Jeffrey B. Perry

Hubert Harrison was a black revolutionary intellectual and sometime innovative Marxist who debated the relations between race and class, socialism and imperialism in ways that remain relevant, despite his death almost a century ago. His story reflects the difficulties many Marxist organisations have had in handling race and racism. Born on the Caribbean island of St. Croix in 1883, Harrison moved to the United States at the age of 17 and developed as a street orator, making complex ideas understandable to a wider audience. He was determined to help his listeners understand their own history and stop them being “dupes of all kinds of boobs that come along with pretentious versions of the past”. The black trade union leader A Philip Randolph described him as “the father of Harlem radicalism”, but his biggest success was probably his influence over Marcus Garvey, the most important black nationalist leader of his age, who he then joined in a brief but significant “united front”…

The second volume finds Harrison arguing for African Americans to follow “the Swadeshi movement of India and the Sinn Féin movement of Ireland”—the meaning of these names, he noted, is “ourselves first”.5 He found himself in a sometimes awkward position between the “class first” organisation of socialist groups and the “race first” organising of black nationalists. Through the next decade, he developed his political ideas and struggled to establish organisational forms to revolutionise life for the “darker races”. Someone needed to describe in detail when and where Harrison engaged with clashing social and political currents, and Perry has quite rightly decided to report Harrison’s development rather than critique it. This review concentrates on Harrison’s overtly political work, though Perry’s book also covers his thoughts on areas such as literature, theatre and anthropology, meaning this volume alone has over 800 pages.

Imperialism reached a historic peak as the First World War ended, despite US President Woodrow Wilson’s hypocritical talk of self-determination at the Versailles peace conference. This was also when the imperialists faced the great challenge of the 1917 Russian Revolution. The Bolsheviks’ anti-racism, anti-colonialism and dramatic social change inspired Harrison, but he was less impressed by the Communist Party USA, which formed in 1919. Still, a government agent reported him saying, “Bolshevism is the salvation of America”. In June 1917, Harrison set up the Liberty League of Negro-Americans to promote self-organisation and armed self-defence against racist pogroms. A savagely repressive period in the US had started in roughly 1915 with the relaunch of the Ku Klux Klan. The refoundation of the Klan was associated with the release of the racist film epic Birth of a Nation, which received a special screening for President Wilson in the White House. In 1919, the “Red Summer” saw “ten major race riots, dozens of minor, racially charged clashes and almost 100 lynchings”. This wave of violence climaxed two years later in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when a white mob massacred up to 270 black people and destroyed 1,000 homes and businesses. Against this backdrop, Harrison launched the left-wing monthly New Negro in order to aid with “moulding the international consciousness of the darker races”. Here he argued that, although racial oppression “was originally economic”, now the main experience of the oppressed “is one of race”. He looked to developments in anthropology to show that current racial and sexual divisions have not always existed.

Marcus Garvey’s rise and fall is intimately tied up with this part of Harrison’s life… Garvey had arrived from Jamaica in 1916 hoping to meet the self-improvement educator Booker T Washington, but discovered that his hero had recently died. Garvey established himself in Harlem, an area of Upper Manhattan, New York City, in which large numbers of black people settled during the Great Migration. There he came across Harrison, who was already established as an uncompromising street orator. A contemporary journalist wrote, “Garvey publicly eulogized Harrison, joined the Liberty League and took a keen interest in its affairs… Harrison was the forerunner of Garvey and contributed largely to the success of the latter”. Harrison complained, “Everything that I did he copied”. Yet, though Harrison’s Liberty League collapsed because it had neither the money nor the groundswell of support to keep going, Garvey launched his UNIA in 1918 and it grew rapidly. Harrison noted that “as a propagandist Garvey was without a peer”. Garvey approached Harrison to work with UNIA and he became associate editor of the UNIA’s newspaper, Negro World, in December 1919. Perry writes that Harrison “significantly reshaped” the publication, making it “the nation’s foremost radical, race-conscious paper”. He reduced the “almost endless” editorials and gave them, as he put it himself, “terseness, point, pungency and force”. He ended the practice of basing news stories on clippings from mainstream white papers and shifted the focus in a decidedly socialist direction. Harrison was happy with the opportunity to engage this new mass audience, but never supported Garvey, describing him in his diary as “spiritually as well as intellectually a little man”…

