Chapter Three: HUBERT H. HARRISON, THE FATHER OF HARLEM RADICALISM
American socialists had confronted (and more often evaded or obfuscated) the problem of race since the 1830s. At the Unity Convention which founded the Socialist party (SP) in 1901, one of the three Afro-American delegates proposed a resolution on the Negro question, which the convention adopted. The "Negro Resolution" acknowledged the "peculiar position in the working class and in society at large" occupied by Afro-Americans, deplored the "disfranchisement and violence" by which blacks were victimized, and invited blacks "to membership and fellowship with us in the world movement for economic emancipation." The Resolution proclaimed the identity of interest of all workers of whatever race or nationality and declared that "all social and race prejudices" originate in "ancient economic causes which still endure," namely, ruling-class exploitation of workers. However, the SP expended precious little effort in recruiting Afro-Americans. Indeed, prominent SP officials and publications issued racist screeds against blacks and justified segregation in the SP on the grounds of both political expediency and allegedly eternal biological laws. Partly for these reasons, Socialists recruited only a few African Americans, the most prominent of whom were ministers loosely affiliated with the Christian Socialist movement.[1] Secular intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois had flirted with Socialism and even briefly joined the party in 1911; but his position as a high NAACP official and editor of the Crisis preoccupied him, and he had no intention of sparking a mass Socialist movement among Afro-Americans.[2]
In 1911-1912, however (one of intellectual ferment marked by SP controversies with Socialist-feminists and the Industrial Workers of the World), Hubert H. Harrison, a West Indian immigrant and a pioneer black Marxist, envisioned a mass Socialist movement in Harlem.[3] Harrison ingeniously refurbished Marxist doctrine. He explained how white racism, while originating in class oppression, became an autonomous force not reducible to class or economic considerations; he elaborated a specific appeal to black voters while simultaneously arguing that white working-class and Socialist self-interest demanded an assault upon white privilege. Yet his efforts shipwrecked upon the shoals of American Federation of Labor (AFL) racism, the cultural and political conservatism of the SP (which favored the racist AFL over the egalitarian IWW), and divisions of class, color, and culture within the Afro-American community.
Harrison was born in 1883 into a farm family on an English-speaking island in the Dutch West Indies. Devastated when his parents died in quick succession during his early teens, he joined his sister in New York in 1900, where he worked at the menial jobs available to blacks while attending high school at night. An exceptional student, he won praise from his principal and was even noticed by a daily New York newspaper. He was soon active in the lyceums sponsored by the interracial St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church and the largely black St. Mark's Episcopal Church, where he exulted in the friendly, but rigorous, give-and-take of debate. In 1904, when he was twenty-one, Harrison wrote the New York Times an eloquent and learned letter denouncing that paper's racist editorial policy. In 1907 he passed the civil service examination and secured work at the Post Office, an excellent job compared with those of most blacks. Although the political corruption and antiunion animus of the Post Office alienated Harrison, he won regular promotions and pay increases. Meanwhile, he read voraciously and eagerly participated in the New York intellectual scene, initially with letters and articles in mainstream white publications.[4]
Harrison's wide-ranging erudition and skeptical intelligence won him the epithet "the black Socrates." Thinking of his own course in self-education and the training in critical thinking afforded by the church lyceums, he urged that blacks acquire education "not only in school and in college, but in books and newspapers, in market-places, institutions, and movements. Prepare by knowing; and never think you know until you have listened to ten others who know differently--and have survived the shock." He extolled "education which we get out of school for ourselves" as "the only one that is really worth while," and told his audiences that "the best college is that on your bookshelf: the best education is that on the inside of your own head."[5]
A renowned "soap boxer," Harrison used the streets as his lecture hall and captivated audiences on Wall Street as well as in Harlem. "His auditors would stand hours at a time shifting from foot to foot, entranced," contemporary black author J.A. Rogers noted. John Carroll, a racist Southern white, exclaimed that his cherished feelings of superiority had evaporated after he heard Harrison speak. Carroll was amazed that a large, respectable white crowd regularly attended Harrison's Sunday lectures. Harrison awed his audiences with his professorial demeanor, his mastery of history, and his cool, logical arguments, so different from the typical soap-box orator. An autodidact, he lacked the cachet of Du Bois's advanced degrees, yet was perhaps for that reason a more independent and iconoclastic thinker. His force of personality intimidated even Marcus Garvey, although it also ensured that his crusade for justice would be for the most part a lonely one. Unspecified and yet reportedly major blunders wrecked his own organizations and publications; predictably, Harrison did not function well as a subordinate under the supervision of others. Harrison's unique qualities enabled him to ignite two of the most significant movements in Afro-American intellectual history: the class-based, orthodox Socialism associated with A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and the Messenger; and (in this case a revivification rather than creation) the race-based, black nationalist ideology embodied in Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its publication, the Negro World.[6]
Harrison began his career as a national writer, publicist, and organizer in Harlem in 1908, years before the massive influx of blacks from the South and the West Indies began. Harrison attacked Christianity in the Truth Seeker, a rationalist publication edited and read almost exclusively by whites, and joined the overwhelmingly white Socialist party. In a letter to a white New York newspaper he assailed Booker T. Washington as a white-appointed misleader of blacks and as a dictator whose "Tuskegee Machine" throttled dissent. Harrison argued that the recent Baltimore ghetto ordinance (which segregated blacks into specified districts), and the Georgia railroad hate strike of 1909 (directed against skilled black workers), decisively disproved Washington's gospel of wealth. Discipline, hard work, and the accumulation of property would generate white repression and violence rather than acceptance. Corroborating Harrison's charges against Washington's dictatorial methods, Washington and his New York lieutenants engineered Harrison's dismissal from his Post Office job--an economic catastrophe from which Harrison never recovered.[7] Harrison subsequently scratched out a living as a Socialist lecturer and part-time instructor at the SP's Rand School and, later, the Modern School (loosely affiliated with the anarchist movement).
Harrison's early Socialist writings in the New York Call and the International Socialist Review broached many of the arguments later elaborated by Randolph and Owen in the Messenger. Much like Socialist-feminist critics of SP orthodoxy, Harrison subtly altered and expanded cherished Socialist doctrines as he adapted them for his own purposes--in his case, increased SP attention to racial injustices. His creative refashioning of the doctrine of economic determinism is one major example. Addressing an overwhelmingly white readership, Harrison argued that Socialism entailed racial egalitarianism and that racism severely vitiated the labor movement. Harrison proclaimed that economic causes constituted "the real root of all race difficulties." Capitalists did not enslave blacks because they thought that blacks were inferior; rather, they evolved ideologies of racial inferiority to justify their depredations. The Spanish, "having starved and flogged and murdered all the available natives of Santo Domingo and the adjacent islands... felt the necessity of a fresh supply of people who could be made to work and produce wealth for them." In a restatement of the orthodox doctrine of economic determinism that nonetheless significantly broadened its scope beyond the simply economic, Harrison argued that "the ideas dominant at any stage of human culture" were "created and shaped by the changing conditions of society. Whenever large groups of men find profit in injustice to other men they will evolve a system of ethics to reconcile their minds to that injustice." Systems of racial oppression had their own histories "much as the class struggle and the system of production have theirs."[8]
Economic causes were the dominant rather than the sole determinants of history, Harrison said. "Purely cultural causes played an important and impelling part" in some major historical events, and "forced attempts to apply a doctrine as sound as the doctrine of historical materialism in certain details and under certain conditions where it does not apply can only serve to throw unmerited reproach upon that doctrine itself." Racism, Harrison strongly implied, was only partly derived from the relations of production; it also had autonomous or semi-autonomous origins, and might continue after the conditions that gave rise to it had ended. Yet Harrison's insistence that social relations are grounded in objective reality and are not explicable "on the basis of the thinking or feeling of either party" underestimated the impact that ideas and feelings (however much these stem from, as well as generate, social arrangements) have on the construction of race, and even of class.[9]
For Harrison, racism stemmed from capitalist exploitation rather than preceding it. Whenever one group has exploited another, "it has despised that group which it has put under subjection. And the degree of contempt has always been in direct proportion to the degree of exploitation." The ruling class diffused its own contempt for its victims among the general population, "for the ruling class has always determined what the social ideals and moral ideas of society should be..... Race prejudice, then, is the fruit of economic subjection and a fixed inferior economic status.... The Negro problem is essentially an economic problem with its roots in slavery past and present." Widespread interracial sex, enforced segregation, and widespread race-baiting belied the white supremacists' claim that racism was instinctual. Many a slaveowner forcibly bred with slave women and "sold for cash the children which were his and hers." If racism were innate, "it would not be necessary to teach it to children by separate schools or to adults by separate cars" or "bolster it up by legislative enactments." Racism seemed universal and innate because the race-mongering press made its readers "think that everyone else thinks and feels in the same way.... Since a man's individual opinions are mostly derived from the social atmosphere, it is easy to see how people who grow up reading such newspapers, surrounded by others who are subjected to the same influences, get to believe that this carefully built up antipathy is innate."[10]
Prejudice, Harrison continued, was "diligently fostered by those who have something to gain by it." Capitalists profited directly from the lower wages paid blacks and also used racism as "a club for the other workers." Striking whites confronted "the cold fact that other wage slaves are doing as hard work, or harder, and doing it for less.... [Th]eir strike can always be broken by making use of that same body of workers whom the others have thus been breeding artificially as strikebreakers." The capitalist media poisoned the minds of white workers with incessant racist propaganda even while capitalists "subsidized Negro leaders, Negro editors and preachers and politicians to build up in the breasts of black people those sentiments which will make them subservient to [the capitalists'] will." Black workers, therefore, menaced white workers much as did "the army of the unemployed... as the craft unions have begun to find out." Referring to the brutalizing of IWW leaders and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Harrison further claimed that cruelties inflicted upon blacks inured whites to other atrocities such as "the jailing of innocent labor leaders and the murder of working girls in a fire trap factory."[11]
Once again using familiar Socialist concepts to further racial justice, Harrison exhorted his readers that the SP was "the party of the working class" whose "historic mission" was "to unite the workers of the world" and "to put an end to the exploitation of one group by another, whether that group be social, economic, or racial. This is the position of Marx, Kautsky, and every great leader of the Socialist movement." The SP must champion "the cause of all sections of down-trodden humanity." Harrison exclaimed that "as soon as Socialism trims and temporizes it dies as Socialism, whatever else it may be transmogrified into." The SP's choice was between Socialism or "Southernism."[12]
Harrison demanded that the SP learn Negro history, advocate black rights in every sphere of life, and repudiate its pro-AFL policy. Whites must "learn a great many things from the negro--not only of his racial psychology; but also of his history and of his present achievements in the various lines of human endeavor." Whites must first "unlearn much" because they know "a great deal that isn't so." Harrison, therefore, educated white Socialists about the egregious abuses inflicted specifically upon black workers: lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow, denial of educational opportunities, intensified economic oppression, and the rape of black women. Utilizing the reformist Socialist faith in the ballot, Harrison said that the SP must champion black voting rights (as it did women's suffrage) because "political rights are the only sure protection and guarantee of economic rights." Treading on dangerous ground, Harrison addressed the bugaboo of "social equality," pointing out that racist structures "dictate to other white people that they shall not choose black friends." Finally, Harrison demanded a substantial departure from the SP's policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of unions, demanding that it condemn "the suicidal policy of certain trades unions in excluding negroes from membership."[13]
Answering critics who objected that a focus on racial injustice would detract from the struggle for Socialism itself, Harrison pointed out that because the SP championed reforms such as old age pensions, the socialization of essential services, and other reforms, neglect of racial issues would constitute rank hypocrisy. Harrison concluded that "the mission of the Socialist Party is to free the working class from exploitation, and since the Negro is the most ruthlessly exploited working class group in America, the duty of the Party to champion his cause is as clear as day." Perhaps disguising his fervent wish as historical prophecy--and certainly allowing logical reasoning to trump historical experience--Harrison claimed that Socialism inevitably entailed racial liberation. "If the overturning of the present system should elevate a new class into power; a class to which the negro belongs; a class which has nothing to gain by the degradation of any portion of itself; that class will remove the economic reason for the degradation of the negro. That is the promise of Socialism, the all-inclusive working-class movement" in whose triumph "lies the only hope of salvation from this second slavery" for both races. Harrison told white Socialists that Theodore Roosevelt's Brownsville Affair betrayal of blacks (Roosevelt had dishonorably discharged without trial Afro-American soldiers accused of fomenting disorder), combined with Taft's unceremonious purging of many blacks from government service, had greatly alienated black voters, who held the balance of power in six northern states. "This establishes two things: that the Negro vote can be got and that it is worth getting."[14]
Once again echoing themes prominent in contemporaneous Socialist-feminist philosophy, Harrison argued that equality for blacks necessitated special consideration because of the unique history, conditions, and sensibilities of blacks. Negroes were not culpable for their ignorance of Socialism. "Behind the veil of the color line none of the great world-movements for social betterment" have penetrated. Furthermore, intelligent blacks "are suspicious of Socialism as of everything that comes from the white people of America. They have seen that every movement for the extension of democracy has broken down as soon as it reached the color line"--including political democracy, religion, public schooling, and the civil service. Socialism was the same for all people but "the minds of all these [different groups] are not the same and are not to be approached in the same way." Isolated "behind the color line," blacks were "somewhat more difficult of approach" and required "special work." Like the foreign language federations and the women's clubs recognized by the SP, blacks required a "special literature.... special forms of address.... a special equipment." Black organizers and speakers knew "the psychology of the Negro.... [They] know the people, their history, their manner of life, and modes of thinking and feeling" and could illustrate Socialist principles with arguments based upon "the Negro's own history and experience." Speakers "who are themselves Negroes [and] to whom these considerations come by second nature" could "drive home an argument with such effectiveness that white Socialists must despair of achieving." Harrison adduced his experiences in the 1911 mayoral campaign as evidence. Even black Republicans and Democrats eagerly accepted a pamphlet, "The Colored Man's Case as Socialism Sees It," by the black minister George Slater, Jr., and "listen[ed] to our street speaker." They also liked a Debs pamphlet with its illustrated comparison of chattel and wage slavery. Nor did such a special racial appeal alienate whites, who comprised between a third and a half of his audiences.[15]
Insisting that white Socialists direct a special appeal to Afro-Americans, Harrison reminded his comrades that "so far, no particular effort has been made to carry the message of Socialism" to blacks. All the rest of the poor have had the gospel preached to them, for the party has carried on special propaganda work among the Poles, Slovaks, Finns, Hungarians, and Lithuanians. Here are ten million Americans, all proletarians, hanging on the ragged edge of the impending class conflict. Left to themselves they may become as great a menace to our advancing army as is the army of the unemployed, and for precisely the same reason: they can be used against us, as the craft unions have begun to find out.... On grounds of common sense and enlightened self-interest it would be well for the Socialist party to begin to organize the Negroes of America in reference to the class struggle. The capitalists of America are not waiting.... Is it to be the white half of the working class against the black half, or all of the working class?[16]
For Harrison, only Socialism could solve the specific problems of Afro-Americans. He addressed this argument partly to whites--demonstrating that blacks were a natural Socialist constituency, who must be courted--and partly to Negroes themselves. When addressing blacks, Harrison subtly modified the economic interpretation of racism which he expounded to white Socialists, and placed slightly more emphasis on racism's cultural underpinnings. Racism was "the one great fact for the Negro in America" both in its own right and because it compounded "the great labor problem with which all working-people are faced." Using an historical argument, Harrison traced the origins of African slavery to "the desire of certain Europeans to acquire wealth without working.... The white aristocrat did not buy black slaves because he had a special hatred or contempt for anything black, nor because he believed that Negroes were inferior to white people. On the contrary, he bought them precisely because, as working cattle, they were superior to whites." In claiming that this superiority stemmed directly from their distinct racial identity, however, Harrison explicitly accorded race a semi-autonomous origin and a continuing relevance independent of its contemporary class basis. Race did after all facilitate the enslavement of Africans, and made their present liberation more difficult. "Being of alien blood, these black people were outside of the social and political system to which they were introduced, and, quite naturally, beyond the range of such sympathies as helped to soften the hard brutalities of the system." Because any exploiting class "develops the psychology of its own advantage and creates insensibly the ethics which will justify" its exploitation, slaveowners "naturally came--without any self-deception, to see that slavery was right," and spread their ethos throughout society by their control of "the public instruments for the diffusion of ideas."[17]
Negroes were, Harrison said, "the most brutally exploited, and, therefore, the most despised section of the laboring class." Racial difference facilitated and intensified exploitation originally based upon economic motives alone; and such exacerbated oppression further identified blacks with degradation and servitude and thus reinforced the racial chasm that had originally facilitated the harsher exploitation. Jewish, Irish, and Italian workers had been similarly victimized by racial prejudice. "In every one of these cases it was the condition of the people--at the bottom as despised, exploited wage-slaves--that was responsible for the race-prejudice. And it is just so in the black man's case, with this difference: that his color marks what he once was, and even though he should wear a dress suit every evening and own an automobile or farm he can always be picked out and reminded."[18]
Harrison's analysis recognized that the forms, meanings, and intensity of racism changed with evolving economic circumstances. "Wherever the system was most profitable, the belief that the slave was not human was strongest"; the cotton gin bolstered a tottering slave system. Class society pitted individuals and groups against one another in the remorseless struggle for jobs; as long as this avoidable "economic fear survives, so long will economic competition create race prejudice." Harrison emphasized that "when this system of vicarious production disappears, the problem which is its consequence will disappear also." Socialism would not "at once remove race prejudice--unless it remove ignorance at the same time," but it would "remove racial injustice and lighten the black man's burden."[19] Harrison said (pace many white Socialists) that Socialism, however necessary, would not itself eradicate racism.
