Hubert Harrison - Legacy and Honors

Legacy and Honors

Biographer Jeffrey B. Perry 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).

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.

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).

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, was published in November 2008. (An excerpt is available online).