In spring 1921, Harrison met with other leading “black reds”—mostly Communists—to discuss how to draw UNIA to the left. These included Claude McKay, Grace Campbell, Richard Moore, W A Domingo, Cyril Briggs, Joseph Fanning and Otto Huiswoud.23 Harrison abandoned the project because he disliked the Communists’ controlling influence, and he believed strongly that a black-only organisation was required. On this and other occasions, Harrison turned down the chance of much needed finance from the Communists so he could maintain his independence. This was despite the fact that he was often forced to interrupt his political work to find paid employment to support his family. The Communist Party USA was developing a serious black cadre, but it would be a few years before the organisation as a whole took racism seriously enough…

Meanwhile, Harrison moved to launch a “colored international” to fight white imperialism and colonialism, though it would also “avail itself of whatever help it can get” from white groups that seek to “destroy the capitalist international of race prejudice and exploitation”. Harrison’s internationalism had always made him wary of Garvey’s call for a return to Africa with its implicit assumption that African Americans would dominate. Garvey called for an African Communities League, modelled after the British Empire, that would “strengthen the imperialism of independent African states” and “assist in civilising the backward tribes of Africa”.

Harrison continued to develop his theoretical understanding of how capitalism had created racism, discussing the competing systems of black slave labour and largely white wage labour in the US, commenting there never was “a quite free white working class”. He wrote of how slave labour exhausted the soil and required continued expansion to remain profitable, and he explained that the free labour system was more profitable. “The capitalist in the South” owned the slaves and had to pay for their upkeep whether or not they were “producing any surplus value”.

In 1922, Garvey was arrested for fraud. Harrison used his position as a former insider to help black radical journalists expose Garvey’s unsuitability to lead the movement. However, Harrison also went further, providing an official statement for use in the case against Garvey, detailing the UNIA leader’s false claim that the Black Star Line owned the SS Phyllis Wheatley, a “ship which he knew didn’t exist”. Perry argues that Harrison believed a movement without Garvey would be strengthened. Yet, Harrison’s action was shockingly naive from someone who had based a career on exposing the oppressive nature of the capitalist state, which attacked Garvey because he was a threat to it. I suspect that Harrison’s judgement was affected by despair at the black movement’s slow progress and the lack of an organisation that shared his ideas. Sadly, this was not the only questionable stand he took. In 1924, arguing against a racist immigration policy, he called for more restrictive controls. He said this would stop bosses using northern European immigrants to undermine a general bettering of workers’ conditions—and particularly those of black workers. Calling for the imperial US state to have greater restrictive powers sits ill with his attempt at the same time to establish an International Colored Unity League…

By the late 1920s, the Communists had come to eclipse Garvey’s influence, and they became the central radical force fighting racism through the 1930s. Seeing the beginning of this shift, Harrison worked with the Communists again. In 1926, he lectured on “world problems of race” for the Communist Party-run American Negro Labor Congress. He argued that race emerged as a “mental reflex” to the social fact of military and political domination in early capitalism. More than a decade before C L R James and Eric Williams, he argued that “side by side with the economic subjection of white men there grew up the economic subjugation of black men and for the same reason. These were alien blood and cheaper”. Once a system such as chattel slavery is in place, the ruling class will “create unconsciously the ethics that will justify that social arrangement”—in this case racism…

Tragically, Harrison was suddenly taken ill with appendicitis and died in December 1927. Obituaries across the radical press reflected his stature in the movement. So how has he become so thoroughly erased from history? He fell between two stools: too Marxist for the Garveyites, and too centrally focused on race for much of the far left… Harrison should be reclaimed by the revolutionary anti-racist tradition. Hopefully, Perry’s groundwork can now be followed both by a political critique of Harrison’s evolution and a shorter, more accessible biography.