Socialism would not only strike at the root causes of racial prejudice; it would also abolish wage slavery, an even greater affliction for blacks than the chattel slavery it replaced. "Under chattel slavery it was to the interest of the owner to give the slave work and to keep him from starving to death," Harrison said. "Under wage slavery, if the man [is thrown] out of work the employer doesn't care; that is no loss to him; and if the man dies there are millions of others to take his place." Wage slavery "pays better. Pays the capitalist I mean.... Today no chain is necessary to bind us to the tools.... This system doesn't care whether the slaves who are bound in this new way are white or black."[20]
Blacks, therefore, suffered doubly from capitalism, both as workers and as members of an especially oppressed race. "Now ask yourself whether you haven't a very special interest in changing the present system.... It pays the capitalist to keep the workers divided. So he creates and keeps alive these prejudices. He gets [workers] to believe that their interests are different. Then he can use one half to club the other half with." White "privileges" condition white victims to "forget their own condition: as long as they can be made to look down upon another class" they remain content in their bogus and degraded "superiority." Harrison told blacks that Socialism was "right" and "inevitable. It is right because any order of things in which those who work have least while those who work them have most, is wrong" and inevitable because starvation amidst plenty would generated revolution. Appealing to black experience of racist newspapers and public figures, Harrison said that politicians lie about Socialism "just as they have to tell lies about you. They lie about it because they don't want you to know what it really is, just as they lie about you because they don't want people to know what you really are."[21]
Harrison emphasized the necessity of a united working class. "If we feel that we can advance to the conquest of capitalism with one part of the proletariat against us, let us say so," he exhorted Socialists. "But I haven't the slightest doubt that our program requires all the proletariat, and we are all aware of that. Let us act, then, in the light of that knowledge and add to the strength of an organized, all-inclusive, class conscious working class movement."[22]
Harrison arrived on the scene just as IWW leader William Haywood was demanding significant changes in the SP philosophy and strategy and the Socialist women's articulation of Socialist feminism was encountering significant resistance. Into this cauldron Harrison dropped his own demand for a Colored Socialist Club (CSC). Harrison's proposal, adopted by Local New York, was ambiguous. Harrison intended that the CSC, led by and mostly composed of blacks, would initiate blacks into SP ideology and tactics; blacks would then join their regular branches as full members. In this formulation, the CSC resembled the local women's committees. In another version, however, the CSC would resemble the SP's language federations, established at the behest of immigrant groups who spoke little or no English and who focused their SP activities in their separate federations. The New York Call's coverage of the CSC emphasized the latter interpretation, mentioning plans "for the immediate organization of a new branch consisting of colored members."[23]
Partly because of this ambiguity, Harrison's proposal drew criticism from other blacks. Long-time Socialist George Frazier Miller, the Brooklyn pastor of a church composed mostly of Haitian immigrants, conditionally approved the CSC as "an expedient of education" if "new-made Socialists join[ed] the locals of their respective assembly districts" after an initial period of education. But if white Socialists expected that a segregated CSC would enable them to "recoil from [the] contamination" of blacks, then such a ploy would only alienate Afro-Americans. To assuage such fears, Harrison clarified his stance in the final installment of a five-part New York Call series, stating that when enough blacks were recruited, "the colored Comrades can be drafted into those branches in whose territory they happen to live, thereby increasing both the finances and the working force of those branches."[24]
The next day, a letter (obviously written before Harrison's clarification), from Du Bois, then a SP member, condemned a segregated CSC as a violation of "the most fundamental principles underlying Socialism." Integrated locals would not only inculcate the principles of Socialism in black members, but, "what is much more important, they and their white fellows would come to know each other as human beings." Blacks sometimes acquiesced in separate institutions "because they wish to avoid insult and oppression. There should be, and is as of yet no such barrier in the Socialist locals and, therefore, the argument that negroes want separate locals is absurd." In response, Harrison chided Du Bois for confusing SP locals with branches and said that "as Dr. Du Bois himself states, the treatment historically accorded to black people in America has bred in them distrust and suspicion to such an extent that they cannot be effectively approached by the average Socialist branch. The word must be brought to them, in part at least, by the men of their own race and the work must be done where negroes 'most do congregate'.... No segregation is intended and if it were I should be the most unlikely person to be selected for such work."[25]
Harrison's career as an SP official was short and stormy. Briefly appointed special Negro organizer for the CSC in late 1911, he was arrested in connection with a street speech in late December, but released when his SP attorney proved the charges false. By early 1912, however, Local New York, dismayed by Harrison's lack of concrete achievements and by the opposition of many blacks, abolished the CSC. Harrison opposed this move, and also directly criticized SP attitudes on race. He reminded white socialists of the horrifying experiences of Theresa Malkiel, whose exposé of virulent white SP racism towards blacks in the South had appeared in the New York Call on August 21, 1911. (Malkiel, a prominent Socialist-Feminist and labor activist, had recently toured the South and found that vicious white racism among SP members--a racism condoned and even justified by many Northern comrades--had undermined her efforts to recruit blacks). Despite Harrison's protests, the SP kept a virulently racist Texas paper (the Rebel) on its list of approved publications. The New York Call, while publishing Harrison's articles, usually refused his request that the "N" in "Negro" be capitalized, taking refuge in standard practice (a dubious argument for a Socialist enterprise) and defensively claiming that, if it capitalized Negro, it must also capitalize White. (The International Socialist Review capitalized Negro for the first time in Harrison's third article for that publication.)[26]
The SP's watershed 1912 National Convention also disappointed Harrison. He asked that the convention demand enfranchisement of Southern blacks, reminding timid whites that in so doing "the party will not be guilty of proposing anything worse than asking the government to enforce its own 'law and order.'"[27] The 1912 convention, however, ignored disfranchisement and other black issues. Worse, conservative SP officials (virulent enemies of the IWW) in the course of viciously denouncing Asian immigrants, virtually justified racism by claiming that it was an innate human characteristic.[28] The 1912 convention also proscribed the racially egalitarian IWW, whose industrial form of unionism Harrison strongly favored. Furthermore, the party hierarchs, alarmed by Debs's refusal to speak before segregated audiences, sedulously routed their presidential candidate away from the South during the 1912 campaign. Despite these slights, Harrison energetically campaigned for Debs in 1912 and exulted when his prediction that blacks would accept a Socialist literature directed especially to them seemed vindicated by events. Despite Harrison's efforts, however, very few New York blacks voted Socialist in 1912.
Harrison's alienation from the SP intensified after the 1912 elections, when the imbroglio over the recall of IWW leader William Haywood from the SP's National Executive Committee reached its denouement. The IWW's staunchly interracial industrial unionism, its magnificent fight against racism in all its forms, and its privileging of direct economic action over the ballot, had obvious appeal for a voteless, immigrant member of a proscribed and largely disfranchised race excluded from most AFL craft unions.
(Haywood was recalled, an event that precipitated a virtual civil war within the SP, from which it never recovered). Immediately after the 1912 election, Harrison publicly endorsed the IWW, direct action, sabotage, and the general strike, privileged economic over political organization, and signed the "Resolutions of Protest" against the recall of Haywood. (That Harrison's own Local New York strongly supported the recall only increased his alienation).[29] He also criticized the SP for its failure to endorse industrial unionism.
By August 1913, orthodox white Socialists complained about the content of Harrison's speeches, which increasingly sided with the (now officially proscribed) IWW in its controversies with the SP. In October, amidst Harrison's vocal participation in the IWW's Paterson strike, Local New York squelched a planned debate on the relative merits of industrial and political organizations. Harrison, a party member, would have favored industrial unionism over electioneering (a stance opposed to the party's official position) while his opponent, who was not an SP member, would have defended the SP orthodoxy, which favored political action. Local New York demanded that Harrison "state in writing his position as to the above question."[30]
Harrison responded by openly repeating his defense of sabotage, saying that it was "feared by capitalists more than anything else. It is our one great weapon.... Whether right or wrong, every blow struck by labor against capital is a blow for labor." Harrison predicted sabotage in the Paterson mills if Frederick Sumner Boyd, a SP member arrested for instructing workers on the details of sabotage, was convicted. He urged that workers challenge the SP and the AFL on this and other issues and taunted the SP for its lackadaisical and even hostile attitude towards the IWW's nationally publicized strike. "We Socialists must go to the workers to hear what we must do," he said. "The revolution is not coming from above" but "from below, working its way up from the depths." Echoing widespread Wobbly pronouncements, Harrison said that workers had no rights under capitalism and never would; their struggle was "not to get rights, but to get might, and when we get that we will have right." Again echoing familiar IWW complaints, Harrison said that "only on election day is the vote of any use in any vital matter." In a (not published) letter to the pro-IWW New Review Harrison assailed the SP's accommodation with racism and affirmed that the IWW "has no scruples about affirming the full import of its revolutionary doctrine at all times and places--even in the South.... I wonder now, whether any Socialist, Southern or other, could blame me for throwing in my lot with the IWW." By February 1914 he publicly doubted whether he would long remain welcome in the SP.[31]
Harrison's fears soon proved justified. The following month Local New York peremptorily canceled a planned debate between Harrison and Frank Urbansky. Two branches--the third and the tenth--had advertised the debate and sold two hundred tickets when the tenth branch received a frantic letter from Local New York forbidding branches from sponsoring debates between party members and non-members "without the approval of the Executive Committee." Both branches defied the Executive Committee, as did Harrison, who, responding to demands that he withdraw from the debate, exclaimed: "Please tell the Executive Committee to go chase itself." Referring to previous petty harassment by the local, Harrison added, "if my color has anything to do with it this time I should thank you to let me know." The Executive Committee retaliated by dissolving the offending branches, which protested that such methods violated the SP's own constitution and were "underhanded, undignified, unfair and militating against the principles and best interest of the Socialist party." Both branches unsuccessfully appealed their dissolution. Local New York also suspended Harrison from the party for three months, thus effectively ending his short stint as an SP activist. Harrison continued to lecture on street corners, suffering frequent arrest, and eked out a living by giving lectures at the Radical Forum and other institutions. At that time, Harrison later said, he was "in the unique position of being the Black leader and lecturer of a white lecture forum."[32]
Harrison's virtual ejection from the SP highlighted impossible dilemmas that would plague not only African-American radicals, but their hoped-for white allies. The SP was far more racially enlightened than either of the capitalist parties. However, it could not consistently espouse an unadulterated egalitarianism capable of weaning Afro-Americans from the mainstream parties that won elections and, sometimes, made a difference (however slight) in African-American lives. The SP's failure stemmed not simply from a lack of vision--although even Harrison's "white friends" simply could not, or would not, comprehend the world as experienced by African Americans. Rather, the SP was bedeviled by its "electoral path to power," which mandated conciliating racist (and sexist) majorities in its potential constituencies. The SP's comparative racial egalitarianism alienated whites in all sections, but especially in the South, where the SP made virtually no headway. (When a prominent Socialist complained, shortly after World War I, that large sections of the United States contained more elephants than Socialists, his mordant comment most fully characterized the South.) However, the SP's desperate attempt at straddling the racial divide and winning support of racist whites likewise estranged those activist blacks whose leadership it most needed. Meanwhile, almost all blacks resided in the South, where, disfranchised by law and by terror, they remained beyond any imaginable Socialist appeal.
