Jeffrey B. Perry

"Hubert Harrison: Tribune of the People" The Struggle for Equality" reviewed by Sean I. Ahern in "Marxism-Leninism Today," June 27, 2022

see HERE

Português Review of Jeffrey B. Perry "Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1818-1927" (Columbia University Press) in "Afro-Asia" Journal (n. 65, 2022, pp. 803-812) by Luiz Bernardo Pericás Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil at

"Hubert Harrison: Tribune of the People" by Sean I. Ahern in "Black Agenda Report" reviews Jeffrey B. Perry's 3 major books on Hubert Harrison (a two-volume biography published by Columbia University Press and "A Hubert Harrison Reader" published by Wesleyan University Press).

Part 1 June 8, 2022 see HERE

Part 2 June 15, 2022 see HERE

Part 3 June 22, 202 see HERE

"Hubert Harrison's on Thomas Paine's Place in the Deistical Movement," Originally published in "Truth Seeker," February 11, 1911, edited with a new Introduction by Jeffrey B. Perry in the May–August 2022 "Truth Seeker ("World's Oldest
Magazine for Freethinkers").

When he restarted a new diary on September 18, 1907, at age twenty-four, Hubert Harrison wrote down his thoughts on why he made that decision:
"It must surely be instructive to look back after long years on one's past thoughts and deeds and form new estimates of ourselves and others. Seen from another perspective large things grow small, small ones large and the lives of relative importance are bound to change position. At any rate it must be instructive to compare the impression of the moment, laden as it may be with the bias of feeling and clouded by partisan or personal prejudice, with the more broad and impartial review which distance in time or space makes possible."

Capitalist (Not Racial Capitalist) Relations of Production in the Virginia Colony in 1618. --
Allen describes capitalist relations of production in Jamestown in the period before Africans arrived in the pattern-setting Virginia colony and before the establishment (later in the century) of a system of racial oppression and "the invention of the white race." He writes that "at the close of the 1610–1618 period ... It was to be a capitalist farming system in Virginia."
This point is important because, if we understand the Virginia plantations as agricultural capitalism, and the plantation owners as capitalists, then we are better able to understand enslaved Black laborers as proletarians (as both Hubert Harrison and W. E. B. Du Bois would later do). This enables us to tear the covers off "white" labor's betrayals of Black labor; to learn many important lessons of "labor history;" and to understand the origin of the invention of the "white race" – all of which have great importance for today.  See HERE

