schoolmates was his lifelong friend, the future Crucian labor leader and social activist, D. Hamilton Jackson.
In later life, Harrison worked with many Virgin Islands-born activists, including James C. Canegata, Anselmo Jackson, Rothschild Francis, Elizabeth Hendrikson, Casper Holstein, and Frank Rudolph Crosswaith. He was especially active in Virgin Island causes after the March 1917 U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands, and subsequent abuses under the U.S. naval occupation of the islands.
Emigration and education Harrison came to New York in 1900 as a 17-year-old orphan and joined his older sister. He confronted a racial oppression unlike anything he previously knew, as only the United States had such a binary color line. In the Caribbean, social relations were more fluid. Harrison was especially "shocked" by the virulent white-supremacy typified by lynchings, which were reaching a peak in these years in the South. They were a horror that had not existed in St. Croix or other Caribbean islands. In addition, the fact that in most places blacks and people of color far outnumbered whites meant they had more social spaces in which to operate away from the oversight of whites.
In the beginning, Harrison worked low-paying service jobs while attending high school at night. For the rest of his life, Harrison continued to study as an autodidact. While he was still in high school, his intellectual gifts were recognized. He was described as a "genius" in The World, a New York daily newspaper. At the age of 20, he had an early letter published by The New York Times in 1903.Hubert H. Harrison, "A Negro on Lynching", The New York Times, June 28, 1903, p. 8. He became an American citizen and lived in the United States the rest of his life.
Marriage and family In 1909 Harrison married Irene Louise Horton. They had four daughters and one son.
Career In his first decade in New York, Harrison started writing letters to the editor of The New York Times on topics such as lynching, Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution and literary criticism. He also began lecturing on such subjects as the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Reconstruction. As part of his civic efforts, Harrison worked with St. Benedict's Lyceum (along with bibliophile Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico, journalist John Edward Bruce, and activist Samuel Duncan); St. Mark's Lyceum (with bibliophile George Young, educator/activist John Dotha Jones, and actor/activist Charles Burroughs); the White Rose Home (with educator/activist Frances Reynolds Keyser), and the Colored YMCA.
In this period, Harrison also became interested in the freethought movement, which encouraged use of the scientific method, empiricism, and reason to solve problems in place of theistic dogma. He deconverted from Christianity and became an agnostic atheist similar to Thomas Huxley, one of his influences. Harrison's new worldview placed humanity, not god, at its center.
Like Huxley, Harrison became a relentless foe of theism and religious faith for the rest of his life. He denounced the Bible as a slave master's book, said that black Christians needed their heads examined, and refused to exalt a "lily white God" and "Jim Crow Jesus". He rebuked the famous motto, "Take the world, but give me Jesus", saying that it legitimized anti-black racism and discrimination. He also said that he preferred going to hell rather than heaven since Satan and his demons were black while God, Jesus, and the angels were white. Harrison repeatedly offered scathing rebuttals to both the Bible and the existence of God in his sociopolitical commentary. Theists, incensed at his outspoken disbelief, often rioted during his lectures and public speeches. During one such incident, Harrison disarmed and chased off a religious extremist who attacked him with a crowbar. A policeman arrested Harrison for assault, letting the assailant get away. A judge found Harrison innocent on grounds of self-defense and admonished the officer for detaining the wrong person. Harrison had been arguing at his event for birth control, and castigating Churches for advancing racism, superstition, ignorance, and poverty.
Harrison was a firm advocate for separation of Church and State, taxation of religious organizations, and teaching evolution in schools. He said that Caucasians were more like apes than black people, having straight hair and fair skin. He also famously remarked: "Show me a population that is deeply religious, and I will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, contumely and the gibbet, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink the waters of affliction." Harrison wrote in his 1914 book The Negro Conservative that "It should seem that Negroes, of all Americans, would be found in the Free-thought fold, since they have suffered more than any other class of Americans from the dubious blessings of Christianity."
In 1907, Harrison obtained a job at the United States Post Office.
He was an early supporter of the protest philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. Particularly after the Brownsville Affair, Harrison became an outspoken critic of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and of the Republican Party.
Harrison expressed disapproval of Booker T. Washington, a prominent Black leader, characterizing his political philosophy as subservient. In 1910, Harrison wrote two critical letters to the New York Sun, challenging Washington's statements. As a result of the influential "Tuskegee Machine" led by Washington, Harrison lost his postal job. The sequence of events involved Charles W. Anderson, a prominent Black Republican, Emmett Scott, Washington's assistant, and Edward M. Morgan, the New York Postmaster.Hubert Harrison to the editor, NYS, December 8, 1910, p. 8, and December 19, 1910, p. 8; and Charles William Anderson to Booker T. Washington, September 10, 1911, and October 30, 1911, in Louis R. Harlan and Raymond W. Smock (eds). The Booker T. Washington Papers, 13 vols (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972–1984), 11: pp. 300 -301 and 351.
Socialism Harrison was an early advocate of the Georgist economic philosophy and later clarified that he had believed Georgism was the same thing as socialism. In 1911, after his postal firing, Harrison began full-time work with the Socialist Party of America and became America's leading Black Socialist. He lectured widely against capitalism, campaigned for the party presidential candidate Eugene V. Debs in 1912, and founded the Colored Socialist Club (the Socialist's first effort at reaching African Americans). He developed two important and pioneering theoretical series on "The Negro and Socialism" for the socialist newspaper the New York Call and for the socialist monthly International Socialist Review. In these articles Harrison outlined a materialist analysis of racism, arguing that it resulted from "the fallacy of economic fear" and economic competition, and that capitalists had an interest in maintaining economic discrimination based on racism, as "they can always use it as a club for the other workers". He maintained that it was the principal "duty" of the Socialists to "champion the cause of the African American and that the Socialists should undertake special efforts to reach African Americans as they had done with foreigners and women." Perhaps most importantly, he emphasized that "Politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea" and that true democracy and equality implies "a revolution... startling even to think of."Hubert Harrison, "The Negro and Socialism: 1--The Negro Problem Stated", New York Call, November 28, 1911, p. 6, repr. in A Hubert Harrison Reader, 52–55, quotes p. 54.
Harrison moved to the left in the Socialist Party. He supported the socialistic, egalitarian, and militantly radical Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). He was a prominent speaker along with IWW leaders Bill Haywood, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Carlo Tresca, and Patrick Quinlan at the historic 1913 Paterson Silk Strike of 1913. He also supported IWW advocacy of direct action and sabotage. He commended the interracial, IWW-influenced, Brotherhood of Timber Workers efforts in the Deep South.