The Socialist party accommodated white racists and other cultural conservatives not only in the electoral arena, but also in the unions. The SP consistently supported the virulently racist, sexist, and patriotic AFL over the egalitarian and internationalist IWW because the AFL contained more potential voters. The SP made a related, and equally catastrophic, decision about its relationship with the AFL. The SP's predecessor, the Socialist Labor party, had exasperated unionized workers by its dogmatic and insistent meddling in internal union affairs; the SP, wary of evoking AFL distrust, steadfastly avoided any interference in such affairs (which included organizational structure and membership requirements). The Socialists therefore not only backed a union federation that ostracized blacks; they also refrained, on principle, from fighting within AFL unions either for racial equality or even industrial unionism--the only organizational form that could recruit from blacks and other large groups excluded from the AFL. Although both the SP and AFL could justify their respective positions on pragmatic grounds (government and capitalist terrorism destroyed the IWW), the results vitiated Socialist electoral and union activity among all races. In 1931, after the near-total destruction of the SP, the IWW, and the organized black left, African-American intellectuals Sterling Spero and Abram Harris recognized this clearly. Because the SP
confined its efforts to the political arena and refused to grapple with trade-union issues, the party made it impossible for its teachings to reach the rank and file of the most articulate sections of the workers. It thereby destroyed its effectiveness even in its chosen field of politics. In spite of its declarations of class solidarity, it could not hope to win the Negro worker politically without first capturing him economically and educating the unions to the necessity of organizing him as chief among the unorganized and excluded. Moreover, so long as socialism was primarily political it could not gain much adherence among Negroes because of their well-nigh unshakeable affection for the Republican party.[33]
However, the IWW's radical counterculturalism, its uncompromising attack on traditional values (including white racism), its steadfast refusal to work within capitalist, racist, or patriarchal structures of power, doomed it. In the interlude between Harrison's exile from the SP and the destruction of both the SP and the IWW, A. Philip Randolph renewed efforts at working within the white left. Randolph launched his campaign, however, after the rapprochement of the SP and IWW in 1917, when his full endorsement of both evoked the hostility of neither. Meanwhile, Harrison, disgusted with working in almost lilly-white environments, increasingly emphasized race-conscious organizing within the Afro-American community.
Reflecting upon his experiences both in the SP and in a largely white lecture forum, Harrison became increasingly dissatisfied with his position as an isolated black working within a white milieu. His experiences with the Socialist party had disillusioned him with cross-race organizing not only because of the pervasive racism of the whites, but because of the defensive color-consciousness of the blacks. "Behind the color line," Harrison sadly acknowledged, "one has to think perpetually of the color line, and most of those who grow up behind it can think of nothing else. Even when one essays to think of other things, that thinking is tinged with the shades of the surrounding atmosphere."[34] Race, not class, was the organizing principle of American life. The Socialist party, replicating its dismal performance of 1912, polled very few votes in Harlem in 1916.
By 1916, therefore, Harrison embraced "the American doctrine of 'Race First'" and determined "to work among his people along the lines of his own choosing."[35] Ironically, however, Harrison's "race first" strategy--first manifested in his "Our Civic Corner" column in the black New York News and in his position as contributing editor to Cyril Briggs's Colored American Review--necessitated criticism of the very black leaders, institutions, and cultural practices upon which a "race first" movement would presumably build. Briggs's publication set the tone. Aiming to "enlighten the struggling colored business man" and promote "every honest and worthy Negro business man or firm, and also the white business men and firms that employ colored help," the Colored American Review relentlessly criticized "those human leeches and parasites in our own race who allow themselves to be used as the tools of dishonest white business men and firms, in depriving the race not only of their honest savings, but impeding our progress as a whole." Harrison quickly found that such intraracial criticism evoked severe retaliation. When a Harrison article in the black Amsterdam News criticized many white-authored plays as degrading black audiences, Harlem's Lincoln Theatre withdrew its advertisements until the paper's editor promised a cessation of such criticism. Harrison complained that this incident proved "that a theatre which made its living from [Negroes] was practically denying them the right to form and express any opinion of its work except a servile, flattering one."[36]
Disgusted by this experience--reminiscent of Booker Washington's depriving him of his Post Office job--Harrison founded the Liberty League (1917) and its publication, the Voice, which he edited. It was a propitious time for such an enterprise, as African-American radicalism was stimulated by the migration of blacks north during World War I, Wilson's stirring slogans about democracy, and the general militance sparked by war, inflation, and the war-induced labor shortage. Having learned that blacks ignored radical appeals, Harrison cleverly enlisted traditional institutions and values on behalf of his organization. Harrison believed that "camouflage was safer and more effective" than strident criticism of the Wilson regime, whose propaganda slogans about "democracy" and "self-determination" could be used to instigate black upheaval. After the war Harrison recalled that "I was well aware that Woodrow Wilson's protestations of democracy were lying protestations, consciously and deliberately designed to deceive.... I chose to pretend to believe that Woodrow Wilson meant what he said, because by so doing I would safely hold up to contempt and ridicule the undemocratic practices of his administration and the actions of his white countrymen in regard to the Negro."[37]
In another bow to traditional values, Harrison secured the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (formerly pastored by the prominent black Socialist R.C. Ransom), as host for the founding meeting, attended by perhaps two thousand persons. (William Monroe Trotter, founder of the National Equal Rights League and publisher of the militant Boston Guardian, sponsored a similar organizational gathering in Boston.) Chandler Owen and Marcus Garvey, as well as Harrison, addressed the meeting, which proclaimed its members "Negro-Americans loyal to their country in every respect and obedient to her laws"--a conservative formulation that often justified armed resistance to lynching.[38]
The organizational meeting also demanded self-determination for the peoples of Africa and equal rights for blacks in the United States. "We, as Negro-Americans who have poured out our blood freely in every war of the Republic, and upheld her flag with undivided loyalty, demand that since we have shared to the full measure of manhood in bearing the burdens of democracy we should also share in the rights and privileges of that democracy." Because white Americans were "aflame with the passionate ardor of democracy which has carried them into the greatest war of the age with the sole purpose of suppressing autocracy in Europe," 1917 was "the best time to appeal to them to give to twelve millions of us the elementary rights of democracy at home." The Liberty League demanded enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments and pledged itself "to agitate by every legal means until we... square the deeds of our nation with its declarations." On July 4th, "Liberty's Birthday," the Liberty League launched the Voice, "a newspaper for the New Negro," under Harrison's editorship. It also addressed a respectful petition to the House of Representatives, which, while demanding justice, affirmed the loyalty, patriotism, and lawfulness of the black race. The Voice also emblazoned on its masthead one of Wilson's ringing pronouncements about self-government.[39]
Although many of the Liberty League's demands recapitulated the long-standing aims of the NAACP, its program attacked the NAACP's stress on integration and moral suasion. Stressing "race first," the League's Declaration of Principles declared that "we must be loyal to our race in everything"; its mottos were "Africa First" and "Negroes First, Last, and Always." Obliquely criticizing Du Bois, Harrison declared that "the old idea of Negro leadership by virtue of the white man's selection has collapsed. The new Negro leader must be chosen by his fellows--by those whose striving he is supposed to represent." Furthermore, "Just as the white men of these and other lands are white men before they are Christians, Anglo-Saxons or Republicans; so the Negroes of this and other lands are intent upon being Negroes before they are Christians, Englishmen, or Republicans." Harrison later remarked that the NAACP had "made a joke of itself" by claiming that "simple publicity" would abolish lynching and other evils. The NAACP, he said, aimed "to secure certain results by affecting the minds of white people" over which it had no control, and had no recourse when moral suasion failed. The Liberty League, by contrast, was exclusively black and based upon the assumption "that white people will love us just as long as they can use us, and that they cannot be trusted any longer.... What we want is not their love, but their respect.... Before allegiance to the flag itself comes our allegiance to the Negro race." When Mary White Ovington, a white Socialist who helped found the NAACP, criticized Harrison for starting yet another paper (and one which adulterated "straight Socialism" with racial matters), Harrison contemptuously dismissed her "bossy and dictatorial note." Whites, Harrison declared, must realize that blacks were not children: "While we need all the friends we can get, we need no benevolent dictators."[40]
The maiden issue of the Voice denounced the East St. Louis pogrom (incited partly by one of Woodrow Wilson's racist diatribes) as "an orgy of unprovoked and villainous barbarism which neither Germans nor any other civilized people have ever equalled." Declaring that "cringing has gone out of date," Harrison favored armed self defense over the NAACP's emphasis on moral suasion. "If white men are to kill unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defense of their lives and property. This is the lesson of the East St. Louis massacre." When murder was cheap, whites indulged in it. Therefore, "let Negroes help to make murder costly, for in so doing they will aid the officers of the city, state and nation in instilling respect for law and order into the minds of the worst and lowest elements of our American cities.... And they will be more highly regarded--as are the Irish--because of fighting back."[41]
The League also differed from the NAACP in its wholehearted endorsement of the IWW. Harrison charged that the AFL helped incite the East St. Louis pogrom. More generally, he said, it kept the Negro "out of work and out of the unions as long as it could; and when it could no longer do this it has taken him in, tricked him, and discriminated against him." AFL racism and the seeming friendliness of big capitalists rendered most blacks anti-union. Accordingly, Harrison advised that Negroes "join hands with the American capitalist and scab [the AFL] out of existence.... Make a truce with your capitalist enemies until you get rid of this traitor to the cause of labor." Harrison proclaimed that his "own duty, here as everywhere, is to the Negro race.... Since the AFL chooses to put Race before Class, let us return the compliment." Harrison, however, touted the IWW's Brotherhood of Timber Workers as a model. "We must organize One Big Union of all the working class.... This is the IWW type of unionism, and the employers use their newspapers to make the public believe that it stands for anarchy, violence, law-breaking and atheism, because they know that if it succeeds it will break them." The IWW, Harrison noted approvingly, recruited blacks "not because its promoters love Negroes--but because they realize that they cannot win if any of the working class is left out."[42] Harrison, like the IWW itself, believed that common underlying interests were a more reliable cement of any alliance than were sentimental or altruistic platitudes.
Harrison's Voice quickly became the major organ of Harlem radicalism, attaining a circulation of eleven thousand--an extraordinary number for a local paper in the small Harlem Afro-American community. A group of black "society girls," perhaps emulating the Appeal to Reason's "Appeal Army," formed the "Voice Volunteers," a group that sold subscriptions and papers and distributed copies on Sundays as congregations left church. Surprisingly, whites volunteered their help, and Harrison claimed that his paper had more white readers than all other African-American newspapers combined.[43]
The Voice covered racial issues large and small. It exposed egregious cases of police brutality and demanded that a black fireman receive the hero's medal he had been promised. It condemned the Wilson administration's summary execution of black troops accused of riot and murder in Houston, Texas. Entering a lively Afro-American debate, Harrison favored the term "Negro" over "colored"--which, he argued, lumped blacks with other racial groups and was favored by supercilious light-skinned Negroes. To those who objected that "Negro" was easily degraded into "Nigger," Harrison replied that blacks should "stop bending the knee and bowing the head to every insult and contumely" and should "stop growing a wish bone where our backbone ought to be."[44] Instead, they should make the appellation "Negro" a token of respect.
The Voice also published Harrison's sophisticated analysis of the Negro theatre. Harrison proclaimed that drama was both "a record of individual expression and of social expression; the author and the age are equally on view." Because of this--and because audience response largely determined "the form and substance of the Negro drama"--such drama would "demonstrate the distinctiveness of Negro society." A person could "reconstruct and interpret the life of any period from its literary and artistic remains.... Conditions prevailing before the floodlights reflect themselves behind them."[45]
White racism, however, scarred black actors and playwrights. As long as whites degraded blacks in real life, they could not "allow representatives of the same people to stand where they can be the recipients of our serious admiration and applause." Acclaimed Afro-American actors Bert Williams and George Walker reinforced white prejudices and insidiously debased the self-image of blacks themselves. Performing before white patrons, the Afro-American actor "must strive at his peril to present their conception of what a Negro is or should be." However, "the Negro playgoer is also a creature of his times and conditions. His general ideas and preferences, his very notion of himself and his group, are to a large extent built upon such models as he gets from the larger world which touches him at so many points." Thus, the black drama, including vaudeville, degraded blacks in the eyes of both races even as it reflected the social reality of Afro-American insubordination. Black dramatists and actors perforce either represented "that conception of life and its stage-presentation which [African Americans] have derived from white people" or played to blacks' "higher ideals and the real lives they live." The latter option, Harrison complained, was unpopular even among blacks. Yet even low comedy, despite its origins in white stereotyping, reflected "the actual flow of the common life around us" and presented "Negro life in its social and moral aspects which the writer of Negro books dares not touch." Presciently, Harrison recognized that popular culture, even in its commercial forms, could--indeed must--reflect social realities and express social truths. Intellectuals, he exclaimed, are "so prone to cut life into sections, according to the patterns in the book, that we often miss the meaning of the actual flow of the common life around us."[46]
For Harrison, the main contribution of black drama was in broaching the forbidden topic of what Alice Walker would later call "colorism"--color prejudice within the Negro community. "The craze for color runs all through Negro society in the United States," Harrison charged; but this scandal "is hidden with especial care from the white outsider." This "great social obsession among our Negroes" suffused and distorted Afro-American life. "One's social value in this group is in direct proportion to one's lightness.... In love, courtship, marriage and their social life generally, lightness of color is perhaps the greatest desideratum." The mulatto, "no matter how ignorant or uncouth he may be, thinks himself superior to the black or brown person." Churches, he said, were especially segregated by color. Distinguishing color prejudice from racism, and recognizing that most whites lumped all persons of African descent together regardless of the shade of their skin, Harrison claimed that "there is no such thing as color prejudice in America--except among 'colored people.'" Many "colored" actors and actresses were "so fair as to be almost undistinguishable from white people." Harrison asserted that the other three black papers in New York would not hire him because of his very dark skin.[47]
A few years later, Harrison continued his analysis of the Afro-American theatre. Writing in the Negro World, Harrison complained that blacks who performed plays by whites about white life whitewashed themselves, much as whites used burnt cork when they played darkface roles. "If Negroes were people," he said, "then it would be proper that Negro audiences" see Negroes depicted "as drawing room guests, doctors, detectives, governors, financiers," and the entire array of human roles. "But if folks can't be considered as people unless they are unlike Negroes, then, of course, our actors should never look like Negroes." Negroes purportedly believed "that culture and ability are not limited by color"; but how could blacks demand that whites embody such principles when "we hypocritically and with cowardly lying refuse to act up to it in our own case?"[48]
Harrison quoted Cyril Briggs as saying that Negroes should no more perform in whiteface than perform a Russian play in Russian. Only when race formed a character should the actor depict race.[49] Harrison, however, was trapped within a contradiction of his own. He fully recognized that black experience was distinct from that of whites. There were no black governors, and any black doctor or attorney would face problems much different from those afflicting their white counterparts. Few white plays adequately expressed Afro-American life, sensibilities, or aspirations. Later black critics would more consistently demand that Afro-Americans create their own theatre, with their own plays, actors, and producers, which could express the realities of African-American experience.
The Voice began publication shortly before the New York City mayoral race of 1917, in which United States participation in the Great War became a major issue. Harrison praised the SP's antiwar stance but noted that the carnage in Europe opened up vast opportunities for the darker races. Although the world was in its vast majority colored, Harrison said, whites presently determined its--and the blacks'--destiny. In a pronouncement that both echoed Du Bois and anticipated Garvey, Harrison said that "this vast majority is at peace and remains at peace until the white minority determines otherwise. The war in Europe is a war of the white race" over "the lands and destinies of this colored majority in Asia, Africa and the islands of the sea." The white race "as it exists today, is the superior race of the world.... not because it has better manners, more religion, or a higher culture" but on "the frankly materialistic ground that it has the guns, soldiers, the money and resources to keep it in the position of the top dog and to make its will go. This is what the white men mean by civilization, disguise it as they may.[50]
The war, Harrison continued, was destroying the very resources upon which white supremacy rested. The whites "are bent upon this form of self-destruction and nothing that we can say will stop them." The darker races could more readily win their freedom after the whites had exhausted themselves in their bloody cataclysm, "for the majority races cannot be eternally coerced into accepting the sovereignty of the white race." White arrogance would generate a terrible race war, "and there is no certainty that in such a conflict the white race will come out on top."[51]
Harrison also commented extensively on the mayoral campaign itself. He had long criticized the black Republican establishment and advocated political independence, "selling our votes for the highest [price] we can get--such as more schools and playgrounds, lower rents, higher wages, better treatment at the hands of policemen... and a larger measure of American manhood."[52] During the 1917 campaign Harrison demanded what the Irish and the Jewish voter get: nominations on the party's ticket in our own districts. And if we don't get this we will smash the party that refuses to give it.
