Hubert Harrison

Hubert Henry Harrison was born on 27 April 1883 at Estate Concordia on St Croix, then part of the Danish West Indies, the son of Cecilia Elizabeth Haines, a working-class immigrant from Barbados, and Adolphus Harrison, who had been born enslaved. He arrived in New York in 1900, at 17, an orphan, and worked in a series of jobs while educating himself relentlessly.

In the early 1900s he became a dazzling street-corner orator and writer in Harlem. By 1912 he was the leading Black organiser, agitator and theorist in the Socialist Party of New York, and he argued that if white people, including white socialists, put their race first, Black Americans were obliged to do the same. The historian Jeffrey Perry credits him with the origin of the phrase race first.

In June 1917 Harrison founded the Liberty League of Negro-Americans, and a month later he launched its newspaper, The Voice, the first organisation and first newspaper of the militant New Negro movement. The League called for an end to segregation and disfranchisement, armed self-defence and federal anti-lynching laws, and for solidarity with liberation struggles in Ireland, India and Africa. In 1917 he gave Marcus Garvey his first major platform in New York at a Liberty League event.

In 1919 he edited The New Negro, a magazine described as an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races, and in 1920 he edited the Negro World and was a major influence on the Garvey movement at its radical height. He was also a champion of freethought, a lifelong bibliophile and lecturer, and a tireless educator of Harlem's working people.

Harrison died on 17 December 1927, at 44, of complications after an appendix operation. A. Philip Randolph called him the father of Harlem radicalism, and the historian J.A. Rogers called him the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time. At his funeral Arturo Schomburg said he had been ahead of his time. For decades he was forgotten, until Jeffrey Perry's two-volume biography, published in 2008 and 2020, restored his place.