Yeah, one without negativity and primitive ways of thinking. We need more sci-fi films that star us and we need more open minded young black folks running shyt.
The New Negro Movement (1919-1936) #BlackExcellence
- Thread starter cole phelps
- Start date
Yeah, one without negativity and primitive ways of thinking. We need more sci-fi films that star us and we need more open minded young black folks running shyt.
cole phelps
Superstar
what we need is some type of revival period we need to reclaim stuff such as rock n roll etc...and learn to keep the stuff we created on lock and show historical things like this to the black youth.
cole phelps
Superstar
Alain Locke
Role in the movement:
No one has articulated the hopes and possibilities associated with the idea and ideal of the "New Negro" more than the Harvard-trained philosophy professor Alain Locke, who later described himself as the "midwife" to aspiring young black writers of the 1920s. According to Locke, The New Negro, whose publication by Albert and Charles Boni in December 1925 symbolizes the culmination of the first stage of the New Negro Renaissance in literature, was put together "to document the New Negro culturally and socially - to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years."
The anthology had already sold 42,000 copies in its earlier incarnation as the March 1925 special Harlem issue on Harlem of the Survey Graphic magazine, a record unsurpassed by the Survey until World War II. Highlighting its national and international scope, Locke compared the New Negro movement with the "nascent movements of folk expression and self determination" that were taking place "in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico."
Locke's philosophy of cultural pluralism is analogous to the thinking of many of his white contemporaries, especially cultural pluralists such as Waldo Frank, V.F. Calverton, Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks. Sharing the optimism of other progressive reformers, Locke recognized that "the conditions that are molding a New Negro are [also] molding a new American attitude." He defined as the creed of his own generation its belief in "the efficacy of collective effort, in race co-operation."
Like the black political leaders of the period, Locke seems to have believed that the American system would ultimately work for African Americans, but he refused to take cognizance of the disagreeable political leverage the system called for. Such an approach implied an excessive dependence of any black hopes for political change or reform upon white men of influence and their good intentions. In terms of art and literature, Locke saw no conflict between being "American" and being "Negro," but rather an opportunity to enrich both through cultural reciprocity. In a way, Locke was reinterpreting Du Bois' "double consciousness" concept for aesthetic and cultural uses.
It seems there was enough room in Locke's view for many different kinds of talents to exist and thrive together. Locke also did not see any direct connection between African arts that had influenced the works of many European artists such as Picasso. For him, the most important lesson the black artist could derive from African art was "not cultural inspiration or technical innovations, but the lesson of a classic background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control."
As W. E. B. Du Bois himself recognized in his response to Locke's New Negro, the concept validated at one level the rejection of the accommodationist politics and ideology represented by Booker T. Washington and his followers around the start of the 20th century when despite Washington's access to the White House and mainstream politicians, violence against African Americans had continued unabated at a disturbing level with little progress in the area of civil rights and economic opportunities.
His Book
Role in the movement:
No one has articulated the hopes and possibilities associated with the idea and ideal of the "New Negro" more than the Harvard-trained philosophy professor Alain Locke, who later described himself as the "midwife" to aspiring young black writers of the 1920s. According to Locke, The New Negro, whose publication by Albert and Charles Boni in December 1925 symbolizes the culmination of the first stage of the New Negro Renaissance in literature, was put together "to document the New Negro culturally and socially - to register the transformations of the inner and outer life of the Negro in America that have so significantly taken place in the last few years."
The anthology had already sold 42,000 copies in its earlier incarnation as the March 1925 special Harlem issue on Harlem of the Survey Graphic magazine, a record unsurpassed by the Survey until World War II. Highlighting its national and international scope, Locke compared the New Negro movement with the "nascent movements of folk expression and self determination" that were taking place "in India, in China, in Egypt, Ireland, Russia, Bohemia, Palestine and Mexico."
Locke's philosophy of cultural pluralism is analogous to the thinking of many of his white contemporaries, especially cultural pluralists such as Waldo Frank, V.F. Calverton, Randolph Bourne and Van Wyck Brooks. Sharing the optimism of other progressive reformers, Locke recognized that "the conditions that are molding a New Negro are [also] molding a new American attitude." He defined as the creed of his own generation its belief in "the efficacy of collective effort, in race co-operation."
Like the black political leaders of the period, Locke seems to have believed that the American system would ultimately work for African Americans, but he refused to take cognizance of the disagreeable political leverage the system called for. Such an approach implied an excessive dependence of any black hopes for political change or reform upon white men of influence and their good intentions. In terms of art and literature, Locke saw no conflict between being "American" and being "Negro," but rather an opportunity to enrich both through cultural reciprocity. In a way, Locke was reinterpreting Du Bois' "double consciousness" concept for aesthetic and cultural uses.
