Public Employee Press

Book Talk
The father of Harlem’s radicals

The writer and union activist Hubert Harrison was one of Harlem’s most influential radical voices in the early 1900s. His analyses of racism and the exploitation of workers had a profound impact on important historical leaders, including Marcus Garvey, A. Phillip Randolph and Arturo Schomburg. Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, called Harrison “the father of Harlem Radicals.”

Harrison, however, was not as well known as those he influenced. He may get more credit for his ideas now that the independent scholar Jeffrey Perry has published a collection of his writing and a biography.

Perry visited DC 37 Jan. 27 to discuss his recent book “Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918,” in a program sponsored by the Education Fund’s Authors Talk Committee.

“He is the clearest thinker on race and class that I’ve come across,” said Perry, as he began his presentation to an audience of over 80 union members and friends. “He believed that whites did not benefit from racism.”

A popular soapbox orator who captivated listeners on the street corners of Harlem, Harrison spoke six languages, wrote for many Black publications, became the first Black reviewer for The New York Times Review of Books and was the leading Black organizer and theoretician of the Socialist Party.

Perry, who preserved and inventoried Harrison’s papers and helped place them in Columbia University’s library of rare book manuscripts, also edited the “Hubert Harrison Reader.” Both are available in the Ed Fund Library.

“We have to tell these stories as accurately as possible because that is what we are going to learn from,” said Perry, before taking questions from the audience.