Hubert Harrison - Career

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 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. 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 what he said were 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.