I have mentioned Hubert Harrison in the 2nd installment this month but I felt like that tiny mention wasn't enough and decided to give him his own entry.
~~~
From Wikipedia:
Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927) was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, and radical socialist, and Single-Tax political activist 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".
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.
Harrison was a seminal and influential thinker who encouraged the development of class consciousness among working people, positive race consciousness among Black people, 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.
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 still in high school, his intellectual gifts were recognized. He was described as a “genius” in The World, a New York daily newspaper. At age 20, he had an early letter published by the New York Times in 1903. He became an American citizen and lived in the United States the rest of his life.
~~~
One thing I didn't know before reading the Wikipedia information is that Harrison had influenced Marcus Garvey who was the influencer of so many people from his day to now. I'm sure people who sutdy Garvey probably already knew that but for me as a mainstream person with limited education on Black History I found that tidbit very interesting.
I also found it interesting that Harrison coming from St Croix had a culture shock of how divided the races were in the USA. I can relate. As a person who grew up in Arizona I found NYC in general to be deeply divided and segregated along color lines even in 1998. I lived in a world where everyone mixed together and most of us really didn't think about it, but in NYC the divisions were clear and maintained for all groups: Italians, Puerto Ricans (and some other island Latinos), Carribean Blacks, Southern Blacks, Northern Blacks. It was so foreign to me.
The next step of course is to try and find some of his works and study him further but for now this snippet is way more than I ever knew before.
No comments:
Post a Comment