Hubert Harrison

Hubert Henry Harrison was born on the twenty-seventh of April 1883 at Estate Concordia on the Danish West Indian island of St. Croix, in what is now the U.S. Virgin Islands. He was the son of Adolphus Harrison, a Crucian who had been born enslaved and who labored all his life without ever owning or renting land, and of Cecilia Elizabeth Haines, a working-class woman of Barbadian descent. His was a childhood of modest means and Anglican schooling, and by his teens he was orphaned.

In 1900, at seventeen, Harrison emigrated to New York and joined kin already in the city. He supported himself through menial work — as an elevator operator, bellhop, and messenger — while reading voraciously and educating himself into one of the most formidable minds of his generation. Settling in Harlem, he rose as the leading Black organizer within the Socialist Party of America between 1912 and 1914, until his insistence that the party confront the distinct plight of African American workers led to his break with it.

In June 1917 he founded the Liberty League of Negro-Americans and its newspaper The Voice — the first organization and the first paper of the race-conscious "New Negro" movement. From his street-corner rostrum at "the Campus," on Lenox Avenue at 135th Street, he lectured on literature, science, and African history to crowds who knew no equal to him as an orator.

A. Philip Randolph called him "the father of Harlem radicalism," and the historian J. A. Rogers named him "the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time." He died on the seventeenth of December 1927, at forty-four. Let his name stand among the honored: the self-taught griot whose voice on a Harlem corner helped awaken a people to their own dignity.