Ken Olende, International Socialism 176 (2022), https://isj.org.uk/hubert-harrison/… (mer)

Hubert Harrison was a towering figure in US black and socialist politics in the early years of the 20th century. He was known as the “father of Harlem radicalism” but has now almost disappeared from the history books. Jeffrey B. Perry has already edited a collection of Harrison’s writings entitled A Hubert Harrison Reader.(Wesleyan University, 2001) He is owed a serious debt of thanks for this, the first part of his exhaustive two-part biography, using Harrison’s own journals and a sympathetic understanding of the time. It rescues a fascinating historical figure from obscurity, and allows us to see how far ahead of its time much of his analysis was.
The level of racism in the US in which Harrison became politicised was not simply dreadful – it was getting worse. The American Federation of Labour (AFL) union federation had passed through a radical phase in the 1890s, in which it appealed to black workers, who responded enthusiastically. Indeed, Philip S. Foner records, “In the opening decade of the 20th century, Southern black workers, far from being ‘opposed to unions’, were often among the most militant unionists.” [1] But the brief flowering of radicalism was beaten back. The AFL retreated to support almost exclusively white craft unions. The segregationist Jim Crow laws had begun to appear across the Southern states at the end of the 19th century. New laws were enacted right through the period covered by this book…

Harrison arrived in New York in 1900 from St Croix in the West Indies. His politics shifted from an initial flirtation with Republicanism – which had been the party of Abraham Lincoln, who freed the slaves – through free thought and socialism. He was also a powerful public speaker and always argued for political organisation. His interests were wide ranging. He was an advocate of women’s rights, and, as well as discussing on the origins of racism and how to overthrow capitalism, he wrote on religion, theatre and evolution, and had a deep interest in religion and culture.

Many of Harrison’s theoretical insights are striking. At the end of 1911 he produced five articles on The Negro and Socialism. Perry comments that this was “the first such effort at comprehensive analysis by an African American in US socialist history, and on many points it evidences a profound and still incisive understanding”. (p. 159) Perry summarises Harrison’s argument: “The historic roots ... were ‘found in slavery’ and the need to supply that system with labourers ... [Though he pointed out that] black people were not the first slaves in North America and that ‘under Spanish rule, the Indians of Florida and California had been enslaved, and under English rule white men, women and children from Ireland had been sold into slavery’ ... Black people were treated as chattels, but, ‘to the credit of our common human nature’, steps had to be taken ‘to reconcile the public mind to the system of slavery’. This reconciliation was accomplished by nurturing the belief ‘that the slaves were not fully human’ and ‘wherever the system was most profitable,’ that belief ‘was strongest’.” (p. 159)

Harrison went on to argue that racism could not be seen as innate, citing examples from the interest of slave owners in black women to the need for legislation to enact segregation. He argued that capitalists foster racism to divide workers. Neither black nor white gain because, with a divided working class, white workers can be told that “other wage slaves are doing as hard work or harder and doing it for less”. (p. 162)

In Capital Karl Marx argued, “Labour cannot emancipate itself in the white skin where in the black it is branded.” But Marx did not theorise how racism had developed. It was not until the 1940s that the explanation of how racism developed out of slavery was fully articulated in the writings of Eric Williams and C.L.R. James. I am not aware of anyone else prior to the First World War who approached this level of sophistication. Harrison maintained this view even as he moved to a more overtly race centred politics.

