Hubert Harrison
Hubert Harrison was born on St. Croix, Danish West Indies in 1883. His mother was a working-class woman, and his biological father was a slave. Growing up in poverty on the island, Harrison learned first-hand the struggles of his race.
In 1900, as a 17-year-old orphan, with nothing but the clothes on his back, he arrived in New York City, and immediately was confronted with the atmosphere of intense racial oppression of African Americans existing in the United States. Harrison was especially horrified and shocked by the lynchings and virulent white supremacy that was then reaching a peak in these years in the South.
Working low-paying service jobs, he attended high school at night, and read and educated himself.
Over the ensuing decades, he rose to become one of the most influential people in America. Writer, orator, educator, critic, editor of “Negro World”, political activist in the Socialist Party, founder of the New Negro Movement, his work had an immense influence not only upon his own time, but upon the times and people that followed.
Author, journalist and historian Joel A. Rogers wrote:
“Harrison was not only the foremost Afro-American intellect of his time, but one of America’s greatest minds. No one worked more seriously and indefatigably to enlighten his fellow men.”
At the core of Harrison’s life,was an unrelenting devotion to justice. Racism and white supremacy were his targets.
Harrision once wrote:
“Politically, the Negro is the touchstone of the modern democratic idea. The presence of the Negro puts our democracy to the proof and reveals the falsity of it…True democracy and equality implies a revolution…startling even to think of.”
Through his writing and lectures and social involvement, he labored unrelentingly to educate the masses, and to give voice and dignity to African-American men and women everywhere.
He wrote:
“America is a great experiment in democracy…unique in the history of the world…And the great American experiment is to determine for the future whether we can make out of the welter of races and nations one people, one culture, one democracy. It is confessedly a hard task, but it can be done, and the grounds of that faith rest on the known facts of the present and the past.”