It seems there was enough room in Locke's view for many different kinds of talents to exist and thrive together. Locke also did not see any direct connection between African arts that had influenced the works of many European artists such as Picasso. For him, the most important lesson the black artist could derive from African art was "not cultural inspiration or technical innovations, but the lesson of a classic background, the lesson of discipline, of style, of technical control."
As W. E. B. Du Bois himself recognized in his response to Locke's New Negro, the concept validated at one level the rejection of the accommodationist politics and ideology represented by Booker T. Washington and his followers around the start of the 20th century when despite Washington's access to the White House and mainstream politicians, violence against African Americans had continued unabated at a disturbing level with little progress in the area of civil rights and economic opportunities.
His Book
cole phelps
Superstar
Eastside Get The Money
Veteran
The Harlam Renaissance looked amazing 
But them white folks would have had to kill me back in the Jim Crow days. I can't stand for indirect racism now, let alone legal racism
But them white folks would have had to kill me back in the Jim Crow days. I can't stand for indirect racism now, let alone legal racism
cole phelps
Superstar
Hell yeah its time for the black community to make a come back!!!
for a dope thread tho.
cole phelps
Superstar
Legacy of the movement
The concept of "New Negro" was first introduced in the 19th century and there are varied interpretations of its long-term significance. There is no doubt that despite the difficult challenges of race and class in the 1920s, a new spirit of hope and pride marked black activity and expression in all areas. All Harlem Renaissance participants, regardless of their generational or ideological orientation in aesthetics or politics, shared at some level this sense of possibility.
The middle-class leadership of NAACP and Urban League were deeply suspicious of the flamboyant and demagogic Marcus Garvey, who in turn saw Du Bois and others as dark-skinned whites. Yet all of them subscribed to some form of Pan-Africanism. Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson rejected cultural separatism and endorsed a hybridity derived from the marriage of black experience and Euro-American aesthetic forms.
Maybe what is important for latter-day culture and literature is the New Negro's insistence in so many spheres at self-definition, self-expression and self-determination, a striving after what Locke called "spiritual emancipation." The many debates during the Harlem Renaissance years regarding art and propaganda, representation and identity, assimilation versus militancy, parochialism versus globalism, have enriched the perspectives on issues of art, culture, politics and ideology that have emerged on the African American scene since the 1930s. This is especially true concerning the perspectives offered by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. In the 1920s, the rich and diverse contributions made by journals such as The Crisis, Opportunity, and The Messenger helped to shape and interpret for their growing readership the powerful impact that World War I and the Great Migration had had on the African American masses
The concept of "New Negro" was first introduced in the 19th century and there are varied interpretations of its long-term significance. There is no doubt that despite the difficult challenges of race and class in the 1920s, a new spirit of hope and pride marked black activity and expression in all areas. All Harlem Renaissance participants, regardless of their generational or ideological orientation in aesthetics or politics, shared at some level this sense of possibility.
The middle-class leadership of NAACP and Urban League were deeply suspicious of the flamboyant and demagogic Marcus Garvey, who in turn saw Du Bois and others as dark-skinned whites. Yet all of them subscribed to some form of Pan-Africanism. Alain Locke and Charles S. Johnson rejected cultural separatism and endorsed a hybridity derived from the marriage of black experience and Euro-American aesthetic forms.
Maybe what is important for latter-day culture and literature is the New Negro's insistence in so many spheres at self-definition, self-expression and self-determination, a striving after what Locke called "spiritual emancipation." The many debates during the Harlem Renaissance years regarding art and propaganda, representation and identity, assimilation versus militancy, parochialism versus globalism, have enriched the perspectives on issues of art, culture, politics and ideology that have emerged on the African American scene since the 1930s. This is especially true concerning the perspectives offered by Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison. In the 1920s, the rich and diverse contributions made by journals such as The Crisis, Opportunity, and The Messenger helped to shape and interpret for their growing readership the powerful impact that World War I and the Great Migration had had on the African American masses
cole phelps
Superstar
I think what the black community needs is some sort of enlightenment movement
cole phelps
Superstar
Hubert Henry Harrison (April 27, 1883 – December 17, 1927) was a West Indian-American writer, orator, educator, critic, and radical socialist political activist based in Harlem, New York. He was described by activist A. Philip Randolph as “the father of Harlem radicalism” and by the historian Joel Augustus Rogers as “the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time.” John G. Jackson of American Atheists described him as "The Black Socrates".[1][2]
An immigrant from St. Croix at age 17, Harrison played significant roles in the largest radical class and race movements in the United States. In 1912-14 he was the leading Black organizer in the Socialist Party of America. In 1917 he founded the Liberty League and The Voice, the first organization and the first newspaper of the race-conscious “New Negro” movement. From his Liberty League and Voice came the core leadership of individuals and race-conscious program of the Garvey movement.[3]
Harrison was a seminal and influential thinker who encouraged the development of class consciousness among working people, positive race consciousness among Black people, agnostic atheism, secular humanism, social progressivism, and freethought. He was also a self-described "radical internationalist" and contributed significantly to the Caribbean radical tradition. Harrison profoundly influenced a generation of “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, Marcus Garvey, Richard Benjamin Moore, W. A. Domingo, Williana Burroughs, and Cyril Briggs.