For we are not Republicans, Democrats, or Socialists any longer. We are Negroes first. And we are no longer begging for sops. We demand, not 'recognition' but representation, and we are out to throw our votes to any party which gives this....[53]
Later in the campaign he asserted that blacks must organize themselves in their own party, in the fashion of the Irish Home Rulers. But for the nonce, Harrison castigated the Republicans (specifically condemning those race traitors whose venal conspiracy had dismissed him from the Post Office as "the old type of Negro barnacle on the bottom of the Republican ship,"), praised the Democrats (Tammany Hall, however corrupt, "had dealt more decently by Negroes than Negroes have by Tammany Hall") and advised blacks that they held the balance of power in New York and other northern states.[54]
But Harrison, who had apparently rejoined the SP, reserved his highest praise for that party, "clean and straight and standing out of the muck of mere politics, with the sunlight on its face, fronting the dawn of a better day." Ignoring his own experience, Harrison claimed that both the SP and its mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit (a strong advocate of the AFL and one of the IWW's most intransigent enemies) had a spotless record on racial issues. Harrison proclaimed that the SP offered the Negro "nothing special... [but] what it offers to all downtrodden workers: Justice, liberty and absolute equality--not only in words, but in deeds." A Socialist victory would mean an "absolute cessation of police brutality and the consciousless evictions by conscienceless landlords; would mean bathhouses and playgrounds; municipal markets to cut down the high cost of living; municipal ownership of ice and milk." Disparaging those who called an SP vote a wasted vote, Harrison claimed that the SP could win. Even if the SP lost, it was "better to vote for that which you want, and not get it, than to vote for what you don't want--and get it." Yet Harrison insisted that the Voice "is neither a Republican, Democratic or Fusion paper, but, as it proudly proclaims, a newspaper for the New Negro." Harrison accepted advertisements from all candidates and endorsed (as did the more orthodox black Socialists Randolph and Owen) the handful of black candidates who had won nominations on the Republican ticket in opposition to the regular party apparatus.[55]
Although a long-time supporter of women's rights (including birth control), Harrison opposed the suffrage amendment on the New York State ballot on the grounds that white suffragists had collaborated with racism. White suffragists claimed both that women's votes would not undermine white supremacy in the South, and that white women in New York (who lacked the vote) should not be degraded beneath black men (who had it). Harrison said he supported "the women of his race" and opposed women's suffrage "until the white women have been properly chastened." Harrison supported the Negro Women's Campaign Committee, which urged "colored men to withhold the vote" for suffrage "until the Woman's Suffrage party declared itself on the status of colored women." Harrison conceded that his position was "not sound logic" but averred that "life is larger than logic" and that blacks must bargain as other groups did, placing their concrete interests above the abstract claims of justice.[56]
After the election, Harrison rejoiced that the SP had vastly increased its vote and elected some of its local candidates: "The party of the Common People has opened the doors of our state and city governments, and stepped inside." He exulted that Hillquit had garnered fully 25 percent of the black vote and predicted that "fear of losing the Negro vote" would cause the capitalist parties "to bestir themselves more in the Negro's behalf in the future than any certainty of allegiance could make them do in the past." Harrison also hailed the victory of the suffrage amendment as "a great step in the direction of democracy at home" and reminded his readers that he had opposed it "not on principle, but as a protest against the cowardly race prejudice of the white women of the Woman Suffrage Party." He predicted that Negro women would vote more wisely than Negro men and win playgrounds, bathhouses, and clean streets in Harlem. Harrison was also jubilant at the victory of black insurgent Republican State Assembly candidate Edward Austin Johnson. The first black elected to the State Assembly, Johnson symbolized "the opening wedge of real political equality for the Negroes of New York" and "the death knell of the barnacle type of [black] Republican leader." No more would "a Negro political leader be hand-picked for us by our white masters"; rather, each such leader would be "responsible first [to] the race that made him what he is."[57] Significantly, Randolph, Owen, and William Bridges (future publisher of the Challenge and organizer of the all-black Liberty party) joined Harrison at Johnson's victory celebration.
This celebration was Harrison's last triumph for quite some time, however. Shortly after the election, the Voice folded. Harrison found that his "race first" organization and ideology foundered just as his previous class-based strategy had. Blacks, he learned, were every bit as divided as were workers. Prosperous blacks disliked Harrison's attacks upon them, upon the newspapers, businesses, and churches they owned or controlled, and upon the political organizations from which they derived prestige and sustenance. Almost immediately after launching the Voice Harrison noticed that the common people offered their pennies and their help while "Big Negroes" shunned it. Although Harrison urged Negro businessmen to advertise in the Voice "not as charity" but as "a good stroke of business," few accepted his offer. Rebuffed, Harrison insisted that the Voice would "place its dependence upon the Negro masses" and would not "cringe before the Exalted Ones." Harrison accepted advertisements from most businesses and individuals who would pay, but reserved his right to criticize his advertisers. On one occasion, Harrison used a paid advertisement as a springboard for a forthright attack on the advertiser; in a classic understatement, Harrison's biographer says that such actions "would certainly scare most potential advertisers."[58]
Harrison's scathing exposé of colorism within the African-American community also aroused anger. Although Harrison conceded that many light-skinned African Americans fought for the rights of all blacks, many of his remarks must have offended the light-toned elite. Harrison presumably alienated other blacks--both manufacturers and consumers--when he refused "those disgusting and degrading Anti-Kink and Whiten-Up ads which make every self-respecting Negro afraid to open [Afro-American papers] in public places where white people may see."[59] Harrison's antiwar and antipatriotic stance, like his hostility to Christianity and his attacks on the Republican party, doubtless repelled many other blacks. Indeed, Harrison's penchant for attacking the mainstays of Afro-American (and white American) culture, rather than working within hallowed institutions and utilizing traditional values, symbols, and icons, sharply differentiated him from the masses of blacks of every class. Harrison's occasional attempts at compromise--holding meetings in a church, using Aesopian language during the war, and pretending belief in Wilson and his war aims--may have kept him out of jail, but did not deceive his potential followers, who were, as Harrison himself readily acknowledged, much more conventional in their cultural orientations.
The Liberty League and the Voice were also plagued by splits, contests for power, and alleged financial irregularities. Debates arose over whether the Voice was Harrison's personal organ or the property of the League. Some supporters differed with Harrison's strategy of competing with the three other black Harlem papers by publishing a special Sunday edition and lowering the price. Harrison himself rejected an offer of $10,000 from an unidentified Harlem white who wanted partial control of the Voice, insisting that "we want to see at least one Negro paper buttressed on the love and devotion of the masses of our own race. It is the fact that our disloyal leaders are fed from the hands of others that makes them of such small service to us."[60] Finally, Marcus Garvey began scheduling UNIA meetings at the same time as Liberty League gatherings, and many of Harrison's followers deserted him for the more charismatic Garvey.
By the end of 1917, therefore, Harrison found that the African-American community, as the American working class, was divided along the lines of class, color, and culture. Paradoxically, however, just as Harrison's initial efforts faltered, two energetic and widely disparate movements emerged from their ashes. A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, frequent auditors of Harrison's street-corner speeches, founded the Messenger, a "straight Socialist" black publication, and the Friends of Negro Freedom (FNF), a radical black organization with a wide-ranging program. At almost the same time, Marcus Garvey, a friend and associate of Harrison's, injected new life into his "race first" Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). For a few years, both movements combined, in their somewhat different proportions, a class and a race analysis and program much as had Harrison. Harrison himself nursed a skeletal Liberty League along, briefly revived the Voice in 1918, and helped edit another short-lived publication, the New Negro, in 1919. His prominence as the most prominent exponent of Harlem radicalism had passed, however, and he struggled to find a place within the ferociously competitive world of black social activism.
Notes:
[1] For a comprehensive survey of SP policy towards Afro-Americans, see Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, 1977). Sally Miller, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth Century American Socialism (New York, 1996), provides documents (including the Negro Resolution quoted above) and astute commentary on SP racial ideas.
[2] DB, "Socialist of the Path" and "Socialism and the Negro," Horizon, (February, 1907), in Meier, Rudwick, and Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1971), 63-64; "Socialists in Oklahoma," TC, December 1910; "The Socialists," TC, March 1911; "Socialism Again," TC, April 1911; "The Socialists Again," TC, November 1911. For an account of the vast role of Socialists in the founding of the NAACP see Foner, American Socialism, 182-201.
[3] The most comprehensive treatment of Harrison yet available is Jeffrey Babcock Perry's Columbia University dissertation, "Hubert Henry Harrison, 'The Father of Harlem Radicalism': The Early Years--1883 Through the Founding of the Liberty League and 'The Voice' in 1917" (1986). Despite the title, Perry has significant information on Harrison through 1920. Perry has also published A Hubert Harrison Reader (Middletown, 2001), a generous selection of Harrison's writings.
Foner, American Socialism, has good material on Harrison, esp. 202-219. Two short accounts include J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color (reprint edition, edited by John Henrik Clarke, New York, 1996), Volume II, 432-441, and Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996), 234-260). Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London, 1998) also discusses Harrison. The MGP contain a brief biography of Harrison, and numerous references to him.
[4] JBP, I, 12-69; HHHR, 31-32.
[5] HHH, "To the Young Men of My Race," TV, January 1919, reprinted in WAA, 91-94; HHH, "Education and Race," WAA, 126-128.
[6] Rogers, Great, 432-441; Gaines, Aloft, 124-125. Rogers quotes the New York Times of September 11, 1922 as saying that "Hubert Harrison, an eloquent and forceful speaker, broke all records at the Stock Exchange yesterday." John Carroll's letter, cited by Gaines, appeared in the New York Globe, November 4, 1914.
[7] JBP (100-106) quotes Harrison's December 8 and December 19, 1910 letters to the New York Sun; the December 8 letter is also in HHHR, 164-166. Charles Anderson wrote Washington, gloating about Harrison's impending dismissal. "Do you see the hand?," he said. "I think you can.... I will attend to Harrison." Anderson asked that Washington destroy the letter. (JBP, 114-115). Harrison, however, was aware of what happened, and publicized this scandal in 1911. Anderson wrote Washington, saying Harrison "is blaming me for his dismissal.... Well, I think I can endure the charge with fortitude and good humor." James, Aloft, 124-125.
[8] HHH, "The Negro and Socialism, I," NYC, November 28, 1911; HHH, "Summary and Conclusion," NYC, December 26, 1911; HHH, "The Materialist Interpretation of Morals," NYC, November 3, 1912.
[9] HHH, "The Negro and Socialism, I," NYC, November 28, 1911; HHH, "Summary and Conclusion," NYC, December 26, 1911; HHH, "The Materialist Interpretation of Morals," NYC, November 3, 1912.
[10] HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912; HHH, "The Negro and Socialism," NYC, November 28, 1911; HHH, "Race Prejudice," NYC, December 4, 1911.
[11] HHH, "Race Prejudice," NYC, December 4, 1911; HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912; HHH, "The Negro and Socialism," NYC, November 28, 1911.
[12] HHH, "The Duty of the Socialist Party," NYC, December 13, 1911; HHH, letter, NYC, October 2, 1911, under the pseudonym "Nils Uhl."
[13] HHH, "Summary and Conclusion," NYC, December 26, 1911; HHH, "The Black Man's Burden," ISR, April 1912; HHH, "The Duty of the Socialist Party," NYC, December 13, 1911.
[14] HHH, "Summary and Conclusion," NYC, December 26, 1911; HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912; HHH, "How to Do It--and How Not," NYC, December 16, 1911. In November 1906 TR had cashiered 167 black soldiers, all or almost all of whom were certainly innocent of any wrongdoing. In keeping with his party's policy of cynically using blacks while actually oppressing them, TR waited until the eve of the midterm elections to announce the discharges. Black voters, therefore, learned of TR's insult and outrage only after they had voted. Harrison correctly perceived that TR's timing indicated his desire for black votes. In 1972, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon, the Secretary of the Army repudiated TR's action and changed the discharges (posthumously) to honorable.
[15] HHH, "How to Do It--And How Not," NYC, December 16, 1911; HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912. Philip Foner usefully reprints many of Slater's works, along with those of two other black Socialist ministers, in Black Socialist Preacher (San Francisco, 1983). However, "The Colored Man's Case as Socialism Sees It" has been lost.
[16] HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912.
[17] HHH, "What Socialism Means to Us," reprinted in NN, 48-58; HHH, "The Real Negro Problem," reprinted in NN, 30-40.
[18] ibid.
[19] HHH, "The Negro and Socialism," NYC, November 28, 1911; HHH, "The Duty of the Socialist Party," NYC, December 13, 1911; HHH, "The Real Negro Problem," reprinted in NN, 30-40.
[20] HHH, "What Socialism Means to Us," reprinted in NN, 48-58.
[21] HHH, "What Socialism Means To Us," reprinted in NN, 48-58.
[22] HHH, "How to Do It--and How Not," NYC, December 16, 1911.
[23] "To Push Agitation Among the Negroes," NYC, November 28, 1911.
[24] George Frazier Miller, "Organizing the Negroes," NYC, December 6, 1911; HHH, "Summary and Conclusions," NYC, December 26, 1911.
[25] George Frazier Miller, "Organizing the Negroes," NYC, December 6, 1911; HHH, "Summary and Conclusions," NYC, December 26, 1911; Du Bois, "Separate Organization," NYC, December 27, 1911; HHH, "No Segregation Intended," NYC, January 9, 1912.
[26] JBP, 159-250. Foner, American Socialism, 246-9, quotes and discusses Malkiel's letter.
[27] HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912.
[28] Harrison later quoted this statement in his "Race First Versus Class First," NW, March 27, 1920, reprinted in WAA. I discuss this important article in chapter 7, below.
[29] "Resolutions of Protest," ISR, February 1913, 623; JBP, 267-322. Sharing a widespread misconception, Perry states that the issue was whether Haywood should be expelled from the SP as well as recalled from the National Executive Committee. Actually, Haywood was never expelled from the SP, although the amendment to the SP's Constitution (Article 2, Section 6) under which he was charged called for expulsion. His local could have expelled him, in which case SP members outside of that local would have been powerless; the Resolutions of Protest were drafted precisely because Haywood's enemies, rather than disciplining him in his local, placed his recall from the NEC on a national ballot.
