Hubert Henry Harrison and the Harlem Renaissance
While most people may be aware of notable names like W. E. B. Dubois, Langston Hughes, and Frederick Douglass (the list goes on), not many people know of Hubert Henry Harrison (1883–1927). Hubert Harrison was one of the earliest pioneers of Black socialism in the early 20th century. A powerful intellectual, his writings critiqued capitalism’s perpetuation of racial inequality and he championed race and class equality for African-Americans. His name has been long forgotten in the discourse surrounding Black activists who advocated for racial equality in America’s history. A recent second part of a two-volume biography of Hubert Harrison was published in 2020, sparking discourse and raising awareness of the life of Hubert Harrison. The two volumes — Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 and Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927 — were the product of decades of research by Jeffrey B. Perry, telling readers what kind of man Hubert Harrison was and the trials and tribulations of his political activism.
In particular, Hubert Harrison spent time in the Socialist Party championing racial equality through socialism. He convinced bulks of Black voters to vote for his party’s candidate, founded a Colored Socialist Club, and wrote articles for the New York Call on “The Negro and Socialism”. Harrison’s understanding of how the capitalist system resulted in the oppression of African-Americans was that competition between Whites and Blacks resulted in the need for Whites to maintain superiority over the Blacks, such that capitalist masters could use the inferior racial position of Blacks as a “club” to wield power. This was why Black Americans were being deprived of proportionate remuneration for their labor or had insufficient benefits for the kind of work they were doing. For Harrison, African-Americans needed to join unions to receive the same kind of protection that their White counterparts got.
Eventually, Harrison’s left-wing radical calls for racial equality did not sit well with the “moderate, white, and largely middle-class party leadership”, who kicked him out of the party in 1918 after factions sprung up within the party and no longer saw a future with Harrison. Evidently, Harrison’s then-radical beliefs that all Americans deserved equal status, regardless of color, was too radical for his counterparts to accept, especially on unionists’ behavior in the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW). For Harrison, he supported their extreme actions of organizing Black workers to fight for their rights whereas the right-wing faction of the party preferred more conventional means of negotiation, a stance that would affirm the party’s good relations with the American Federation of Labor.
The Harlem Renaissance
In 1917, the “New Negro Movement” was founded by Hubery Harrison, who is referred to as "The Father of Harlem Radicalism". Harrison lived in Harlem since 1907 and Harlem was a hub for the emigration of African-Americans from the South as well as from the Antilles (a region of an island southwest of North America). Harlem was a place where Black culture thrived due to the congregation of Black people from diverse backgrounds in one city area. Harrison founded the Liberty League, an organization part of the militant “New Negro Movement” that aimed to make lynching a federal crime as well as uplift the marginalized African-American group by pressuring the government to redress their grievances. The Liberty League employed various strategies to achieve its goals, including educational work as well as the exercise of political pressure to attempt to make the government accede to their demands. A rally was called around the slogans ‘Stop Lynching and Disfranchisement’ and “Make the South ‘Safe For Democracy.’ This was in accordance with Hubert Harrison’s calls for Black Americans to arm themselves and use weapons as a form of self-defense against oppression if necessary. His newspaper, the Voice, which was founded to support this movement, also took off and thousands of Black Americans were reading the paper, which covered political ideology on Black socialism as well as the arts. The “New Negro Movement” is today known as the Harlem Renaissance, which is now defined as an “intellectual and cultural revival of African American music, dance, art, fashion, literature, theater, politics and scholarship”.
What Hubert Harrison could not have done alone, the Black community in Harlem and even beyond helped to achieve. The Harlem Renaissance inspired many Black artists and creators to express themselves without fear of judgment by society. Alain Locke’s anthology, The New Negro, featured writing exclusively from African-American authors and poets. An interesting product of the Renaissance was the birth of jazz poetry. African-American poets experimented with writing poetry with the use of musical elements and swing rhythm reminiscent of jazz. Repetition was also used in this type of poetry, along with allusions to important figures, names, and places in the jazz scene. Black culture thrived because of the Harlem Renaissance and it gave many Black writers the confidence to express themselves more freely.
As Langston Hughes wrote in the opening line of his poem, Harlem:
“What happens to a dream deferred?”
This question asks what happens when Black Americans are denied the same possibility of achieving the American Dream when they are treated on an unequal status compared to White Americans. This dream being “deferred” still represents some sort of optimism that one day, Black Americans will achieve equality of status to dream this dream. The Harlem Renaissance provided opportunities for African-Americans to unleash their creativity and reclaim power by means of artistic expression, but underlying the movement was the culmination of decades of hard work and effort by driven individuals. People like Hubert Henry Harrison, who have been forgotten need to be uncovered and celebrated for their contributions to the struggle for racial equality in America. Perhaps one day, Martin Luther King Junior’s dream will no longer be a dream, and all men will be equal regardless of color.
Sources:
https://www.aaihs.org/hubert-harrison-black-griot-of-the-harlem-renaissance/
https://blogs.cul.columbia.edu/rbml/2021/12/17/on-the-anniversary-of-the-death-of-hubert-harrison/
https://jacobin.com/2019/06/black-radicalism-hubert-harrison-web-dubois-malcolm-x
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/hubert-harrison-jeffrey-perry/
https://newpol.org/review/the-life-and-political-contributions-of-hubert-harrison/
https://www.aaihs.org/socialism-and-the-black-vote/
https://blackagendareport.com/100_anniversary_liberty_league_harrison