Early life
Hubert was born to Cecilia Elizabeth Haines, a working-class woman, on Estate Concordia, St. Croix, Danish West Indies. Harrison's biological father, Adolphus Harrison, was born enslaved. One account from the 1920s suggested that Harrison's father owned a substantial estate.[4] Harrison's biographer, however, found no such landholding and writes that "there is no indication that Adolphus, a laborer his entire life, ever owned, or even rented, land".[5] As a youth, Harrison knew poverty but also learned of African customs and the Crucian people’s rich history of direct action mass struggles. Among his schoolmates was his lifelong friend, the future Crucian labor leader and social activist, D. Hamilton Jackson.
In later life Harrison worked with many Virgin Islands-born activists, including James C. Canegata, Anselmo Jackson, Rothschild Francis, Elizabeth Hendrikson, Casper Holstein, and Frank Rudolph Crosswaith. He was especially active in Virgin Island causes after the March 1917 U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands, and subsequent abuses under the U.S. naval occupation of the islands.
cole phelps
Superstar
continued
Emigration and education
Harrison came to New York in 1900 as a seventeen-year old orphan and joined his older sister. He confronted a racial oppression unlike anything he previously knew, as only the United States had such a binary color line. In the Caribbean, social relations were more fluid. Harrison was especially “shocked” by the virulent white-supremacy typified by lynchings, which were reaching a peak in these years in the South. They were a horror that had not existed in St. Croix or other Caribbean islands. In addition, the fact that in most places blacks and people of color far outnumbered whites meant they had more social spaces in which to operate away from the oversight of whites.
In the beginning, Harrison worked low-paying service jobs while attending high school at night. For the rest of his life, Harrison continued to study as an autodidact. While still in high school, his intellectual gifts were recognized. He was described as a “genius” in The World, a New York daily newspaper. At age 20, he had an early letter published by the New York Times in 1903.[6] He became an American citizen and lived in the United States the rest of his life.
Marriage and family
In 1909 Harrison married Irene Louise Horton. They had four daughters and one son.
Career
In his first decade in New York, Harrison started writing letters to the editor of the New York Times on topics such as lynching, Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution and literary criticism. He also began lecturing on such subjects as the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Reconstruction. As part of his civic efforts, Harrison worked with St. Benedict's Lyceum (along with bibliophile Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico, journalist John E. Bruce, and activist Samuel Duncan); St. Mark's Lyceum (with bibliophile George Young, educator/activist John Dotha Jones, and actor/activist Charles Burroughs); the White Rose Home (along with educator/activist Frances Reynolds Keyser), and the Colored YMCA.
In this period, Harrison also became interested in the freethought movement, which encouraged use of the scientific method, empiricism, reason and thinking devoid of theistic dogma. He underwent a deconversion from Christianity and became an agnostic atheist similar to Thomas Huxley, one of Harrison's influences. His new worldview placed humanity, not a god, at its center (secular humanism).
Harrison, like Huxley, developed a lifelong, determined opposition to organized religion, remarking famously that any black man who believed Biblical material needed to have their head checked, and that he wouldn't worship a "lily white god" and "Jim Crow Jesus". He viewed the Christian Bible as a slave masters book, citing passages in it that allegedly justify slavery (slavery in the Bible). He also said that the only Blacks in Christianity were the devil and his demons; Jesus, God, and his angels were white. For these reasons, Harrison preferred remaining black and going to hell. He criticized the phrase "Take the world but give me Jesus" as a tool for black oppression, and claimed that religion was used to wage war on the poor. Harrison regularly offered rebuttals to the bible and god's existence in his commentary on faith. Naturally, theists condemned his remarks, and riots often broke out at his lectures as a result of his remarks. One such incident involved a religious extremist attacking him with a crowbar, whom Harrison disarmed and chased out. He was arrested by a policeman (who let the attacker escape) for assault, but later acquitted by a judge, who said Harrison had acted in self-defense and that the cop had arrested the wrong person. Harrison had been arguing (at the meeting) for birth control, and castigating churches for superstition, ignorance, and poverty. Harrison was also a firm advocate for separation of church and state as well as taxation of churches.[7] He once wrote: " Show me a population that is deeply religious, and i will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, contumely and the gibbet, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink from the waters of affliction".