[30] JBP covers this controversy in detail, 267-8, 287-94, 297-307.
[31] JBP, 267-8, 287-94, 297-307. Harrison printed the letter to the New Review in NW, January 8, 1921. JBP discusses this letter, 304-307; the citation from the NW is on 320, note 44. The New Review was itself verboten at Local New York meetings, which banned it from sale at party meetings (JBP, 303).
[32] JBP, 307-315. Interestingly, Harrison was repeatedly acquitted by the judge, whom he later publicly thanked.
[33] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 409.
[34] HHH, "On a Certain Conservatism in Negroes," NN, 41-47.
[35] HHH, NN, 3, speaking in the third person.
[36] HHH, "Leaves Torn from the Diary of a Race Critic--the Race in Drama," Amsterdam News c. July 1916, quoted in JBP, 379-85.
[37] HHH, Introduction to Chapter III, WAA p. 25.
[38] HHH, "Launching the Liberty League," TV, July 4, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 9-11.
[39] HHH, "Launching the Liberty League," TV, July 4, 1917; "Resolutions Passed at the Liberty League Meeting," "Liberty League's Petition to the House of Representatives," all in TV, July 4, 1917, and reprinted in WAA, 9-13. JBP says that Harrison added a reference to Marcus Garvey, absent from the original article, when he reprinted it in WAA. Perry reprints the original in HHHR, 86-93.
[40] HHH, "The New Politics for the New Negro, TV, September 4, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 39-40; HHH, "Shillady Resigns," NW, June 19, 1920, reprinted in WAA, 60-1; HHH, "Our Professional Friends," TV, November 7, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 55-60. White had written Harrison that "I don't see any reason for another organization, or another paper. If you printed straight socialism it might be different."
[41] HHH, "The East St. Louis Horror, TV, July 4, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 14-16; HHH, "Arms and the Man," TV, July 17, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 17-20. JBP, 487-488, says the New York Times for July 5, 1917, reported Harrison's speech of the previous day exhorting blacks to defend themselves against white depredations, in "Urges Negroes to Get Arms." Du Bois, of course, would not deny blacks their right of defending themselves against white violence.
[42] HHH, "The Negro and the Labor Unions," WAA, 20-22. JBP, 494, says that this was an editorial in TV; he reprints it in HHHR 79-81. It has all the hallmarks of having been written shortly after the East St. Louis pogrom.
[43] JBP, 498-503.
[44] HHH, "Why Is a Negro?," TV, September 4, 1917, quoted in JBP 552-554. Some black troops, exasperated by vicious, degrading, and at times homicidal treatment, were "guilty" (though not nearly so much as the whites who had provoked them. The question--unanswered because Wilson had the troops tried by secret court and hanged before they could appeal--was which ones.
[45] HHH, "Leaves Torn from the Diary of a Critic--the Race in Drama," July 1916, quoted in JBP, 375-388; HHH, "Negro Society and the Negro Stage," TV, September 19, 1917, in HHHR, 370-373.
[46] HHH, "Negro Society and the Negro Stage," TV, September 19, 1917, in HHHR 370-373; HHH, "Negro Society and the Negro Stage, Part 2," TV, October 3, 1917, in HHHR 373-376; HHH, "Leaves Torn from the Diary of a Critic--the Race in Drama," July 1916, quoted in JBP, 375-388.
[47] HHH, "Negro Society and the Negro Stage, Part 2" TV, October 3, 1917, quoted in JBP, 385-388 (also in HHHR, 373-376).
[48] HHH, "Are Negro Actors White?," NW article reprinted in TCR, April 1921.
[49] ibid.
[50] HHH, "The White War and the Colored World," TV, August 14, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 96-98.
[51] HHH, "The White War and the Colored World," TV, August 14, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 96-98.
[52] HHH, "Our Civic Corner," New York News, September 2, 1917, quoted in JBP, 395.
[53] "The Drift in Politics," TV, July 1917, reprinted in WAA, 41-43.
[54] HHH, "Charles W. Anderson," TV, October 31, 1917, quoted in JBP, 647-8; HHH, "The Coming Election," TV, October 18, 1917, quoted in JBP, 627-635 and reprinted in HHHR, 140-143.
[55] "The Coming Election," TV, October 18, 1917, quoted in JBP, 627-635.
[56] HHH, "Women Suffrage," TV, October 31, 1917, quoted in JBP, 650-652.
[57] HHH, "Election Results," TV, November 14, 1917, quoted in JBP, 665-668.
[58] JBP, 505-6, 647. Perry was referring to Harrison's attack on Edward Morgan, a white politician who advertised in the Voice; Morgan was one of the conspirators who had deprived Harrison of his Post Office job.
[59] JBP, 554, 557, 506-7.
[60] "The (New) Voice," July 11, 1918, from FSAA, Reel 11.
In 1911-1912, however (one of intellectual ferment marked by SP controversies with Socialist-feminists and the Industrial Workers of the World), Hubert H. Harrison, a West Indian immigrant and a pioneer black Marxist, envisioned a mass Socialist movement in Harlem.[3] Harrison ingeniously refurbished Marxist doctrine. He explained how white racism, while originating in class oppression, became an autonomous force not reducible to class or economic considerations; he elaborated a specific appeal to black voters while simultaneously arguing that white working-class and Socialist self-interest demanded an assault upon white privilege. Yet his efforts shipwrecked upon the shoals of American Federation of Labor (AFL) racism, the cultural and political conservatism of the SP (which favored the racist AFL over the egalitarian IWW), and divisions of class, color, and culture within the Afro-American community.
Harrison was born in 1883 into a farm family on an English-speaking island in the Dutch West Indies. Devastated when his parents died in quick succession during his early teens, he joined his sister in New York in 1900, where he worked at the menial jobs available to blacks while attending high school at night. An exceptional student, he won praise from his principal and was even noticed by a daily New York newspaper. He was soon active in the lyceums sponsored by the interracial St. Benedict the Moor Catholic Church and the largely black St. Mark's Episcopal Church, where he exulted in the friendly, but rigorous, give-and-take of debate. In 1904, when he was twenty-one, Harrison wrote the New York Times an eloquent and learned letter denouncing that paper's racist editorial policy. In 1907 he passed the civil service examination and secured work at the Post Office, an excellent job compared with those of most blacks. Although the political corruption and antiunion animus of the Post Office alienated Harrison, he won regular promotions and pay increases. Meanwhile, he read voraciously and eagerly participated in the New York intellectual scene, initially with letters and articles in mainstream white publications.[4]
Harrison's wide-ranging erudition and skeptical intelligence won him the epithet "the black Socrates." Thinking of his own course in self-education and the training in critical thinking afforded by the church lyceums, he urged that blacks acquire education "not only in school and in college, but in books and newspapers, in market-places, institutions, and movements. Prepare by knowing; and never think you know until you have listened to ten others who know differently--and have survived the shock." He extolled "education which we get out of school for ourselves" as "the only one that is really worth while," and told his audiences that "the best college is that on your bookshelf: the best education is that on the inside of your own head."[5]
A renowned "soap boxer," Harrison used the streets as his lecture hall and captivated audiences on Wall Street as well as in Harlem. "His auditors would stand hours at a time shifting from foot to foot, entranced," contemporary black author J.A. Rogers noted. John Carroll, a racist Southern white, exclaimed that his cherished feelings of superiority had evaporated after he heard Harrison speak. Carroll was amazed that a large, respectable white crowd regularly attended Harrison's Sunday lectures. Harrison awed his audiences with his professorial demeanor, his mastery of history, and his cool, logical arguments, so different from the typical soap-box orator. An autodidact, he lacked the cachet of Du Bois's advanced degrees, yet was perhaps for that reason a more independent and iconoclastic thinker. His force of personality intimidated even Marcus Garvey, although it also ensured that his crusade for justice would be for the most part a lonely one. Unspecified and yet reportedly major blunders wrecked his own organizations and publications; predictably, Harrison did not function well as a subordinate under the supervision of others. Harrison's unique qualities enabled him to ignite two of the most significant movements in Afro-American intellectual history: the class-based, orthodox Socialism associated with A. Philip Randolph, Chandler Owen, and the Messenger; and (in this case a revivification rather than creation) the race-based, black nationalist ideology embodied in Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) and its publication, the Negro World.[6]
Harrison began his career as a national writer, publicist, and organizer in Harlem in 1908, years before the massive influx of blacks from the South and the West Indies began. Harrison attacked Christianity in the Truth Seeker, a rationalist publication edited and read almost exclusively by whites, and joined the overwhelmingly white Socialist party. In a letter to a white New York newspaper he assailed Booker T. Washington as a white-appointed misleader of blacks and as a dictator whose "Tuskegee Machine" throttled dissent. Harrison argued that the recent Baltimore ghetto ordinance (which segregated blacks into specified districts), and the Georgia railroad hate strike of 1909 (directed against skilled black workers), decisively disproved Washington's gospel of wealth. Discipline, hard work, and the accumulation of property would generate white repression and violence rather than acceptance. Corroborating Harrison's charges against Washington's dictatorial methods, Washington and his New York lieutenants engineered Harrison's dismissal from his Post Office job--an economic catastrophe from which Harrison never recovered.[7] Harrison subsequently scratched out a living as a Socialist lecturer and part-time instructor at the SP's Rand School and, later, the Modern School (loosely affiliated with the anarchist movement).
Harrison's early Socialist writings in the New York Call and the International Socialist Review broached many of the arguments later elaborated by Randolph and Owen in the Messenger. Much like Socialist-feminist critics of SP orthodoxy, Harrison subtly altered and expanded cherished Socialist doctrines as he adapted them for his own purposes--in his case, increased SP attention to racial injustices. His creative refashioning of the doctrine of economic determinism is one major example. Addressing an overwhelmingly white readership, Harrison argued that Socialism entailed racial egalitarianism and that racism severely vitiated the labor movement. Harrison proclaimed that economic causes constituted "the real root of all race difficulties." Capitalists did not enslave blacks because they thought that blacks were inferior; rather, they evolved ideologies of racial inferiority to justify their depredations. The Spanish, "having starved and flogged and murdered all the available natives of Santo Domingo and the adjacent islands... felt the necessity of a fresh supply of people who could be made to work and produce wealth for them." In a restatement of the orthodox doctrine of economic determinism that nonetheless significantly broadened its scope beyond the simply economic, Harrison argued that "the ideas dominant at any stage of human culture" were "created and shaped by the changing conditions of society. Whenever large groups of men find profit in injustice to other men they will evolve a system of ethics to reconcile their minds to that injustice." Systems of racial oppression had their own histories "much as the class struggle and the system of production have theirs."[8]
Economic causes were the dominant rather than the sole determinants of history, Harrison said. "Purely cultural causes played an important and impelling part" in some major historical events, and "forced attempts to apply a doctrine as sound as the doctrine of historical materialism in certain details and under certain conditions where it does not apply can only serve to throw unmerited reproach upon that doctrine itself." Racism, Harrison strongly implied, was only partly derived from the relations of production; it also had autonomous or semi-autonomous origins, and might continue after the conditions that gave rise to it had ended. Yet Harrison's insistence that social relations are grounded in objective reality and are not explicable "on the basis of the thinking or feeling of either party" underestimated the impact that ideas and feelings (however much these stem from, as well as generate, social arrangements) have on the construction of race, and even of class.[9]
For Harrison, racism stemmed from capitalist exploitation rather than preceding it. Whenever one group has exploited another, "it has despised that group which it has put under subjection. And the degree of contempt has always been in direct proportion to the degree of exploitation." The ruling class diffused its own contempt for its victims among the general population, "for the ruling class has always determined what the social ideals and moral ideas of society should be..... Race prejudice, then, is the fruit of economic subjection and a fixed inferior economic status.... The Negro problem is essentially an economic problem with its roots in slavery past and present." Widespread interracial sex, enforced segregation, and widespread race-baiting belied the white supremacists' claim that racism was instinctual. Many a slaveowner forcibly bred with slave women and "sold for cash the children which were his and hers." If racism were innate, "it would not be necessary to teach it to children by separate schools or to adults by separate cars" or "bolster it up by legislative enactments." Racism seemed universal and innate because the race-mongering press made its readers "think that everyone else thinks and feels in the same way.... Since a man's individual opinions are mostly derived from the social atmosphere, it is easy to see how people who grow up reading such newspapers, surrounded by others who are subjected to the same influences, get to believe that this carefully built up antipathy is innate."[10]
Prejudice, Harrison continued, was "diligently fostered by those who have something to gain by it." Capitalists profited directly from the lower wages paid blacks and also used racism as "a club for the other workers." Striking whites confronted "the cold fact that other wage slaves are doing as hard work, or harder, and doing it for less.... [Th]eir strike can always be broken by making use of that same body of workers whom the others have thus been breeding artificially as strikebreakers." The capitalist media poisoned the minds of white workers with incessant racist propaganda even while capitalists "subsidized Negro leaders, Negro editors and preachers and politicians to build up in the breasts of black people those sentiments which will make them subservient to [the capitalists'] will." Black workers, therefore, menaced white workers much as did "the army of the unemployed... as the craft unions have begun to find out." Referring to the brutalizing of IWW leaders and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire, Harrison further claimed that cruelties inflicted upon blacks inured whites to other atrocities such as "the jailing of innocent labor leaders and the murder of working girls in a fire trap factory."[11]
Once again using familiar Socialist concepts to further racial justice, Harrison exhorted his readers that the SP was "the party of the working class" whose "historic mission" was "to unite the workers of the world" and "to put an end to the exploitation of one group by another, whether that group be social, economic, or racial. This is the position of Marx, Kautsky, and every great leader of the Socialist movement." The SP must champion "the cause of all sections of down-trodden humanity." Harrison exclaimed that "as soon as Socialism trims and temporizes it dies as Socialism, whatever else it may be transmogrified into." The SP's choice was between Socialism or "Southernism."[12]
Harrison demanded that the SP learn Negro history, advocate black rights in every sphere of life, and repudiate its pro-AFL policy. Whites must "learn a great many things from the negro--not only of his racial psychology; but also of his history and of his present achievements in the various lines of human endeavor." Whites must first "unlearn much" because they know "a great deal that isn't so." Harrison, therefore, educated white Socialists about the egregious abuses inflicted specifically upon black workers: lynching, peonage, disfranchisement, Jim Crow, denial of educational opportunities, intensified economic oppression, and the rape of black women. Utilizing the reformist Socialist faith in the ballot, Harrison said that the SP must champion black voting rights (as it did women's suffrage) because "political rights are the only sure protection and guarantee of economic rights." Treading on dangerous ground, Harrison addressed the bugaboo of "social equality," pointing out that racist structures "dictate to other white people that they shall not choose black friends." Finally, Harrison demanded a substantial departure from the SP's policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of unions, demanding that it condemn "the suicidal policy of certain trades unions in excluding negroes from membership."[13]
