Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism

Brian Kwoba‘s recently published Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism introduces the working-class journalist, activist, and educator Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), who generated an array of visionary solutions to the systemic injustices of his day. After blazing a trail for Black workers and organizers in the Socialist Party of America and the Paterson Silk Strike of 1913, Harrison emerged as the most prominent Black freethinker and free lover of his generation. He also practiced armed self-defense and called for an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist “Colored International” alliance in the face of European colonization in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most spectacularly, Harrison’s Liberty League of Negro Americans catalyzed the rise of Marcus Garvey and the largest international organization of African people in modern history. Because of his fearless radicalism, however, the full scope of Harrison’s revolutionary legacy has been largely erased from popular memory … until now.

Dr. Brian Kwoba was born in Manchester, Connecticut, and raised in Boulder, Colorado. After earning his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Cornell University, he spent six years teaching high school and middle school history and social studies in Boston before heading to the University of Oxford for his doctoral degree in history. Dr. Kwoba is currently an associate professor of history and also the director of African and African American Studies at the University of Memphis. Over the past two decades, Dr. Kwoba has been an activist on issues including anti-imperialism, immigrant workers rights, climate justice, Falastin, decolonizing education, pan-Africanism, and the movement for Black lives. In his spare time, he is a big time music lover (especially live jazz), an Afrobeats DJ, and a frequent traveler to Kenya where he visits his dad’s side of the family.

Image l/r: author Brian Kwoba; Hubert Harrison with Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Big Bill Haywood, and other leaders of 1913 Paterson, NJ silk workers strike; book cover.