On the subject of human evolution, Harrison said whites were more similar to apes than black people, having straight hair and fair skin like them. He also called for evolution to be taught in schools.
In 1907 Harrison obtained a job at the United States Post Office.
Harrison was an early supporter of the protest philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. Particularly after the Brownsville Affair, he became an outspoken critic of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and of the Republican Party.
He also criticized the prominent Black leader Booker T. Washington, whose political philosophy Harrison considered subservient. In 1910 Harrison wrote two letters to the New York Sun that were critical of statements by Washington. Harrison lost his postal employment through the efforts of Washington’s powerful “Tuskegee Machine”, in events that involved the prominent Black Republican Charles W. Anderson, Washington’s assistant Emmett Scott, and New York Postmaster Edward M. Morgan.[8]
Emigration and education
Harrison came to New York in 1900 as a seventeen-year old orphan and joined his older sister. He confronted a racial oppression unlike anything he previously knew, as only the United States had such a binary color line. In the Caribbean, social relations were more fluid. Harrison was especially “shocked” by the virulent white-supremacy typified by lynchings, which were reaching a peak in these years in the South. They were a horror that had not existed in St. Croix or other Caribbean islands. In addition, the fact that in most places blacks and people of color far outnumbered whites meant they had more social spaces in which to operate away from the oversight of whites.
In the beginning, Harrison worked low-paying service jobs while attending high school at night. For the rest of his life, Harrison continued to study as an autodidact. While still in high school, his intellectual gifts were recognized. He was described as a “genius” in The World, a New York daily newspaper. At age 20, he had an early letter published by the New York Times in 1903.[6] He became an American citizen and lived in the United States the rest of his life.
Marriage and family
In 1909 Harrison married Irene Louise Horton. They had four daughters and one son.
Career
In his first decade in New York, Harrison started writing letters to the editor of the New York Times on topics such as lynching, Charles Darwin's theory of Evolution and literary criticism. He also began lecturing on such subjects as the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar and Reconstruction. As part of his civic efforts, Harrison worked with St. Benedict's Lyceum (along with bibliophile Arthur Schomburg from Puerto Rico, journalist John E. Bruce, and activist Samuel Duncan); St. Mark's Lyceum (with bibliophile George Young, educator/activist John Dotha Jones, and actor/activist Charles Burroughs); the White Rose Home (along with educator/activist Frances Reynolds Keyser), and the Colored YMCA.
In this period, Harrison also became interested in the freethought movement, which encouraged use of the scientific method, empiricism, reason and thinking devoid of theistic dogma. He underwent a deconversion from Christianity and became an agnostic atheist similar to Thomas Huxley, one of Harrison's influences. His new worldview placed humanity, not a god, at its center (secular humanism).
Harrison, like Huxley, developed a lifelong, determined opposition to organized religion, remarking famously that any black man who believed Biblical material needed to have their head checked, and that he wouldn't worship a "lily white god" and "Jim Crow Jesus". He viewed the Christian Bible as a slave masters book, citing passages in it that allegedly justify slavery (slavery in the Bible). He also said that the only Blacks in Christianity were the devil and his demons; Jesus, God, and his angels were white. For these reasons, Harrison preferred remaining black and going to hell. He criticized the phrase "Take the world but give me Jesus" as a tool for black oppression, and claimed that religion was used to wage war on the poor. Harrison regularly offered rebuttals to the bible and god's existence in his commentary on faith. Naturally, theists condemned his remarks, and riots often broke out at his lectures as a result of his remarks. One such incident involved a religious extremist attacking him with a crowbar, whom Harrison disarmed and chased out. He was arrested by a policeman (who let the attacker escape) for assault, but later acquitted by a judge, who said Harrison had acted in self-defense and that the cop had arrested the wrong person. Harrison had been arguing (at the meeting) for birth control, and castigating churches for superstition, ignorance, and poverty. Harrison was also a firm advocate for separation of church and state as well as taxation of churches.[7] He once wrote: " Show me a population that is deeply religious, and i will show you a servile population, content with whips and chains, contumely and the gibbet, content to eat the bread of sorrow and drink from the waters of affliction".
On the subject of human evolution, Harrison said whites were more similar to apes than black people, having straight hair and fair skin like them. He also called for evolution to be taught in schools.