Answering critics who objected that a focus on racial injustice would detract from the struggle for Socialism itself, Harrison pointed out that because the SP championed reforms such as old age pensions, the socialization of essential services, and other reforms, neglect of racial issues would constitute rank hypocrisy. Harrison concluded that "the mission of the Socialist Party is to free the working class from exploitation, and since the Negro is the most ruthlessly exploited working class group in America, the duty of the Party to champion his cause is as clear as day." Perhaps disguising his fervent wish as historical prophecy--and certainly allowing logical reasoning to trump historical experience--Harrison claimed that Socialism inevitably entailed racial liberation. "If the overturning of the present system should elevate a new class into power; a class to which the negro belongs; a class which has nothing to gain by the degradation of any portion of itself; that class will remove the economic reason for the degradation of the negro. That is the promise of Socialism, the all-inclusive working-class movement" in whose triumph "lies the only hope of salvation from this second slavery" for both races. Harrison told white Socialists that Theodore Roosevelt's Brownsville Affair betrayal of blacks (Roosevelt had dishonorably discharged without trial Afro-American soldiers accused of fomenting disorder), combined with Taft's unceremonious purging of many blacks from government service, had greatly alienated black voters, who held the balance of power in six northern states. "This establishes two things: that the Negro vote can be got and that it is worth getting."[14]
Once again echoing themes prominent in contemporaneous Socialist-feminist philosophy, Harrison argued that equality for blacks necessitated special consideration because of the unique history, conditions, and sensibilities of blacks. Negroes were not culpable for their ignorance of Socialism. "Behind the veil of the color line none of the great world-movements for social betterment" have penetrated. Furthermore, intelligent blacks "are suspicious of Socialism as of everything that comes from the white people of America. They have seen that every movement for the extension of democracy has broken down as soon as it reached the color line"--including political democracy, religion, public schooling, and the civil service. Socialism was the same for all people but "the minds of all these [different groups] are not the same and are not to be approached in the same way." Isolated "behind the color line," blacks were "somewhat more difficult of approach" and required "special work." Like the foreign language federations and the women's clubs recognized by the SP, blacks required a "special literature.... special forms of address.... a special equipment." Black organizers and speakers knew "the psychology of the Negro.... [They] know the people, their history, their manner of life, and modes of thinking and feeling" and could illustrate Socialist principles with arguments based upon "the Negro's own history and experience." Speakers "who are themselves Negroes [and] to whom these considerations come by second nature" could "drive home an argument with such effectiveness that white Socialists must despair of achieving." Harrison adduced his experiences in the 1911 mayoral campaign as evidence. Even black Republicans and Democrats eagerly accepted a pamphlet, "The Colored Man's Case as Socialism Sees It," by the black minister George Slater, Jr., and "listen[ed] to our street speaker." They also liked a Debs pamphlet with its illustrated comparison of chattel and wage slavery. Nor did such a special racial appeal alienate whites, who comprised between a third and a half of his audiences.[15]
Insisting that white Socialists direct a special appeal to Afro-Americans, Harrison reminded his comrades that "so far, no particular effort has been made to carry the message of Socialism" to blacks. All the rest of the poor have had the gospel preached to them, for the party has carried on special propaganda work among the Poles, Slovaks, Finns, Hungarians, and Lithuanians. Here are ten million Americans, all proletarians, hanging on the ragged edge of the impending class conflict. Left to themselves they may become as great a menace to our advancing army as is the army of the unemployed, and for precisely the same reason: they can be used against us, as the craft unions have begun to find out.... On grounds of common sense and enlightened self-interest it would be well for the Socialist party to begin to organize the Negroes of America in reference to the class struggle. The capitalists of America are not waiting.... Is it to be the white half of the working class against the black half, or all of the working class?[16]
For Harrison, only Socialism could solve the specific problems of Afro-Americans. He addressed this argument partly to whites--demonstrating that blacks were a natural Socialist constituency, who must be courted--and partly to Negroes themselves. When addressing blacks, Harrison subtly modified the economic interpretation of racism which he expounded to white Socialists, and placed slightly more emphasis on racism's cultural underpinnings. Racism was "the one great fact for the Negro in America" both in its own right and because it compounded "the great labor problem with which all working-people are faced." Using an historical argument, Harrison traced the origins of African slavery to "the desire of certain Europeans to acquire wealth without working.... The white aristocrat did not buy black slaves because he had a special hatred or contempt for anything black, nor because he believed that Negroes were inferior to white people. On the contrary, he bought them precisely because, as working cattle, they were superior to whites." In claiming that this superiority stemmed directly from their distinct racial identity, however, Harrison explicitly accorded race a semi-autonomous origin and a continuing relevance independent of its contemporary class basis. Race did after all facilitate the enslavement of Africans, and made their present liberation more difficult. "Being of alien blood, these black people were outside of the social and political system to which they were introduced, and, quite naturally, beyond the range of such sympathies as helped to soften the hard brutalities of the system." Because any exploiting class "develops the psychology of its own advantage and creates insensibly the ethics which will justify" its exploitation, slaveowners "naturally came--without any self-deception, to see that slavery was right," and spread their ethos throughout society by their control of "the public instruments for the diffusion of ideas."[17]
Negroes were, Harrison said, "the most brutally exploited, and, therefore, the most despised section of the laboring class." Racial difference facilitated and intensified exploitation originally based upon economic motives alone; and such exacerbated oppression further identified blacks with degradation and servitude and thus reinforced the racial chasm that had originally facilitated the harsher exploitation. Jewish, Irish, and Italian workers had been similarly victimized by racial prejudice. "In every one of these cases it was the condition of the people--at the bottom as despised, exploited wage-slaves--that was responsible for the race-prejudice. And it is just so in the black man's case, with this difference: that his color marks what he once was, and even though he should wear a dress suit every evening and own an automobile or farm he can always be picked out and reminded."[18]
Harrison's analysis recognized that the forms, meanings, and intensity of racism changed with evolving economic circumstances. "Wherever the system was most profitable, the belief that the slave was not human was strongest"; the cotton gin bolstered a tottering slave system. Class society pitted individuals and groups against one another in the remorseless struggle for jobs; as long as this avoidable "economic fear survives, so long will economic competition create race prejudice." Harrison emphasized that "when this system of vicarious production disappears, the problem which is its consequence will disappear also." Socialism would not "at once remove race prejudice--unless it remove ignorance at the same time," but it would "remove racial injustice and lighten the black man's burden."[19] Harrison said (pace many white Socialists) that Socialism, however necessary, would not itself eradicate racism.
Socialism would not only strike at the root causes of racial prejudice; it would also abolish wage slavery, an even greater affliction for blacks than the chattel slavery it replaced. "Under chattel slavery it was to the interest of the owner to give the slave work and to keep him from starving to death," Harrison said. "Under wage slavery, if the man [is thrown] out of work the employer doesn't care; that is no loss to him; and if the man dies there are millions of others to take his place." Wage slavery "pays better. Pays the capitalist I mean.... Today no chain is necessary to bind us to the tools.... This system doesn't care whether the slaves who are bound in this new way are white or black."[20]
Blacks, therefore, suffered doubly from capitalism, both as workers and as members of an especially oppressed race. "Now ask yourself whether you haven't a very special interest in changing the present system.... It pays the capitalist to keep the workers divided. So he creates and keeps alive these prejudices. He gets [workers] to believe that their interests are different. Then he can use one half to club the other half with." White "privileges" condition white victims to "forget their own condition: as long as they can be made to look down upon another class" they remain content in their bogus and degraded "superiority." Harrison told blacks that Socialism was "right" and "inevitable. It is right because any order of things in which those who work have least while those who work them have most, is wrong" and inevitable because starvation amidst plenty would generated revolution. Appealing to black experience of racist newspapers and public figures, Harrison said that politicians lie about Socialism "just as they have to tell lies about you. They lie about it because they don't want you to know what it really is, just as they lie about you because they don't want people to know what you really are."[21]
Harrison emphasized the necessity of a united working class. "If we feel that we can advance to the conquest of capitalism with one part of the proletariat against us, let us say so," he exhorted Socialists. "But I haven't the slightest doubt that our program requires all the proletariat, and we are all aware of that. Let us act, then, in the light of that knowledge and add to the strength of an organized, all-inclusive, class conscious working class movement."[22]
Harrison arrived on the scene just as IWW leader William Haywood was demanding significant changes in the SP philosophy and strategy and the Socialist women's articulation of Socialist feminism was encountering significant resistance. Into this cauldron Harrison dropped his own demand for a Colored Socialist Club (CSC). Harrison's proposal, adopted by Local New York, was ambiguous. Harrison intended that the CSC, led by and mostly composed of blacks, would initiate blacks into SP ideology and tactics; blacks would then join their regular branches as full members. In this formulation, the CSC resembled the local women's committees. In another version, however, the CSC would resemble the SP's language federations, established at the behest of immigrant groups who spoke little or no English and who focused their SP activities in their separate federations. The New York Call's coverage of the CSC emphasized the latter interpretation, mentioning plans "for the immediate organization of a new branch consisting of colored members."[23]
Partly because of this ambiguity, Harrison's proposal drew criticism from other blacks. Long-time Socialist George Frazier Miller, the Brooklyn pastor of a church composed mostly of Haitian immigrants, conditionally approved the CSC as "an expedient of education" if "new-made Socialists join[ed] the locals of their respective assembly districts" after an initial period of education. But if white Socialists expected that a segregated CSC would enable them to "recoil from [the] contamination" of blacks, then such a ploy would only alienate Afro-Americans. To assuage such fears, Harrison clarified his stance in the final installment of a five-part New York Call series, stating that when enough blacks were recruited, "the colored Comrades can be drafted into those branches in whose territory they happen to live, thereby increasing both the finances and the working force of those branches."[24]
The next day, a letter (obviously written before Harrison's clarification), from Du Bois, then a SP member, condemned a segregated CSC as a violation of "the most fundamental principles underlying Socialism." Integrated locals would not only inculcate the principles of Socialism in black members, but, "what is much more important, they and their white fellows would come to know each other as human beings." Blacks sometimes acquiesced in separate institutions "because they wish to avoid insult and oppression. There should be, and is as of yet no such barrier in the Socialist locals and, therefore, the argument that negroes want separate locals is absurd." In response, Harrison chided Du Bois for confusing SP locals with branches and said that "as Dr. Du Bois himself states, the treatment historically accorded to black people in America has bred in them distrust and suspicion to such an extent that they cannot be effectively approached by the average Socialist branch. The word must be brought to them, in part at least, by the men of their own race and the work must be done where negroes 'most do congregate'.... No segregation is intended and if it were I should be the most unlikely person to be selected for such work."[25]
Harrison's career as an SP official was short and stormy. Briefly appointed special Negro organizer for the CSC in late 1911, he was arrested in connection with a street speech in late December, but released when his SP attorney proved the charges false. By early 1912, however, Local New York, dismayed by Harrison's lack of concrete achievements and by the opposition of many blacks, abolished the CSC. Harrison opposed this move, and also directly criticized SP attitudes on race. He reminded white socialists of the horrifying experiences of Theresa Malkiel, whose exposé of virulent white SP racism towards blacks in the South had appeared in the New York Call on August 21, 1911. (Malkiel, a prominent Socialist-Feminist and labor activist, had recently toured the South and found that vicious white racism among SP members--a racism condoned and even justified by many Northern comrades--had undermined her efforts to recruit blacks). Despite Harrison's protests, the SP kept a virulently racist Texas paper (the Rebel) on its list of approved publications. The New York Call, while publishing Harrison's articles, usually refused his request that the "N" in "Negro" be capitalized, taking refuge in standard practice (a dubious argument for a Socialist enterprise) and defensively claiming that, if it capitalized Negro, it must also capitalize White. (The International Socialist Review capitalized Negro for the first time in Harrison's third article for that publication.)[26]
The SP's watershed 1912 National Convention also disappointed Harrison. He asked that the convention demand enfranchisement of Southern blacks, reminding timid whites that in so doing "the party will not be guilty of proposing anything worse than asking the government to enforce its own 'law and order.'"[27] The 1912 convention, however, ignored disfranchisement and other black issues. Worse, conservative SP officials (virulent enemies of the IWW) in the course of viciously denouncing Asian immigrants, virtually justified racism by claiming that it was an innate human characteristic.[28] The 1912 convention also proscribed the racially egalitarian IWW, whose industrial form of unionism Harrison strongly favored. Furthermore, the party hierarchs, alarmed by Debs's refusal to speak before segregated audiences, sedulously routed their presidential candidate away from the South during the 1912 campaign. Despite these slights, Harrison energetically campaigned for Debs in 1912 and exulted when his prediction that blacks would accept a Socialist literature directed especially to them seemed vindicated by events. Despite Harrison's efforts, however, very few New York blacks voted Socialist in 1912.
Harrison's alienation from the SP intensified after the 1912 elections, when the imbroglio over the recall of IWW leader William Haywood from the SP's National Executive Committee reached its denouement. The IWW's staunchly interracial industrial unionism, its magnificent fight against racism in all its forms, and its privileging of direct economic action over the ballot, had obvious appeal for a voteless, immigrant member of a proscribed and largely disfranchised race excluded from most AFL craft unions.
(Haywood was recalled, an event that precipitated a virtual civil war within the SP, from which it never recovered). Immediately after the 1912 election, Harrison publicly endorsed the IWW, direct action, sabotage, and the general strike, privileged economic over political organization, and signed the "Resolutions of Protest" against the recall of Haywood. (That Harrison's own Local New York strongly supported the recall only increased his alienation).[29] He also criticized the SP for its failure to endorse industrial unionism.
