Hubert Harrison - Race Radicalism and The New Negro Movement

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... . 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.’”

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.