In 1907 Harrison obtained a job at the United States Post Office.
Harrison was an early supporter of the protest philosophies of W. E. B. Du Bois and William Monroe Trotter. Particularly after the Brownsville Affair, he became an outspoken critic of Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft, and of the Republican Party.
He also criticized the prominent Black leader Booker T. Washington, whose political philosophy Harrison considered subservient. In 1910 Harrison wrote two letters to the New York Sun that were critical of statements by Washington. Harrison lost his postal employment through the efforts of Washington’s powerful “Tuskegee Machine”, in events that involved the prominent Black Republican Charles W. Anderson, Washington’s assistant Emmett Scott, and New York Postmaster Edward M. Morgan.[8]
cole phelps
Superstar
Race radicalism and the New Negro Movement
In 1914-15, after withdrawing from the Socialist Party, Harrison began work with freethinkers, the freethought/anarchist-influenced Modern School Movement (started by the martyred Spanish anarchist/educator Francisco Ferrer), and his own Radical Forum. He also spoke widely on topics such as birth control, evolution, literature, nonbelief, and the racial aspects of World War I. His outdoor talks and free speech efforts were instrumental in developing a Harlem tradition of militant street corner oratory. He paved the way for those who followed, including A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Richard B. Moore, and (later) Malcolm X.
In 1915-16, after a New York Age editorial by James Weldon Johnson praised his street lectures, Harrison decided to concentrate his work in Harlem’s Black community. He wrote reviews on the developing Black Theatre and the pioneering Lafayette Players of the Lafayette Theatre (Harlem). He emphasized how the “Negro Theater” helped express the psychology of the “Negro” and how it called attention to color consciousness within the African-American community.
In response to the “white first” attitude of the organized labor movement and the Socialists, Harrison provided a “race first” political perspective. He founded the “New Negro Movement,” as a race-conscious, internationalist, mass-based, radical movement for equality, justice, opportunity, and economic power. This “New Negro” movement laid the basis for the Garvey movement. It encouraged mass interest in literature and the arts, and paved the way for publication of Alain Locke’s well-known The New Negro eight years later. Harrison’s mass-based political movement was noticeably different from the more middle-class and apolitical movement associated with Locke.
In 1917, African Americans and others were asked to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy” by fighting during World War I. In the United States, lynchings, racial segregation and discrimination continued. Harrison founded the Liberty League and the Voice, as a radical alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Liberty League aimed at the Black masses beyond “The Talented Tenth”. Its program advocated internationalism, political independence, and class and race consciousness. It called for full equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, armed self-defense, and mass-based political efforts.
In 1918 Harrison briefly served as an organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He chaired the Negro-American Liberty Congress (co-headed by William Monroe Trotter.) The latter was the major wartime protest effort of African Americans. The Liberty Congress pushed demands against discrimination and racial segregation in the United States. It submitted a petition to the U. S. Congress for federal anti-lynching legislation, which the NAACP did not demand at that time. Harrison commented on domestic and international aspects of the war, writing, “During the war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world, mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims... [however]. those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending the limits or the applications of ‘democracy.’”[11]
The autonomous Liberty Congress effort was undermined by the U.S. Army’s anti-radical Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB) in a campaign that targeted NAACP leader Joel E. Spingarn, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington’s former assistant, Emmett Scott. The Liberty Congress protest efforts in wartime can be seen as precursors to the A. Philip Randolph-led March on Washington Movement during World War II, and to the Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr.-led March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during the Vietnam War.
In 1919 Harrison edited the monthly New Negro magazine, which was “intended as an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races--especially of the Negro race.” Harrison’s concentration on international matters continued. Over the next several years, he wrote many powerful pieces critical of imperialism and supportive of internationalism. His writings and talks over his last decade revealed a deep understanding of developments in India, China, Africa, Asia, the Islamic world, and the Caribbean. Harrison repeatedly began his analysis of contemporary situations from an international perspective. Though a strong advocate of armed self-defense for African Americans, he also praised the mass-based non-violent efforts of Mohandas K. Gandhi.[12]
The Garvey Movement
In January 1920 Harrison became principal editor of the Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Over the next eight months, he developed it into the leading race-conscious, radical and literary publication of the day. By the August 1920 UNIA convention, Harrison had grown increasingly critical of Garvey. Harrison criticized Garvey for exaggerations, financial schemes, and desire for empire. In contrast to Garvey, Harrison emphasized that African Americans' principal struggle was in the United States, not in Africa. Harrison did however contribute to the UNIA’s 1920 “Declaration of the Negro Peoples of the World". Though Harrison continued to write for the Negro World into 1922, he looked to develop political alternatives to Garvey.