By August 1913, orthodox white Socialists complained about the content of Harrison's speeches, which increasingly sided with the (now officially proscribed) IWW in its controversies with the SP. In October, amidst Harrison's vocal participation in the IWW's Paterson strike, Local New York squelched a planned debate on the relative merits of industrial and political organizations. Harrison, a party member, would have favored industrial unionism over electioneering (a stance opposed to the party's official position) while his opponent, who was not an SP member, would have defended the SP orthodoxy, which favored political action. Local New York demanded that Harrison "state in writing his position as to the above question."[30]
Harrison responded by openly repeating his defense of sabotage, saying that it was "feared by capitalists more than anything else. It is our one great weapon.... Whether right or wrong, every blow struck by labor against capital is a blow for labor." Harrison predicted sabotage in the Paterson mills if Frederick Sumner Boyd, a SP member arrested for instructing workers on the details of sabotage, was convicted. He urged that workers challenge the SP and the AFL on this and other issues and taunted the SP for its lackadaisical and even hostile attitude towards the IWW's nationally publicized strike. "We Socialists must go to the workers to hear what we must do," he said. "The revolution is not coming from above" but "from below, working its way up from the depths." Echoing widespread Wobbly pronouncements, Harrison said that workers had no rights under capitalism and never would; their struggle was "not to get rights, but to get might, and when we get that we will have right." Again echoing familiar IWW complaints, Harrison said that "only on election day is the vote of any use in any vital matter." In a (not published) letter to the pro-IWW New Review Harrison assailed the SP's accommodation with racism and affirmed that the IWW "has no scruples about affirming the full import of its revolutionary doctrine at all times and places--even in the South.... I wonder now, whether any Socialist, Southern or other, could blame me for throwing in my lot with the IWW." By February 1914 he publicly doubted whether he would long remain welcome in the SP.[31]
Harrison's fears soon proved justified. The following month Local New York peremptorily canceled a planned debate between Harrison and Frank Urbansky. Two branches--the third and the tenth--had advertised the debate and sold two hundred tickets when the tenth branch received a frantic letter from Local New York forbidding branches from sponsoring debates between party members and non-members "without the approval of the Executive Committee." Both branches defied the Executive Committee, as did Harrison, who, responding to demands that he withdraw from the debate, exclaimed: "Please tell the Executive Committee to go chase itself." Referring to previous petty harassment by the local, Harrison added, "if my color has anything to do with it this time I should thank you to let me know." The Executive Committee retaliated by dissolving the offending branches, which protested that such methods violated the SP's own constitution and were "underhanded, undignified, unfair and militating against the principles and best interest of the Socialist party." Both branches unsuccessfully appealed their dissolution. Local New York also suspended Harrison from the party for three months, thus effectively ending his short stint as an SP activist. Harrison continued to lecture on street corners, suffering frequent arrest, and eked out a living by giving lectures at the Radical Forum and other institutions. At that time, Harrison later said, he was "in the unique position of being the Black leader and lecturer of a white lecture forum."[32]
Harrison's virtual ejection from the SP highlighted impossible dilemmas that would plague not only African-American radicals, but their hoped-for white allies. The SP was far more racially enlightened than either of the capitalist parties. However, it could not consistently espouse an unadulterated egalitarianism capable of weaning Afro-Americans from the mainstream parties that won elections and, sometimes, made a difference (however slight) in African-American lives. The SP's failure stemmed not simply from a lack of vision--although even Harrison's "white friends" simply could not, or would not, comprehend the world as experienced by African Americans. Rather, the SP was bedeviled by its "electoral path to power," which mandated conciliating racist (and sexist) majorities in its potential constituencies. The SP's comparative racial egalitarianism alienated whites in all sections, but especially in the South, where the SP made virtually no headway. (When a prominent Socialist complained, shortly after World War I, that large sections of the United States contained more elephants than Socialists, his mordant comment most fully characterized the South.) However, the SP's desperate attempt at straddling the racial divide and winning support of racist whites likewise estranged those activist blacks whose leadership it most needed. Meanwhile, almost all blacks resided in the South, where, disfranchised by law and by terror, they remained beyond any imaginable Socialist appeal.
The Socialist party accommodated white racists and other cultural conservatives not only in the electoral arena, but also in the unions. The SP consistently supported the virulently racist, sexist, and patriotic AFL over the egalitarian and internationalist IWW because the AFL contained more potential voters. The SP made a related, and equally catastrophic, decision about its relationship with the AFL. The SP's predecessor, the Socialist Labor party, had exasperated unionized workers by its dogmatic and insistent meddling in internal union affairs; the SP, wary of evoking AFL distrust, steadfastly avoided any interference in such affairs (which included organizational structure and membership requirements). The Socialists therefore not only backed a union federation that ostracized blacks; they also refrained, on principle, from fighting within AFL unions either for racial equality or even industrial unionism--the only organizational form that could recruit from blacks and other large groups excluded from the AFL. Although both the SP and AFL could justify their respective positions on pragmatic grounds (government and capitalist terrorism destroyed the IWW), the results vitiated Socialist electoral and union activity among all races. In 1931, after the near-total destruction of the SP, the IWW, and the organized black left, African-American intellectuals Sterling Spero and Abram Harris recognized this clearly. Because the SP
confined its efforts to the political arena and refused to grapple with trade-union issues, the party made it impossible for its teachings to reach the rank and file of the most articulate sections of the workers. It thereby destroyed its effectiveness even in its chosen field of politics. In spite of its declarations of class solidarity, it could not hope to win the Negro worker politically without first capturing him economically and educating the unions to the necessity of organizing him as chief among the unorganized and excluded. Moreover, so long as socialism was primarily political it could not gain much adherence among Negroes because of their well-nigh unshakeable affection for the Republican party.[33]
However, the IWW's radical counterculturalism, its uncompromising attack on traditional values (including white racism), its steadfast refusal to work within capitalist, racist, or patriarchal structures of power, doomed it. In the interlude between Harrison's exile from the SP and the destruction of both the SP and the IWW, A. Philip Randolph renewed efforts at working within the white left. Randolph launched his campaign, however, after the rapprochement of the SP and IWW in 1917, when his full endorsement of both evoked the hostility of neither. Meanwhile, Harrison, disgusted with working in almost lilly-white environments, increasingly emphasized race-conscious organizing within the Afro-American community.
Reflecting upon his experiences both in the SP and in a largely white lecture forum, Harrison became increasingly dissatisfied with his position as an isolated black working within a white milieu. His experiences with the Socialist party had disillusioned him with cross-race organizing not only because of the pervasive racism of the whites, but because of the defensive color-consciousness of the blacks. "Behind the color line," Harrison sadly acknowledged, "one has to think perpetually of the color line, and most of those who grow up behind it can think of nothing else. Even when one essays to think of other things, that thinking is tinged with the shades of the surrounding atmosphere."[34] Race, not class, was the organizing principle of American life. The Socialist party, replicating its dismal performance of 1912, polled very few votes in Harlem in 1916.
By 1916, therefore, Harrison embraced "the American doctrine of 'Race First'" and determined "to work among his people along the lines of his own choosing."[35] Ironically, however, Harrison's "race first" strategy--first manifested in his "Our Civic Corner" column in the black New York News and in his position as contributing editor to Cyril Briggs's Colored American Review--necessitated criticism of the very black leaders, institutions, and cultural practices upon which a "race first" movement would presumably build. Briggs's publication set the tone. Aiming to "enlighten the struggling colored business man" and promote "every honest and worthy Negro business man or firm, and also the white business men and firms that employ colored help," the Colored American Review relentlessly criticized "those human leeches and parasites in our own race who allow themselves to be used as the tools of dishonest white business men and firms, in depriving the race not only of their honest savings, but impeding our progress as a whole." Harrison quickly found that such intraracial criticism evoked severe retaliation. When a Harrison article in the black Amsterdam News criticized many white-authored plays as degrading black audiences, Harlem's Lincoln Theatre withdrew its advertisements until the paper's editor promised a cessation of such criticism. Harrison complained that this incident proved "that a theatre which made its living from [Negroes] was practically denying them the right to form and express any opinion of its work except a servile, flattering one."[36]
Disgusted by this experience--reminiscent of Booker Washington's depriving him of his Post Office job--Harrison founded the Liberty League (1917) and its publication, the Voice, which he edited. It was a propitious time for such an enterprise, as African-American radicalism was stimulated by the migration of blacks north during World War I, Wilson's stirring slogans about democracy, and the general militance sparked by war, inflation, and the war-induced labor shortage. Having learned that blacks ignored radical appeals, Harrison cleverly enlisted traditional institutions and values on behalf of his organization. Harrison believed that "camouflage was safer and more effective" than strident criticism of the Wilson regime, whose propaganda slogans about "democracy" and "self-determination" could be used to instigate black upheaval. After the war Harrison recalled that "I was well aware that Woodrow Wilson's protestations of democracy were lying protestations, consciously and deliberately designed to deceive.... I chose to pretend to believe that Woodrow Wilson meant what he said, because by so doing I would safely hold up to contempt and ridicule the undemocratic practices of his administration and the actions of his white countrymen in regard to the Negro."[37]
In another bow to traditional values, Harrison secured the Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church (formerly pastored by the prominent black Socialist R.C. Ransom), as host for the founding meeting, attended by perhaps two thousand persons. (William Monroe Trotter, founder of the National Equal Rights League and publisher of the militant Boston Guardian, sponsored a similar organizational gathering in Boston.) Chandler Owen and Marcus Garvey, as well as Harrison, addressed the meeting, which proclaimed its members "Negro-Americans loyal to their country in every respect and obedient to her laws"--a conservative formulation that often justified armed resistance to lynching.[38]
The organizational meeting also demanded self-determination for the peoples of Africa and equal rights for blacks in the United States. "We, as Negro-Americans who have poured out our blood freely in every war of the Republic, and upheld her flag with undivided loyalty, demand that since we have shared to the full measure of manhood in bearing the burdens of democracy we should also share in the rights and privileges of that democracy." Because white Americans were "aflame with the passionate ardor of democracy which has carried them into the greatest war of the age with the sole purpose of suppressing autocracy in Europe," 1917 was "the best time to appeal to them to give to twelve millions of us the elementary rights of democracy at home." The Liberty League demanded enforcement of the Reconstruction amendments and pledged itself "to agitate by every legal means until we... square the deeds of our nation with its declarations." On July 4th, "Liberty's Birthday," the Liberty League launched the Voice, "a newspaper for the New Negro," under Harrison's editorship. It also addressed a respectful petition to the House of Representatives, which, while demanding justice, affirmed the loyalty, patriotism, and lawfulness of the black race. The Voice also emblazoned on its masthead one of Wilson's ringing pronouncements about self-government.[39]
Although many of the Liberty League's demands recapitulated the long-standing aims of the NAACP, its program attacked the NAACP's stress on integration and moral suasion. Stressing "race first," the League's Declaration of Principles declared that "we must be loyal to our race in everything"; its mottos were "Africa First" and "Negroes First, Last, and Always." Obliquely criticizing Du Bois, Harrison declared that "the old idea of Negro leadership by virtue of the white man's selection has collapsed. The new Negro leader must be chosen by his fellows--by those whose striving he is supposed to represent." Furthermore, "Just as the white men of these and other lands are white men before they are Christians, Anglo-Saxons or Republicans; so the Negroes of this and other lands are intent upon being Negroes before they are Christians, Englishmen, or Republicans." Harrison later remarked that the NAACP had "made a joke of itself" by claiming that "simple publicity" would abolish lynching and other evils. The NAACP, he said, aimed "to secure certain results by affecting the minds of white people" over which it had no control, and had no recourse when moral suasion failed. The Liberty League, by contrast, was exclusively black and based upon the assumption "that white people will love us just as long as they can use us, and that they cannot be trusted any longer.... What we want is not their love, but their respect.... Before allegiance to the flag itself comes our allegiance to the Negro race." When Mary White Ovington, a white Socialist who helped found the NAACP, criticized Harrison for starting yet another paper (and one which adulterated "straight Socialism" with racial matters), Harrison contemptuously dismissed her "bossy and dictatorial note." Whites, Harrison declared, must realize that blacks were not children: "While we need all the friends we can get, we need no benevolent dictators."[40]
The maiden issue of the Voice denounced the East St. Louis pogrom (incited partly by one of Woodrow Wilson's racist diatribes) as "an orgy of unprovoked and villainous barbarism which neither Germans nor any other civilized people have ever equalled." Declaring that "cringing has gone out of date," Harrison favored armed self defense over the NAACP's emphasis on moral suasion. "If white men are to kill unoffending Negroes, Negroes must kill white men in defense of their lives and property. This is the lesson of the East St. Louis massacre." When murder was cheap, whites indulged in it. Therefore, "let Negroes help to make murder costly, for in so doing they will aid the officers of the city, state and nation in instilling respect for law and order into the minds of the worst and lowest elements of our American cities.... And they will be more highly regarded--as are the Irish--because of fighting back."[41]
The League also differed from the NAACP in its wholehearted endorsement of the IWW. Harrison charged that the AFL helped incite the East St. Louis pogrom. More generally, he said, it kept the Negro "out of work and out of the unions as long as it could; and when it could no longer do this it has taken him in, tricked him, and discriminated against him." AFL racism and the seeming friendliness of big capitalists rendered most blacks anti-union. Accordingly, Harrison advised that Negroes "join hands with the American capitalist and scab [the AFL] out of existence.... Make a truce with your capitalist enemies until you get rid of this traitor to the cause of labor." Harrison proclaimed that his "own duty, here as everywhere, is to the Negro race.... Since the AFL chooses to put Race before Class, let us return the compliment." Harrison, however, touted the IWW's Brotherhood of Timber Workers as a model. "We must organize One Big Union of all the working class.... This is the IWW type of unionism, and the employers use their newspapers to make the public believe that it stands for anarchy, violence, law-breaking and atheism, because they know that if it succeeds it will break them." The IWW, Harrison noted approvingly, recruited blacks "not because its promoters love Negroes--but because they realize that they cannot win if any of the working class is left out."[42] Harrison, like the IWW itself, believed that common underlying interests were a more reliable cement of any alliance than were sentimental or altruistic platitudes.
Harrison's Voice quickly became the major organ of Harlem radicalism, attaining a circulation of eleven thousand--an extraordinary number for a local paper in the small Harlem Afro-American community. A group of black "society girls," perhaps emulating the Appeal to Reason's "Appeal Army," formed the "Voice Volunteers," a group that sold subscriptions and papers and distributed copies on Sundays as congregations left church. Surprisingly, whites volunteered their help, and Harrison claimed that his paper had more white readers than all other African-American newspapers combined.[43]
The Voice covered racial issues large and small. It exposed egregious cases of police brutality and demanded that a black fireman receive the hero's medal he had been promised. It condemned the Wilson administration's summary execution of black troops accused of riot and murder in Houston, Texas. Entering a lively Afro-American debate, Harrison favored the term "Negro" over "colored"--which, he argued, lumped blacks with other racial groups and was favored by supercilious light-skinned Negroes. To those who objected that "Negro" was easily degraded into "Nigger," Harrison replied that blacks should "stop bending the knee and bowing the head to every insult and contumely" and should "stop growing a wish bone where our backbone ought to be."[44] Instead, they should make the appellation "Negro" a token of respect.
