Hubert Henry Harrison
Hubert Henry Harrison was a notable black intellectual and activist born in Concordia, Danish West Indies, in the late 19th century. He immigrated to the United States in 1900, where he navigated a range of jobs while pursuing education through night school and self-study. Harrison became an influential figure in the early 20th-century labor and civil rights movements, initially joining the Socialist Party, but later distancing himself due to perceived racism within its ranks. He was a prominent public speaker, known for his engaging discussions on socialism, racial issues, and social reform, particularly from his soapbox at Wall and Broad streets in Manhattan.
In the 1910s, Harrison shifted his focus toward race consciousness and Pan-Africanism, founding the Harlem People's Forum and the Liberty League of Negro-Americans in response to escalating racial tensions. He had a complex relationship with Marcus Garvey and his Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), initially collaborating but later becoming a critic. Throughout his life, Harrison emphasized the importance of independent black political movements and advocated for racial solidarity. He continued to work as an educator and writer until his death in 1927. Often called the "Father of Harlem Radicalism," Harrison's contributions significantly shaped the discourse on race and identity in early 20th-century America, yet his life remains under-explored in biographical studies.
Subject Terms
Hubert Henry Harrison
- Hubert Harrison
- Born: April 27, 1883
- Died: December 17, 1927
Black intellectual and activist, born at Concordia, Danish West Indies (now St. Croix, U.S. Virgin Islands), was the son of William Adolphus Harrison and Elizabeth Haynes Harrison. He received a primary education on his home island, and then worked his way around the world as a cabin boy. In 1900 he immigrated to the United States where he held a series of casual jobs while attending night school to obtain a secondary education. Graduating in 1906, he passed a competitive examination and was hired at the Post Office, while continuing his education informally through wide reading. He began contributing articles to radical magazines, and may have been fired from the Post Office in 1911 because of his criticism of the doctrines of Booker T. Washington.
An early conviction that economic exploitation was the basis for racial prejudice led him to join the Socialist party. In 1913 he participated in a prolonged strike of silk workers at Paterson, New Jersey, along with Big Bill Haywood and Elizabeth Gurley Flynn of the Industrial Workers of the World; Harrison protested Haywood’s ouster from the Socialist party’s executive committee that year for violating the party’s ban on advocating sabotage. He continued contributing articles to such publications as The Call, and The Truth-Seeker, and for a time served as an assistant editor of The Masses, but attracted most attention as a highly effective soapbox speaker. From his favorite corner at Wall and Broad streets, in Manhattan, Harrison spoke about socialism, birth control, and Darwinism; the writer Henry Miller once commented that Harrison was his “quondam Idol” when he held forth in Madison Square.
Harrison left the Socialist party in 1914, believing that it was tainted with racism, and turned his attention to Harlem, and to a new doctrine of race consciousness that anticipated the appeal of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Adopting a program of “race first,” and appealing to Pan-Africanism, he founded the Harlem People’s Forum in 1916, and, in response to the East St. Louis race riots of 1917, he set up the Liberty League of Negro-Americans. At a mass meeting inaugurating the League at the Bethel A.M.E. Church in Harlem in the summer of 1917 Harrison urged blacks to engage in retaliatory violence against whites, and to develop an independent black political movement to protest lynching and disfranchisement. That same rally gave Garvey his first effective platform; he revived the UNIA in New York City, which quickly eclipsed the Liberty League and absorbed much of its membership.
Harrison quickly moved into Garvey’s orbit, leading the anti-Garveyite black radical Cyril Briggs to comment that he was one of the “prostituted literati.” Harrison’s own publication the New Negro was moribund; he became an associate editor of the Garvey publication Negro World in 1920, and the UNIA’s commissioner of education from 1920 to 1921. According to Robert A. Hill, editor of the Garvey papers, Harrison was the first to articulate the doctrine of racial purity within the UNIA. He and Garvey were trailed and monitored by both the FBI and British Military Intelligence. Garvey attempted to send Harrison to Liberia in 1920 to negotiate a relationship with the Liberian government, but Harrison was denied a passport at the behest of the FBI.
For reasons as yet unknown, Harrison became dillusioned with Garvey and eventually joined his most vehement critics in urging his deportation from the United States. He testified in the divorce case of Garvey and Amy Ashwood Garvey. In 1923 he renewed his ties with the white community, becoming a lecturer for the New York City Board of Education—he occasionally lectured at City College and at New York University—and a member of the Institute for Social Study and the Sunrise Club, a white intellectual group. Although he from time to time claimed to be a graduate of a European university—as did Garvey—he apparently never attended college; from 1912-14 he taught at the Harlem School of Social Science, and from 1913-14 at the Modern School. In 1925 he organized the International Colored Unity League and edited a new journal, the Voice of the Negro. In 1926 he participated in a campaign to free Richard B. Moore, a black radical arrested after he had organized a strike among black employees of the Lafayette Theater in Harlem. In the last few years of his life he espoused the doctrine of creating a separate black state in the United States, a position later adopted by the American Communist party. He died in 1927 following an appendectomy. He was married to Puerto Rico-born Irene Horton; they had one son and four daughters: William Frances, Marion, Alice Genevieve, Aida Mae, and l’lua Henrietta.
Sometimes called the “Father of Harlem Radicalism,” Harrison was clearly a seminal thinker. The nature of his relationship to Garvey is as yet unclear, as is the relationship between his concepts and those of the American Communist party. Deeply absorbed in the ideological confusion of his time, he unquestionably contributed to the rise of race consciousness that swept Harlem in the 1920s.
There is no biography of Hubert Henry Harrison. In addition to his own work, When Africa Awakes (1920), a collection of his articles and speeches; and a surviving issue of the Voice of the Negro (1927), biographical information on him is scattered in a handful of sources: “Brief History of the Life and Work of Hubert Harrison,” WPA Writer’s Program, Negroes of New York (1929); J. A. Rogers, World’s Great Men of Color, vol. II (1947); W. D. Samuels, Five Afro-Caribbean Voices in American Culture: 1917-1929 (1977); “Hubert Harrison: Negro Advocate,” Negro History Bulletin, vol. 34 (1971); and R. W. Logan and M. R. Winston, Dictionary of American Negro Biography (1982). More substantive information can be found in R. A. Hill, ed., The Papers of Marcus Garvey and the Universal Negro Improvement Association (1983), especially in the footnotes. Obituaries appeared in The Chicago Defender, December 28, 1927; The Amsterdam News, December 24, 1927; and New York Age, December 23, 1927.