In 1914-15, after withdrawing from the Socialist Party, Harrison began work with freethinkers, the freethought/anarchist-influenced Modern School Movement (started by the martyred Spanish anarchist/educator Francisco Ferrer), and his own Radical Forum. He also spoke widely on topics such as birth control, evolution, literature, nonbelief, and the racial aspects of World War I. His outdoor talks and free speech efforts were instrumental in developing a Harlem tradition of militant street corner oratory. He paved the way for those who followed, including A. Philip Randolph, Marcus Garvey, Richard B. Moore, and (later) Malcolm X.
In 1915-16, after a New York Age editorial by James Weldon Johnson praised his street lectures, Harrison decided to concentrate his work in Harlem’s Black community. He wrote reviews on the developing Black Theatre and the pioneering Lafayette Players of the Lafayette Theatre (Harlem). He emphasized how the “Negro Theater” helped express the psychology of the “Negro” and how it called attention to color consciousness within the African-American community.
In response to the “white first” attitude of the organized labor movement and the Socialists, Harrison provided a “race first” political perspective. He founded the “New Negro Movement,” as a race-conscious, internationalist, mass-based, radical movement for equality, justice, opportunity, and economic power. This “New Negro” movement laid the basis for the Garvey movement. It encouraged mass interest in literature and the arts, and paved the way for publication of Alain Locke’s well-known The New Negro eight years later. Harrison’s mass-based political movement was noticeably different from the more middle-class and apolitical movement associated with Locke.
In 1917, African Americans and others were asked to ‘Make the World Safe for Democracy” by fighting during World War I. In the United States, lynchings, racial segregation and discrimination continued. Harrison founded the Liberty League and the Voice, as a radical alternative to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). The Liberty League aimed at the Black masses beyond “The Talented Tenth”. Its program advocated internationalism, political independence, and class and race consciousness. It called for full equality, federal anti-lynching legislation, enforcement of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments, labor organizing, support for socialist and anti-imperialist causes, armed self-defense, and mass-based political efforts.
In 1918 Harrison briefly served as an organizer for the American Federation of Labor (AFL). He chaired the Negro-American Liberty Congress (co-headed by William Monroe Trotter.) The latter was the major wartime protest effort of African Americans. The Liberty Congress pushed demands against discrimination and racial segregation in the United States. It submitted a petition to the U. S. Congress for federal anti-lynching legislation, which the NAACP did not demand at that time. Harrison commented on domestic and international aspects of the war, writing, “During the war the idea of democracy was widely advertised, especially in the English-speaking world, mainly as a convenient camouflage behind which competing imperialists masked their sordid aims... [however]. those who so loudly proclaimed and formulated the new democratic demands never had the slightest intention of extending the limits or the applications of ‘democracy.’”[11]
The autonomous Liberty Congress effort was undermined by the U.S. Army’s anti-radical Military Intelligence Bureau (MIB) in a campaign that targeted NAACP leader Joel E. Spingarn, W. E. B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington’s former assistant, Emmett Scott. The Liberty Congress protest efforts in wartime can be seen as precursors to the A. Philip Randolph-led March on Washington Movement during World War II, and to the Randolph and Martin Luther King, Jr.-led March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom during the Vietnam War.
In 1919 Harrison edited the monthly New Negro magazine, which was “intended as an organ of the international consciousness of the darker races--especially of the Negro race.” Harrison’s concentration on international matters continued. Over the next several years, he wrote many powerful pieces critical of imperialism and supportive of internationalism. His writings and talks over his last decade revealed a deep understanding of developments in India, China, Africa, Asia, the Islamic world, and the Caribbean. Harrison repeatedly began his analysis of contemporary situations from an international perspective. Though a strong advocate of armed self-defense for African Americans, he also praised the mass-based non-violent efforts of Mohandas K. Gandhi.[12]
The Garvey Movement
In January 1920 Harrison became principal editor of the Negro World, the newspaper of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Over the next eight months, he developed it into the leading race-conscious, radical and literary publication of the day. By the August 1920 UNIA convention, Harrison had grown increasingly critical of Garvey. Harrison criticized Garvey for exaggerations, financial schemes, and desire for empire. In contrast to Garvey, Harrison emphasized that African Americans' principal struggle was in the United States, not in Africa. Harrison did however contribute to the UNIA’s 1920 “Declaration of the Negro Peoples of the World". Though Harrison continued to write for the Negro World into 1922, he looked to develop political alternatives to Garvey.
