Harrison’s arrival in New York City coincided with the aftermath of the August 1900 race riot, which injured more than 70 Black New Yorkers and marked a new low in the city’s race relations. But at the same time, many from the West Indies also came to the United States, exerting a considerable influence on Black American culture, and American culture more generally, in the 20th century. “In a sense,” Perry writes, “Harrison was like many other West Indians who came to the United States at that time: young, male, and literate thwarted by limited educational, political, and occupational opportunities at home in search of a better life and with a desire for more education and a propensity for self-education.” While we consider this period as one of the great ages of immigration to the United States, we usually think in terms of people coming from Southern and Eastern Europe-and perhaps the banning of immigration from China in 1882. Instead, Harrison examined the problem of race and class and came to the inescapable conclusion that only mass politics and organizing among Black Americans could free them and, by extension, the working class from future exploitation. For Perry, what defined Harrison’s legacy as a radical was that he avowed a socialist and class-based politics and yet also refused to abandon the masses of Black Americans, north and south, in their struggle against racism. Having written for publications like Black Agenda Report, CounterPunch, and many others, Perry has spent years arguing for the importance of understanding how race and class are bound together as categories used to stratify and divide American society. Perry’s background as a working-class intellectual-not to mention his writings on race and labor in American life-make him the perfect person to help recover one of the early 20th century’s great Black intellectuals and socialists. But above all they make a case for why Harrison is a crucial part of the American radical tradition. A biography that is also a work of intellectual and institutional history, Perry’s two volumes offer an incisive survey of the radical upheaval at the turn of the 20th century. Harrison’s intellect was matched only by his steadfast refusal to bend on his principles-including not taking money from sources he disagreed with. Tracking Harrison’s life from his birth in the Danish West Indies to his long career as an activist and intellectual in Harlem, Perry leaves no stone unturned in understanding the man, the times in which he lived, and the ideals he championed. Perry- Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918 and Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927-seeks to correct this oversight. Even in histories examining the Black left’s rich and important literary and activist history, Harrison’s name isn’t invoked nearly enough.Ī recent two-volume biography by Jeffrey B. Philip Randolph are fondly remembered, Harrison’s critical contributions to socialism and Black political thought are often unfairly passed over. While left intellectuals like Michael Harrington and Black socialists like A. Yet since the 1960s, Harrison’s genius and importance have gone somewhat into eclipse.
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