Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism

“Hubert Harrison is the most significant black democratic socialist of early twentieth-century America. Jeffrey B. Perry has brought his thought and practice to life in a powerful and persuasive manner.” — Cornel West, Princeton University

“Jeffrey Perry’s significant biography lives up to the promise of its title. Finally, the voice of this major Harlem Renaissance progressive is to be heard again loud and clear.” — David Levering Lewis, New York University, and author of a two-volume biography of W.E.B. Du Bois

This is just some of the praise that Jeffrey B. Perry’s extraordinary new biography Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918 has already earned. Perry’s work recounts and recovers the legacy and life and times of Hubert Harrison, a thinker and activist who influenced Marcus Garvey, Du Bois, and other important political and cultural figures of the Harlem Renaissance.

Please let me know if you would like a review copy of the book, would like to interview the author or have Jeffrey Perry contribute to your site.

For more information, you can also read the book’s introduction or read Jeffrey Perry’s postings on the Columbia University Press blog, here and here. (Please feel free to link to or excerpt from these materials.)

More on Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918:

Hubert Harrison was an immensely skilled writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist who, more than any other political leader of his era, combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a coherent political radicalism. Harrison’s ideas profoundly influenced “New Negro” militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his synthesis of class and race issues is a key unifying link between the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement: the labor- and civil-rights-based work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist platform associated with Malcolm X.

The foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York, Harrison was also the founder of the “New Negro” movement, the editor of Negro World, and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement. He was a highly praised journalist and critic (reportedly the first regular Black book reviewer), a freethinker and early proponent of birth control, a supporter of Black writers and artists, a leading public intellectual, and a bibliophile who helped transform the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture. His biography offers profound insights on race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.

Thank you for your time and I hope you and your readers will be interested in this major contribution to African American history.

Philip Leventhal, Associate Editor, Web Marketing Manager, Columbia University Press, 61 W. 62nd Street, New York, NY 10023, 212.459.0600 ext. 7159, pl2164@columbia.edu, http://www.cup.columbia.edu