Book Talk: Brian Kwoba on Hubert Harrison

Brian Kwoba will speak on his newly published book Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism and Harrison’s prominent role in the early Socialist Party, IWW, and Black radicalism during the 1910s and 20s.  Brian’s visit forms part of our current study group on the Historical Roots of American Fascism.

The following excerpt from the Introduction to Kwoba’s book gives a taste of his new approach:

“In the face of the superexploitation of working people by the likes of John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan—the capitalist robber barons of the Gilded Age—Harrison crystallized a secular Black revolutionary Socialist politics. In so doing, he theorized the role of anti-Black racial oppression in preventing the emancipation of the working class from the wage slavery of industrial capitalism.

In contrast to the Eurocentric mass media and education systems, Harrison’s spellbinding street-corner speaking, commitment to grassroots empowerment, fearless journalism, and encyclopedic knowledge allowed him to crystallize a new and revolutionary model—what some called the “Outdoor University”—for free urban Black emancipatory education. It stood in stark contrast to both the industrial education symbolized by Booker T. and Margaret Murray Washington’s Tuskegee Institute and the “higher” elite education of the colleges and universities that were inaccessible to the masses of Black people. Perched atop a sidewalk stepladder at 135th Street and Seventh Avenue and addressing audiences large enough to block traffic, Harrison spoke on subject matter ranging across such topics as African American art and popular culture, sociology, scientific racism, English literature, evolutionary biology, theological criticism, African history, macroeconomics, and global geopolitics. A. Philip Randolph aptly described this model of education as “one of the great intellectual forums in America.”

In the face of rampant racism in white society and President Woodrow Wilson’s decision to take the United States of America into World War I, Harrison helped crystallize Harlem’s political “New Negro” movement. Calling for voting rights for Black men and Black women, federal antilynching legislation, armed self-defense, and an end to Jim Crow racial oppression, Harrison’s Liberty League of Negro-Americans cohered a pan-African and people-centered movement for Black self-empowerment. By recruiting and training an unknown Jamaican immigrant by the name of Marcus Garvey, Harrison’s Liberty League catalyzed the emergence of the largest international organization of Black people in modern history.

Harrison spoke out about injustices taking place all over the globe. Standing against European colonialism and the predatory imperial powers of the world, Harrison crystallized a new form of radical internationalism in his groundbreaking theorization of the “Colored International.” As a revolutionary political alliance of colonized peoples in the Islamic world, India, the Caribbean, Latin America, Africa, Europe, and Asia, the Colored International he envisioned would smash the giant triplets of capitalism, imperialism, and white racial domination.

In a city where white people put a Congolese man named Ota Benga on display in the Bronx Zoo, Harrison self-identified as an “untamed, untamable African” and crystallized a model of African consciousness for the Black diaspora based on his deep study of African history, culture, and politics.

After a childhood upbringing steeped in the Anglican Church, Harrison broke with Christianity and religion more generally. He would later emerge as the most prominent Black freethinker of his generation. As against the conservative dogmas of the church, Harrison crystallized—for a new generation—a Black agnosticism grounded in modern science, empirical evidence, and rational explanation over religious dogma. As a militant “truth seeker,” he demanded the taxation of church properties, an end to prayers in school and courtroom Bible oaths, and a complete separation of church and state.

In the face of federal government censorship, repression, and criminalization of sexuality—and widespread policing of sexual morality by the church—Harrison crystallized a Black free love politics. In that respect, he emerged among the earliest of Black voices advocating for legalizing access to contraception, offering public-facing courses in sex education, and explicitly advancing a conception of love based on variety and freedom from compulsory monogamy and the Puritanical sex-negativity of US culture and society.

As a result of crystallizing so many political breakthroughs, Harrison developed a kaleidoscopic radicalism that connected multiple worlds of counter-hegemonic knowledge. As Kirnon put it, “Harrison was the first Negro who boldly preached racialism and all forms of radicalism in New York. He preached them continuously and consistently. He was the first Negro whose radicalism was comprehensive enough to include racialism, science, politics, sociology and education in a thorough-going, scientific manner.”…

Scholars of a particular figure or organization are often ideologically partisan toward it and therefore less comfortable remembering—let alone actually engaging with—forceful internal critics like Harrison. As Harrison once observed, “Even savants are prone to forget that they do most of their thinking with their desires, beliefs, prejudices and subconscious urges, which they then proceed to rationalize.”23 This explains, in part, why those who are partial to one or another ideological framework that Harrison criticized have so often run from him—whether consciously or subconsciously—like a rich person avoiding a beggar. His legacy has been forbidden precisely because it forces us to rethink fundamentally what we think we know—about everything from poverty, war, and racism, to love, sex, and religion.

And this is precisely why it is so revealing to study Hubert Henry Harrison.

On the one hand, the most relevant historiographies—of Black Marxism, Black freethinkers, Garveyism, Black sexual liberation, and the New Negro “Renaissance”—have either marginalized or omitted him entirely. On the other hand, Harrison played a groundbreaking role in the crystallization of each of these formations. Therefore, putting him back into the picture opens multiple highly revealing angles of vision on the conjunctures both within and between them.

Recovering Harrison’s legacy requires us to: reexamine the history of Black people in relation to the Socialist and Communist Parties; recover a forgotten strand of Black class-conscious, anti-imperialist, “colored” internationalism; reframe the spatial and intellectual possibilities for Black liberatory education in light of Harlem’s “Outdoor University”; rethink the genealogy of the Black secular and freethinking traditions; reappraise the origins and pitfalls of the global Garvey movement; reinterrogate the mythology of the “Harlem Renaissance”; excavate an onyx crystalline layer in the historical geology of free love politics. In short, to reimagine the horizons of the Black radical tradition.”