cole phelps
Superstar
Later years
In the 1920s, after breaking with Garvey, Harrison continued public speaking, writing, and organizing. He lectured on politics history, science, literature, social sciences, international affairs, and the arts for the New York City Board of Education, and was one of the first to use radio to discuss topics in which he had expertise. In early July 1923, he spoke on "The Negro and The Nation" over New York station WEAF. His book and theater reviews and other writings appeared in many of the leading periodicals of the day—including the New York Times, New York Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, New York World, Nation, New Republic, Modern Quarterly, Boston Chronicle, and Opportunity magazine. He openly criticized the Ku Klux Klan and the racist attacks of the "Tulsa Race Riot" of 1921. He worked with various groups, including the Virgin Island Congressional Council, the Democratic Party, the Farmer-Labor Party, the single tax movement, the American Friends Service Committee, the Urban League, the American Negro Labor Congress, and the Workers (Communist) Party (the name at that time of the Communist Party USA).
In 1924 Harrison founded the International Colored Unity League (ICUL), which was his most broadly unitary effort. The ICUL urged Black people to develop “race consciousness” as a defensive measure—to be aware of their racial oppression and to use that awareness to unite, organize, and respond as a group. The ICUL program sought political rights, economic power, and social justice; urged self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and cooperative efforts; and called for the founding of “a Negro state” in the U.S. (not in Africa, as Garvey advocated). In 1927 Harrison edited the ICUL’s Voice of the Negro until shortly before his death that year.
In his last lecture, Harrison told his listeners that he had appendicitis and would be getting surgery. Afterwards, he said he would be giving another lecture. Unfortunately, he died on the operating table, at the age of 44.
Intellectual and educational work
Harrison’s appeal was both mass and individual. His race-conscious mass appeal utilized newspapers, popular lectures, and street-corner talks. This was in contrast to the approaches of Booker T. Washington, who relied on white patrons and a Black political machine, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who focused on the “Talented Tenth of the Negro Race.” Harrison’s appeal (later identified with that of Garvey) was aimed directly at the masses. His class- and race-conscious radicalism, though neglected at some periods, laid out the contours of much subsequent debate and discussion of African-American social activists. It is being increasingly studied.
For many years after his 1927 death, Harrison was much neglected. However, recent scholarship on Harrison’s life and the Columbia University Library's acquisition of his papers show renewed interest.[13] acquisition of the Hubert H. Harrison Papers,[14] and publishing the "Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid",[15] Columbia University plans to make Harrison's writings available on the internet. The forthcoming Columbia University Press two-volume Harrison biography also reflects the growing interest in Harrison’s life and thought.
Legacy and honors
Biographer Jeffrey B. Perry [16] writes that, among the African-American leaders of his era, Harrison was “the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals.” Perry emphasized that Harrison was a key unifying figure between two major trends of African-American struggle—the labor/civil rights trend (identified with Randolph and Owen, and later with Martin Luther King, Jr.) and the race/nationalist trend (identified with Garvey, and later with Malcolm X).[17]
He has been described as "the most distinguished, if not the most well-known, Caribbean radical in the United States in the early twentieth century" by the historian Winston James.[18]
As an intellectual, Harrison was an unrivaled soapbox orator, a featured lecturer for the New York City Board of Education’s prestigious “Trend of the Times” series, a prolific and influential writer, and, reportedly, the first Black person to write regularly published book reviews in history. His efforts in these areas were lauded by both black and white writers, intellectuals, and activists such as Eugene O’Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Henry Miller, Hermie Huiswoud, William Pickens, Bertha Howe, Hodge Kirnon, and Oscar Benson. Harrison aided Black writers and artists, including Charles Gilpin, Andy Razaf, J. A. Rogers, Eubie Blake, Walter Everette Hawkins, Claude McKay, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Lucian B. Watkins, and Augusta Savage. He was a pioneer Black participant in the freethought, and birth control movements; a bibliophile and library popularizer. He created “Poetry for the People” columns in various publications, including the New Negro magazine (1919), Garvey’s Negro World (1920), and the International Colored Unity League’s The Voice of the Negro (1927).[19]
A sampling of his varied work and poetry appears in the edited collection A Hubert Harrison Reader (2001). His collected writings are found in the Hubert H. Harrison Papers (which also contain a detailed Finding Aid) at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. Other writings appear in his two books The Negro and the Nation (1917) and When Africa Awakes. A two-volume biography by Jeffrey B. Perry is being published by Columbia University Press. The first volume, The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918,[20] was published in November 2008 (an excerpt is available online).[20]
In the 1920s, after breaking with Garvey, Harrison continued public speaking, writing, and organizing. He lectured on politics history, science, literature, social sciences, international affairs, and the arts for the New York City Board of Education, and was one of the first to use radio to discuss topics in which he had expertise. In early July 1923, he spoke on "The Negro and The Nation" over New York station WEAF. His book and theater reviews and other writings appeared in many of the leading periodicals of the day—including the New York Times, New York Tribune, Pittsburgh Courier, Chicago Defender, Amsterdam News, New York World, Nation, New Republic, Modern Quarterly, Boston Chronicle, and Opportunity magazine. He openly criticized the Ku Klux Klan and the racist attacks of the "Tulsa Race Riot" of 1921. He worked with various groups, including the Virgin Island Congressional Council, the Democratic Party, the Farmer-Labor Party, the single tax movement, the American Friends Service Committee, the Urban League, the American Negro Labor Congress, and the Workers (Communist) Party (the name at that time of the Communist Party USA).
