The other night, a wonderful event took place at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. “It ought to have attracted as large an audience as Beyoncé would have,” insisted my friend Jean Garret. “At least it should have in Harlem. We’re supposed to be the African American Cultural Capital?”
Instead, only 50 fortunate people experienced an invaluable presentation made as a part of the Schomburg’s ongoing centenary celebration. Dr. Brian Kwoba discussed his new book, “Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism,” with the New York Public Library’s Dr. Brian P. Jones (author of “Black History Is for Everyone”). It was a revelation.
Harrison was an adroit journalist who wrote for the Tattler and the Amsterdam News, right? Yes, I thought that I certainly knew who Harrison was — but, I soon realized, I did not. Kwoba’s book discloses something, someone, astonishing and unlike anything or any individual we’ve ever encountered before. Imagine someone who’s “uneducated,” yet an autodidactic genius. Picture a person speaking six languages with the fluency of a native and self-taught: someone, it turns out, who’s the most brilliant person you know of.
We learned that, besides being so extraordinarily gifted, Harrison was frank and fastidious, a person of great integrity, one who was largely uncompromising. A person like that, one might reasonably think, ought to have been an insufferable scold and widely disliked, but that was not Harrison at all. This Black intellectual-activist, mounting stepladders to address crowds at street corners, speaking from pulpits and lecture hall lecterns, free thinking and an unapologetic agnostic, preached a gospel of the equality of humanity, which he maintained, necessitated a “kaleidoscopic radicalism.”
Nor did Harrison shrink from critiquing injustices of every sort, be it racial segregation, imperialist avarice, or even religious oppression. “Early on,” Kwoba explained, “he came to view colonialism as inextricably linked to racism. Similarly, sexual convention, with public control of private morality, to him was but another aspect of capitalism’s stranglehold on the working class.”
Harrison’s principal belief — that white supremacy is central to capitalist rule — finds Kwoba in full accord with his subject. He calls Harrison, a “Black griot of the Harlem Acropolis.”
With a Kenyan father and white English mother, Kwoba is so like Harrison that he once lost his job as a high school teacher. His infraction? Teaching about subjects that helped to radicalize his students. Following Harrison’s lead, he had sought to enlighten these youth about the international interconnectedness of evil. He showed them how both in the past and today, ongoing and recurrent genocide in the Gaza Strip, West Bank, or Lebanon bears little difference from other atrocities toward people of color elsewhere.
Hubert Harrison (1883–1927) was born at St. Croix in the Danish West Indies. The foundational formal primary training he obtained in the Caribbean corresponded to a ninth-grade education in the U.S. At 17, he moved to New York, where, working low-paying jobs as an elevator operator and bellhop, he attended night school to complete his secondary studies. A voracious, even avaricious reader, his steady progress and widespread intellectual engagement saw Harrison addressed respectfully as “Professor” and “Doctor” for the remainder of his life — despite his lack of either an undergraduate, graduate, or postgraduate degree of any kind.
Opposing capitalism and imperialism, Harrison emphasized that “politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea”; that, “as long as the Color Line exists, all the perfumed protestations of Democracy on the part of the white race were … downright lying … the cant of Democracy,” he wrote, is “… intended as dust in the eyes of white voters; that … capitalist imperialism which mercilessly exploits the darker races for its own financial purposes is the enemy which we must combine to fight.”
Kwoba and Jones laid out how for Harrison, race came eventually to matter first and most, with class coming in at a close second. With such an idealistic outlook, it was almost inevitable that sooner or later, Harrison was destined to fight with many, even with those who began as his allies.
Since that was never the case with America’s most renowned Black leader, the great accommodationist Booker T. Washington. There’s no surprise that men with such diverging points of view soon came to metaphoric blows. Condemning Washington’s self-dealing in the press as corrupt, Washington returned the favor, seeing to it through his well-placed white Republican friends that Harrison was summarily dismissed as a postal worker.
If Washington had taken exception to being put on blast for accepting cash in exchange for muzzling and pacifying the poor Black masses, Harrison’s impact on W. E. B. DuBois was, initially at least, more harmonious. Indeed, based both on Harrison’s teachings and his own life experience, DuBois became an ever more fierce radical, to an extent that he might even be considered Harrison’s disciple.
In 1917, with Marcus Garvey, things were different. On the brink of despair, contemplating returning home to Jamaica, Harrison and Garvey met, inaugurating what amounted almost to a mentoring tutorial. Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association happily adapted Harrison’s crusade of “race consciousness” and “racial solidarity.” This collaboration comprised America’s most militant opposition to resurgent white supremacy, partly prompted by greater race contact because of World War I.
At first, the connection was mutually beneficial. Harrison’s belligerent anti-Christianity was considerably ameliorated as he came to be more strategic about meeting Christians where they were. Gradually, though, he came to better appreciate Garvey’s penchant for aggrandizement as a function of his own internalized oppression. Garvey, he realized soon enough, aped aristocracy and its accoutrements for the same opportunity and other exploitative benefits as Europeans. Unable to pretend, he and Harrison had parted ways well before Garvey went to prison.
In dramatic contrast to Garvey’s red black and green flag, Harrison’s banner was designed to lead a fight to the finish for freedom. It was black, brown, and yellow, meant to physically reflect people of color whose only chance of overcoming efforts by elites to keep them in check was alliance. No matter any superficial difference, ultimately, sharing interests in common behooved them to achieve success by joining forces.
For me, a highlight of the discussion was when Kwoba told Jones of Harrison’s acceptance of both equal rights for women and of homosexuality. Like ancestral Africans’ sexual fluidity, the spectacle and ambiguity of the annual Hamilton Lodge cross-dressing “Faggot’s Ball” fascinated him. He learned how, in accordance with ancient tribal custom in Africa, homophobia, the denigration of a class of people revered as sacred, is anti-African. Married from 1909 until his untimely death in 1927 (from appendicitis), the father of four daughters and a son, Harrison even came to feel that the idea of compulsory monogamy was unrealistic. Like celibacy, he found it to be not a signifier of morality, but merely a mechanism of social control.
Kwoba grew up in Boulder, Colorado, and earned his undergraduate degree in philosophy at Cornell University. He garnered other degrees besides, leading all the way to a doctoral history degree at Oxford. Presently Kwoba is an associate professor of history and director of African and African American Studies at the University of Memphis. Where Hubert Harrison had no such academic credentials, Kwoba’s is a life rich with academic accomplishment and many diplomas.
Some might conclude both men are quite different, that each is aberrant and an exception among people of African descent. However, because both cultivated an interior life of infinite expansiveness, with each determined to leave their world more enlightened, enhanced, and a better place. In reality, they are one and the same. Harrison was a liberator come to lead the downtrodden from ignorance. Kwoba is his beautiful successor, self-assured and self-selected. Please join me. I delight to bask in their aura.