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Considered more race conscious than A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen and more class conscious than Marcus Garvey, Hubert Harrison is the key link in the ideological unity of the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement—the labor and civil rights trend associated with Martin Luther King Jr., and the race and nationalist trend associated with Malcolm X. (Randolph and Garvey were, respectively, the direct links to King marching on Washington, with Randolph at his side, and to Malcolm, whose father was a Garveyite preacher and whose mother was a writer for Garvey’s Negro World, speaking militantly and proudly on Harlem’s Lenox Avenue.)
As the center of national Black leadership shifted from Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee, Alabama, headquarters to New York City in the era of the First World War, Harlem increasingly became an “international Negro Mecca” and “the center of radical Black thought.” In this period, Harrison earned the title, ascribed to him by A. Philip Randolph and others, “the father of Harlem radicalism.”
During the 1910s and 1920s he was either the creator, or among the founders, of “almost every important development originating in Negro Harlem — from the Negro Manhood Movement to political representation in public office, from collecting Negro books to speaking on the streets, from demanding Federal control over lynching to agitation for Negroes on the police force.” He was also a key figure in developing Caribbean radicalism; he exhibited a rare willingness to learn from the peoples and cultures of Africa; and his (often unattributed) ideas and writings from this period significantly shaped the contours of radical Black thought on matters of race and class in the twentieth century.
Harrison was not only a political radical, however. Rogers described him as an “Intellectual Giant and Free-Lance Educator,” whose contributions were wide-ranging, innovative, and influential.
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