In 1924 Harrison founded the International Colored Unity League (ICUL), which was his most broadly unitary effort. The ICUL urged Black people to develop “race consciousness” as a defensive measure—to be aware of their racial oppression and to use that awareness to unite, organize, and respond as a group. The ICUL program sought political rights, economic power, and social justice; urged self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and cooperative efforts; and called for the founding of “a Negro state” in the U.S. (not in Africa, as Garvey advocated). In 1927 Harrison edited the ICUL’s Voice of the Negro until shortly before his death that year.
In his last lecture, Harrison told his listeners that he had appendicitis and would be getting surgery. Afterwards, he said he would be giving another lecture. Unfortunately, he died on the operating table, at the age of 44.
Intellectual and educational work
Harrison’s appeal was both mass and individual. His race-conscious mass appeal utilized newspapers, popular lectures, and street-corner talks. This was in contrast to the approaches of Booker T. Washington, who relied on white patrons and a Black political machine, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who focused on the “Talented Tenth of the Negro Race.” Harrison’s appeal (later identified with that of Garvey) was aimed directly at the masses. His class- and race-conscious radicalism, though neglected at some periods, laid out the contours of much subsequent debate and discussion of African-American social activists. It is being increasingly studied.
For many years after his 1927 death, Harrison was much neglected. However, recent scholarship on Harrison’s life and the Columbia University Library's acquisition of his papers show renewed interest.[13] acquisition of the Hubert H. Harrison Papers,[14] and publishing the "Hubert H. Harrison Papers, 1893-1927: Finding Aid",[15] Columbia University plans to make Harrison's writings available on the internet. The forthcoming Columbia University Press two-volume Harrison biography also reflects the growing interest in Harrison’s life and thought.
Legacy and honors
Biographer Jeffrey B. Perry [16] writes that, among the African-American leaders of his era, Harrison was “the most class conscious of the race radicals and the most race conscious of the class radicals.” Perry emphasized that Harrison was a key unifying figure between two major trends of African-American struggle—the labor/civil rights trend (identified with Randolph and Owen, and later with Martin Luther King, Jr.) and the race/nationalist trend (identified with Garvey, and later with Malcolm X).[17]
He has been described as "the most distinguished, if not the most well-known, Caribbean radical in the United States in the early twentieth century" by the historian Winston James.[18]
As an intellectual, Harrison was an unrivaled soapbox orator, a featured lecturer for the New York City Board of Education’s prestigious “Trend of the Times” series, a prolific and influential writer, and, reportedly, the first Black person to write regularly published book reviews in history. His efforts in these areas were lauded by both black and white writers, intellectuals, and activists such as Eugene O’Neill, James Weldon Johnson, Henry Miller, Hermie Huiswoud, William Pickens, Bertha Howe, Hodge Kirnon, and Oscar Benson. Harrison aided Black writers and artists, including Charles Gilpin, Andy Razaf, J. A. Rogers, Eubie Blake, Walter Everette Hawkins, Claude McKay, Solomon Tshekisho Plaatje, Lucian B. Watkins, and Augusta Savage. He was a pioneer Black participant in the freethought, and birth control movements; a bibliophile and library popularizer. He created “Poetry for the People” columns in various publications, including the New Negro magazine (1919), Garvey’s Negro World (1920), and the International Colored Unity League’s The Voice of the Negro (1927).[19]
A sampling of his varied work and poetry appears in the edited collection A Hubert Harrison Reader (2001). His collected writings are found in the Hubert H. Harrison Papers (which also contain a detailed Finding Aid) at the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. Other writings appear in his two books The Negro and the Nation (1917) and When Africa Awakes. A two-volume biography by Jeffrey B. Perry is being published by Columbia University Press. The first volume, The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918,[20] was published in November 2008 (an excerpt is available online).[20]
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