"Hubert Harrison: Black Socrates of the Harlem Renaissance"

 

A Talk by Jeffrey B. Perry

March 2, 2010

7:30 - 9:00 pm

Lecture Hall B-10

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Hubert Harrison, (1883-1927) was an immensely skilled writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist who, more than any other
political leader of his era, combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a coherent political radicalism. The St. Croix, Virgin Islands-born and Harlem-based Harrison profoundly influenced "New Negro" militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his synthesis of class and race issues is a key unifying link between the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement: the labor- and civil-rights-based work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist work associated with Malcolm X.

Harrison played unique, signal roles in the largest class radical movement (socialism) and the largest race radical movement (the New Negro/Garvey) movement of his era. He was the foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York, the founder of the "New Negro" movement, the editor of the Negro World, and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement. A self-described, “radical internationalist,” he was also a highly praised journalist and critic (reportedly the first regular Black book reviewer), a postal labor unionist, a union organizer (with both the Hotel Workers and the Pullman Porters), an IWW supporter, a speaker at the 1913 Paterson strike, a freethinker and early proponent of birth control, a supporter of Black writers and artists, a leading community-based public intellectual, an adult education lecturer for the New York City Board of Education, and a bibliophile who helped transform the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture (known today as the world-famous Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture). His biography offers profound insights on race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.
 

About the Author: Jeffrey B. Perry is an independent, working class
scholar who was formally educated at Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, and Columbia University. He was a long-time (33 years) activist, elected union officer with Local 300, and editor for the National Postal Mail Handlers Union (div. of LIUNA, AFL-CIO, CTW). Dr. Perry preserved and inventoried the Hubert H. Harrison papers (now at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library) and is the editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader (Wesleyan University Press, 2001). He is also literary executor for Theodore W. Allen (author of The Invention of the White Race) and edited and introduced Allen's Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race.
 

Autographed copies of Perry's biography will be available for purchase. An excerpt from the book’s introduction can be found here.

 

Sponsored by: Clayton State’s Department of Humanities, the Alpha-Nu-Psi Chapter of Phi Alpha Theta, and CSU's History Society.

 

The event may be viewed here, using Adobe Flash.

 

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