See HERE

A July 4, 1917 rally of Hubert Harrison's Liberty League at Harlem's Metropolitan Baptist Church on 138th Street between Lenox and Seventh Avenues drew national attention and saw the first edition of "The Voice: A Newspaper for the New Negro." Harrison's Liberty League was the first organization of the militant "New Negro Movement" and his newspaper, "The Voice," was the first newspaper of the movement and a prime example of the militant new spirit that was developing.
Historian Robert A. Hill points out that Harrison's "Voice" was "the radical forerunner" of the periodicals that would express the developing political and intellectual ferment in the era of World War I. It was followed in November 1917 by the "Messenger" of A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen and in August 1918 by the "Negro World" of Marcus Garvey and the "Crusader" of Cyril Briggs. These four publications, led by "The Voice," manifested "the principal articulation of the New Negro mood."
The July 4 meeting came in the wake of the July 1-3 white supremacist pogrom in East St. Louis, Illinois (which is 12 miles from Ferguson, Missouri). Reports on the number of African Americans killed ranged from thirty-nine to two-hundred-and-fifty and 244 buildings were totally or partially destroyed. Historian Edward Robb Ellis reports that in East St. Louis Black women were scalped and four Black children slaughtered.
These riots were widely attributed to "white" labor's opposition to Black workers coming into the labor market and they were directly precipitated by a car of white "joy riders" who fired guns into the African-American community. Officials of organized labor served as prominent apologists for "white" labor's role in the rioting. Samuel Gompers, President of the American Federation of Labor, placed principal blame for the riots on "the excessive and abnormal number of negroes" in East St. Louis while W. S. Carter, President of the Brotherhood of Locomotive Firemen and Enginemen, maintained that "the purpose of the railroads in importing Negro labor is to destroy the influence of white men's labor organizations." A subsequent House of Representatives committee found that the local police and Illinois National Guard were inept and indifferent, and, in specific instances, supported the white mobs.
The Liberty League's July 4 meeting in the largest church in Harlem came one day after a "race riot" in the San Juan Hill section of Manhattan (the third in six weeks) in which two thousand people fought after a reserve policemen arrested a uniformed Black soldier standing on a street corner who allegedly refused to move fast enough.
The "New York Times" reported that at the July 4 Liberty League rally a thousand Black men and women were present and enthusiastically cheered the speakers who were "all Negroes." Every speaker was reported to have denounced the East St. Louis rioters as ruthless murderers and each condemned the authorities for not preventing the atrocities and for not providing protection.
As president of the Liberty League, Harrison advised Black people who feared mob violence in the South and elsewhere to take direct action and "supply themselves with rifles and fight if necessary, to defend their lives and property." As he later put it -- "'An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,' and sometimes two eyes or a half dozen teeth for one is the aim of the New Negro." Harrison stressed that it was imperative to "demand justice" and to "make our voices heard."
The emphasis on a political voice ran across the masthead of "The Voice," which proclaimed "We will fight for all the things we have held nearest our hearts--for democracy--for the right of those who submit to authority to have a voice in their own government."
Several years later Marcus Garvey, who learned from Harrison and joined Harrison's Liberty League, emphasized that "[the] new spirit of the new Negro . . . seeks a political voice, and the world is amazed, the world is astounded that the Negro should desire a political voice, because after the voice comes a political place, and . . . we are not only asking but we are going to demand--we are going to fight for and die for that place." According to Robert A. Hill, this demand for a political voice marked the new spirit of the "New Negro" and keyed the later radicalism of Garvey's UNIA.
The call for armed self-defense, the publishing of "The Voice," and the desire to have the political voice of the militant New Negro heard were important components of Hubert Harrison's activities in 1917.

110 Years ago – in the July 1912 "International Socialist Review," appeared Hubert Harrison's seminal article "Socialism and the Negro."
Harrison's article described "the Negro" as "a group that is more essentially proletarian than any other American group" and urged, since "the Negro" was the "most ruthlessly exploited working class group in America, that the duty of the party to champion his cause" was "as clear as day."
To Harrison this was "the crucial test of Socialism's sincerity."
For the majority in the party the key political debates concerned positions on revolutionary vs. evolutionary socialism and revolutionary unionism vs. AFL craft unionism. Harrison proposed a new litmus test, a new "crucial test," for U.S. socialists — "to champion" the cause of the "Negro." He thought this was the key to revolutionary change strategy.

Hubert Harrison Caribbean Elections Biography see HERE

"The most vulnerable point at which a decisive blow can be struck against bourgeois rule in the United States is white supremacy. White supremacy is both the keystone [in the arch] and the Achilles heel of U.S. bourgeois democracy."

Theodore W, Allen in "The Most Vulnerable Point," October 20, 1972, see HERE

"When I reviewed the first volume of Jeffrey B. Perry's monumental double-barreled biography of Harrison in 2011 'Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism.1883-1918' I said it was the best biography I'd ever read. But this massive second volume is even better." John Woodford reviews "Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918-1927" in "Against the Current" No. 219, July/August 2022. See HERE

See Here

Following the 1918 Liberty Congress, Hubert Harrison initiated "New Negro" criticism of W. E. B. Du Bois for urging African Americans to forget justifiable grievances [lynching, segregation, disfranchisement], for "closing ranks" behind President Woodrow Wilson's war effort, and for following Joel A. Spingarn's lead and seeking a captaincy in Military Intelligence, the branch of government that monitored radicals and the African American community. Harrison's exposé, "The Descent of Du Bois" ("The Voice," July 25, 1918) was a principal reason that Du Bois was denied the captaincy he sought in Military Intelligence, and more than any other document it marked the significant break between the "New Negroes" and the older leadership.