Perry writes: “In 1926 [Harrison] explained, ‘The conception now prevailing that white people are superior and darker people inferior arose as the mental reflex of a social fact. The fact was the military and political dominations exercised by European whites over the darker people who as late as the 14th century had been superior to them.’ He added that the King James version of the Bible ‘does not contain the word “race” in our modern sense of a breed of people ... as late as 1611 our modern idea of race had not yet arisen, or had not found expression in the English language’.” (p. 121)

Harrison also opposed the First World War, arguing that capitalist competition inevitably leads to armed conflict:

“Hence beaks and claws must be provided beforehand against the day of conflict, and hence the exploitation of white men in Europe and America becomes the reason for the exploitation of black and brown and yellow men in Africa and Asia. And therefore it is hypocritical and absurd to pretend that the capitalist nations can ever intend to abolish wars.” (p. 232)

He wrote much of the above in publications associated with the Socialist Party. This had been formed in 1901. It built significant support in the early years of the 20th century. While it was usually dominated by conservative elements, it contained some serious revolutionary socialists. Its presidential candidate, Eugene Debs, won over 900,000 votes in 1912. The party also boasted two Congressmen and many state legislators and mayors. It was later weakened by rows over its opposition to the First World War and how to respond to the Russian Revolution in 1917.

Within the Socialist Party a paternalistic view of black people as at best deprived of education and at worst degenerate held sway. Harrison challenged this. He came to work as a full-time organiser for the party in New York, after being sacked from his job as a post office clerk for his political activity. Initially he was optimistic about the possibilities of winning black workers to socialism. He argued for an organised strategy to recruit a layer of black workers. He was asked if this meant separate black branches, something that Du Bois specifically objected to. Harrison stated, “There is no intention to establish separate branches or separate organisations for coloured people.” However, since black people had a legitimate suspicion of white-led organisations they must be approached, “in part at least, by men of their own race and the work must be done where Negroes ‘most do congregate’.” (p. 170) But Harrison’s attempt to organise in this field was undermined by the party, which offered no support.

Harrison demanded that the party stopped allowing racism within its ranks. He asked, “Southernism or socialism – which? Is it to be the white half of the working class against the black half, or all of the working class? Can we hope to triumph over capitalism with one half of the working class against us?” (p. 183) The Socialist Party’s 1912 congress passed motions favouring the exclusion of Asian immigrants. Race was put ahead of class and Harrison’s views were marginalised. He was pushed out of the party both because of its line on racism and its drift away from anything that could be defined as revolutionary socialism.

He went on to became active in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), building support for a number of major strikes in this period and challenging the AFL’s complacency. In 1913 he declared to a rally, “We socialists must go to the workers to hear what we must do. The revolution is not coming from above, remember, but from below, working its way up from the depths.” (p. 210) The freedom to speak like this was a relief after the Socialist Party, even if his words also reflect the IWW’s admiration of spontaneity at the expense of any consistent and sustained organisation.

In late 1915 Harrison became more concerned with organising Harlem’s black community. He increasingly believed that a “race first” view was necessary. Perry says he regarded this as “a self-defence measure under existing social conditions and that it was a necessary corrective to white supremacy.” (p. 278) By 1920 he would advocate separate black unions.

Harrison’s shift was a tragic response to the behaviour of the left in this period. Take, for instance, William Z. Foster, a former member of both the Socialist Party and the IWW, who would become a leading Communist. Foster wrote a history of the great steel strike of 1919. A section of this attacks black workers for their “open hostility” to organised labour, complaining that they were prepared to be used as strikebreakers and took a “keen delight in stealing the white men’s jobs”.

Harrison reviewed the book, saying, “It is conceded on all sides that the white organised labour movement has been and still is pronouncedly anti-Negro. And so long as that remains true, just so long will any self-respecting Negro leaders abstain from urging the labouring masses of their race to join forces with the stupid and shortsighted labour oligarchy which refuses to join forces with them.” (p. 279) Harrison may have been wrong to advocate separate unions but his point stands. Unless the socialist movement actively welcomes the oppressed it has no right to condemn them for not taking part…

Ken Olende, International Socialism 123 (2009), https://isj.org.uk/black-star-rising/… (mer)