The Voice also published Harrison's sophisticated analysis of the Negro theatre. Harrison proclaimed that drama was both "a record of individual expression and of social expression; the author and the age are equally on view." Because of this--and because audience response largely determined "the form and substance of the Negro drama"--such drama would "demonstrate the distinctiveness of Negro society." A person could "reconstruct and interpret the life of any period from its literary and artistic remains.... Conditions prevailing before the floodlights reflect themselves behind them."[45]
White racism, however, scarred black actors and playwrights. As long as whites degraded blacks in real life, they could not "allow representatives of the same people to stand where they can be the recipients of our serious admiration and applause." Acclaimed Afro-American actors Bert Williams and George Walker reinforced white prejudices and insidiously debased the self-image of blacks themselves. Performing before white patrons, the Afro-American actor "must strive at his peril to present their conception of what a Negro is or should be." However, "the Negro playgoer is also a creature of his times and conditions. His general ideas and preferences, his very notion of himself and his group, are to a large extent built upon such models as he gets from the larger world which touches him at so many points." Thus, the black drama, including vaudeville, degraded blacks in the eyes of both races even as it reflected the social reality of Afro-American insubordination. Black dramatists and actors perforce either represented "that conception of life and its stage-presentation which [African Americans] have derived from white people" or played to blacks' "higher ideals and the real lives they live." The latter option, Harrison complained, was unpopular even among blacks. Yet even low comedy, despite its origins in white stereotyping, reflected "the actual flow of the common life around us" and presented "Negro life in its social and moral aspects which the writer of Negro books dares not touch." Presciently, Harrison recognized that popular culture, even in its commercial forms, could--indeed must--reflect social realities and express social truths. Intellectuals, he exclaimed, are "so prone to cut life into sections, according to the patterns in the book, that we often miss the meaning of the actual flow of the common life around us."[46]
For Harrison, the main contribution of black drama was in broaching the forbidden topic of what Alice Walker would later call "colorism"--color prejudice within the Negro community. "The craze for color runs all through Negro society in the United States," Harrison charged; but this scandal "is hidden with especial care from the white outsider." This "great social obsession among our Negroes" suffused and distorted Afro-American life. "One's social value in this group is in direct proportion to one's lightness.... In love, courtship, marriage and their social life generally, lightness of color is perhaps the greatest desideratum." The mulatto, "no matter how ignorant or uncouth he may be, thinks himself superior to the black or brown person." Churches, he said, were especially segregated by color. Distinguishing color prejudice from racism, and recognizing that most whites lumped all persons of African descent together regardless of the shade of their skin, Harrison claimed that "there is no such thing as color prejudice in America--except among 'colored people.'" Many "colored" actors and actresses were "so fair as to be almost undistinguishable from white people." Harrison asserted that the other three black papers in New York would not hire him because of his very dark skin.[47]
A few years later, Harrison continued his analysis of the Afro-American theatre. Writing in the Negro World, Harrison complained that blacks who performed plays by whites about white life whitewashed themselves, much as whites used burnt cork when they played darkface roles. "If Negroes were people," he said, "then it would be proper that Negro audiences" see Negroes depicted "as drawing room guests, doctors, detectives, governors, financiers," and the entire array of human roles. "But if folks can't be considered as people unless they are unlike Negroes, then, of course, our actors should never look like Negroes." Negroes purportedly believed "that culture and ability are not limited by color"; but how could blacks demand that whites embody such principles when "we hypocritically and with cowardly lying refuse to act up to it in our own case?"[48]
Harrison quoted Cyril Briggs as saying that Negroes should no more perform in whiteface than perform a Russian play in Russian. Only when race formed a character should the actor depict race.[49] Harrison, however, was trapped within a contradiction of his own. He fully recognized that black experience was distinct from that of whites. There were no black governors, and any black doctor or attorney would face problems much different from those afflicting their white counterparts. Few white plays adequately expressed Afro-American life, sensibilities, or aspirations. Later black critics would more consistently demand that Afro-Americans create their own theatre, with their own plays, actors, and producers, which could express the realities of African-American experience.
The Voice began publication shortly before the New York City mayoral race of 1917, in which United States participation in the Great War became a major issue. Harrison praised the SP's antiwar stance but noted that the carnage in Europe opened up vast opportunities for the darker races. Although the world was in its vast majority colored, Harrison said, whites presently determined its--and the blacks'--destiny. In a pronouncement that both echoed Du Bois and anticipated Garvey, Harrison said that "this vast majority is at peace and remains at peace until the white minority determines otherwise. The war in Europe is a war of the white race" over "the lands and destinies of this colored majority in Asia, Africa and the islands of the sea." The white race "as it exists today, is the superior race of the world.... not because it has better manners, more religion, or a higher culture" but on "the frankly materialistic ground that it has the guns, soldiers, the money and resources to keep it in the position of the top dog and to make its will go. This is what the white men mean by civilization, disguise it as they may.[50]
The war, Harrison continued, was destroying the very resources upon which white supremacy rested. The whites "are bent upon this form of self-destruction and nothing that we can say will stop them." The darker races could more readily win their freedom after the whites had exhausted themselves in their bloody cataclysm, "for the majority races cannot be eternally coerced into accepting the sovereignty of the white race." White arrogance would generate a terrible race war, "and there is no certainty that in such a conflict the white race will come out on top."[51]
Harrison also commented extensively on the mayoral campaign itself. He had long criticized the black Republican establishment and advocated political independence, "selling our votes for the highest [price] we can get--such as more schools and playgrounds, lower rents, higher wages, better treatment at the hands of policemen... and a larger measure of American manhood."[52] During the 1917 campaign Harrison demanded what the Irish and the Jewish voter get: nominations on the party's ticket in our own districts. And if we don't get this we will smash the party that refuses to give it.
For we are not Republicans, Democrats, or Socialists any longer. We are Negroes first. And we are no longer begging for sops. We demand, not 'recognition' but representation, and we are out to throw our votes to any party which gives this....[53]
Later in the campaign he asserted that blacks must organize themselves in their own party, in the fashion of the Irish Home Rulers. But for the nonce, Harrison castigated the Republicans (specifically condemning those race traitors whose venal conspiracy had dismissed him from the Post Office as "the old type of Negro barnacle on the bottom of the Republican ship,"), praised the Democrats (Tammany Hall, however corrupt, "had dealt more decently by Negroes than Negroes have by Tammany Hall") and advised blacks that they held the balance of power in New York and other northern states.[54]
But Harrison, who had apparently rejoined the SP, reserved his highest praise for that party, "clean and straight and standing out of the muck of mere politics, with the sunlight on its face, fronting the dawn of a better day." Ignoring his own experience, Harrison claimed that both the SP and its mayoral candidate Morris Hillquit (a strong advocate of the AFL and one of the IWW's most intransigent enemies) had a spotless record on racial issues. Harrison proclaimed that the SP offered the Negro "nothing special... [but] what it offers to all downtrodden workers: Justice, liberty and absolute equality--not only in words, but in deeds." A Socialist victory would mean an "absolute cessation of police brutality and the consciousless evictions by conscienceless landlords; would mean bathhouses and playgrounds; municipal markets to cut down the high cost of living; municipal ownership of ice and milk." Disparaging those who called an SP vote a wasted vote, Harrison claimed that the SP could win. Even if the SP lost, it was "better to vote for that which you want, and not get it, than to vote for what you don't want--and get it." Yet Harrison insisted that the Voice "is neither a Republican, Democratic or Fusion paper, but, as it proudly proclaims, a newspaper for the New Negro." Harrison accepted advertisements from all candidates and endorsed (as did the more orthodox black Socialists Randolph and Owen) the handful of black candidates who had won nominations on the Republican ticket in opposition to the regular party apparatus.[55]
Although a long-time supporter of women's rights (including birth control), Harrison opposed the suffrage amendment on the New York State ballot on the grounds that white suffragists had collaborated with racism. White suffragists claimed both that women's votes would not undermine white supremacy in the South, and that white women in New York (who lacked the vote) should not be degraded beneath black men (who had it). Harrison said he supported "the women of his race" and opposed women's suffrage "until the white women have been properly chastened." Harrison supported the Negro Women's Campaign Committee, which urged "colored men to withhold the vote" for suffrage "until the Woman's Suffrage party declared itself on the status of colored women." Harrison conceded that his position was "not sound logic" but averred that "life is larger than logic" and that blacks must bargain as other groups did, placing their concrete interests above the abstract claims of justice.[56]
After the election, Harrison rejoiced that the SP had vastly increased its vote and elected some of its local candidates: "The party of the Common People has opened the doors of our state and city governments, and stepped inside." He exulted that Hillquit had garnered fully 25 percent of the black vote and predicted that "fear of losing the Negro vote" would cause the capitalist parties "to bestir themselves more in the Negro's behalf in the future than any certainty of allegiance could make them do in the past." Harrison also hailed the victory of the suffrage amendment as "a great step in the direction of democracy at home" and reminded his readers that he had opposed it "not on principle, but as a protest against the cowardly race prejudice of the white women of the Woman Suffrage Party." He predicted that Negro women would vote more wisely than Negro men and win playgrounds, bathhouses, and clean streets in Harlem. Harrison was also jubilant at the victory of black insurgent Republican State Assembly candidate Edward Austin Johnson. The first black elected to the State Assembly, Johnson symbolized "the opening wedge of real political equality for the Negroes of New York" and "the death knell of the barnacle type of [black] Republican leader." No more would "a Negro political leader be hand-picked for us by our white masters"; rather, each such leader would be "responsible first [to] the race that made him what he is."[57] Significantly, Randolph, Owen, and William Bridges (future publisher of the Challenge and organizer of the all-black Liberty party) joined Harrison at Johnson's victory celebration.
This celebration was Harrison's last triumph for quite some time, however. Shortly after the election, the Voice folded. Harrison found that his "race first" organization and ideology foundered just as his previous class-based strategy had. Blacks, he learned, were every bit as divided as were workers. Prosperous blacks disliked Harrison's attacks upon them, upon the newspapers, businesses, and churches they owned or controlled, and upon the political organizations from which they derived prestige and sustenance. Almost immediately after launching the Voice Harrison noticed that the common people offered their pennies and their help while "Big Negroes" shunned it. Although Harrison urged Negro businessmen to advertise in the Voice "not as charity" but as "a good stroke of business," few accepted his offer. Rebuffed, Harrison insisted that the Voice would "place its dependence upon the Negro masses" and would not "cringe before the Exalted Ones." Harrison accepted advertisements from most businesses and individuals who would pay, but reserved his right to criticize his advertisers. On one occasion, Harrison used a paid advertisement as a springboard for a forthright attack on the advertiser; in a classic understatement, Harrison's biographer says that such actions "would certainly scare most potential advertisers."[58]
Harrison's scathing exposé of colorism within the African-American community also aroused anger. Although Harrison conceded that many light-skinned African Americans fought for the rights of all blacks, many of his remarks must have offended the light-toned elite. Harrison presumably alienated other blacks--both manufacturers and consumers--when he refused "those disgusting and degrading Anti-Kink and Whiten-Up ads which make every self-respecting Negro afraid to open [Afro-American papers] in public places where white people may see."[59] Harrison's antiwar and antipatriotic stance, like his hostility to Christianity and his attacks on the Republican party, doubtless repelled many other blacks. Indeed, Harrison's penchant for attacking the mainstays of Afro-American (and white American) culture, rather than working within hallowed institutions and utilizing traditional values, symbols, and icons, sharply differentiated him from the masses of blacks of every class. Harrison's occasional attempts at compromise--holding meetings in a church, using Aesopian language during the war, and pretending belief in Wilson and his war aims--may have kept him out of jail, but did not deceive his potential followers, who were, as Harrison himself readily acknowledged, much more conventional in their cultural orientations.
The Liberty League and the Voice were also plagued by splits, contests for power, and alleged financial irregularities. Debates arose over whether the Voice was Harrison's personal organ or the property of the League. Some supporters differed with Harrison's strategy of competing with the three other black Harlem papers by publishing a special Sunday edition and lowering the price. Harrison himself rejected an offer of $10,000 from an unidentified Harlem white who wanted partial control of the Voice, insisting that "we want to see at least one Negro paper buttressed on the love and devotion of the masses of our own race. It is the fact that our disloyal leaders are fed from the hands of others that makes them of such small service to us."[60] Finally, Marcus Garvey began scheduling UNIA meetings at the same time as Liberty League gatherings, and many of Harrison's followers deserted him for the more charismatic Garvey.
By the end of 1917, therefore, Harrison found that the African-American community, as the American working class, was divided along the lines of class, color, and culture. Paradoxically, however, just as Harrison's initial efforts faltered, two energetic and widely disparate movements emerged from their ashes. A. Philip Randolph and Chandler Owen, frequent auditors of Harrison's street-corner speeches, founded the Messenger, a "straight Socialist" black publication, and the Friends of Negro Freedom (FNF), a radical black organization with a wide-ranging program. At almost the same time, Marcus Garvey, a friend and associate of Harrison's, injected new life into his "race first" Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). For a few years, both movements combined, in their somewhat different proportions, a class and a race analysis and program much as had Harrison. Harrison himself nursed a skeletal Liberty League along, briefly revived the Voice in 1918, and helped edit another short-lived publication, the New Negro, in 1919. His prominence as the most prominent exponent of Harlem radicalism had passed, however, and he struggled to find a place within the ferociously competitive world of black social activism.
Notes:
[1] For a comprehensive survey of SP policy towards Afro-Americans, see Philip S. Foner, American Socialism and Black Americans: From the Age of Jackson to World War II (Westport, 1977). Sally Miller, Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in Early Twentieth Century American Socialism (New York, 1996), provides documents (including the Negro Resolution quoted above) and astute commentary on SP racial ideas.
[2] DB, "Socialist of the Path" and "Socialism and the Negro," Horizon, (February, 1907), in Meier, Rudwick, and Broderick, eds., Black Protest Thought in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1971), 63-64; "Socialists in Oklahoma," TC, December 1910; "The Socialists," TC, March 1911; "Socialism Again," TC, April 1911; "The Socialists Again," TC, November 1911. For an account of the vast role of Socialists in the founding of the NAACP see Foner, American Socialism, 182-201.
[3] The most comprehensive treatment of Harrison yet available is Jeffrey Babcock Perry's Columbia University dissertation, "Hubert Henry Harrison, 'The Father of Harlem Radicalism': The Early Years--1883 Through the Founding of the Liberty League and 'The Voice' in 1917" (1986). Despite the title, Perry has significant information on Harrison through 1920. Perry has also published A Hubert Harrison Reader (Middletown, 2001), a generous selection of Harrison's writings.
Foner, American Socialism, has good material on Harrison, esp. 202-219. Two short accounts include J.A. Rogers, World's Great Men of Color (reprint edition, edited by John Henrik Clarke, New York, 1996), Volume II, 432-441, and Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill, 1996), 234-260). Winston James, Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (London, 1998) also discusses Harrison. The MGP contain a brief biography of Harrison, and numerous references to him.
[4] JBP, I, 12-69; HHHR, 31-32.
[5] HHH, "To the Young Men of My Race," TV, January 1919, reprinted in WAA, 91-94; HHH, "Education and Race," WAA, 126-128.
[6] Rogers, Great, 432-441; Gaines, Aloft, 124-125. Rogers quotes the New York Times of September 11, 1922 as saying that "Hubert Harrison, an eloquent and forceful speaker, broke all records at the Stock Exchange yesterday." John Carroll's letter, cited by Gaines, appeared in the New York Globe, November 4, 1914.
[7] JBP (100-106) quotes Harrison's December 8 and December 19, 1910 letters to the New York Sun; the December 8 letter is also in HHHR, 164-166. Charles Anderson wrote Washington, gloating about Harrison's impending dismissal. "Do you see the hand?," he said. "I think you can.... I will attend to Harrison." Anderson asked that Washington destroy the letter. (JBP, 114-115). Harrison, however, was aware of what happened, and publicized this scandal in 1911. Anderson wrote Washington, saying Harrison "is blaming me for his dismissal.... Well, I think I can endure the charge with fortitude and good humor." James, Aloft, 124-125.
[8] HHH, "The Negro and Socialism, I," NYC, November 28, 1911; HHH, "Summary and Conclusion," NYC, December 26, 1911; HHH, "The Materialist Interpretation of Morals," NYC, November 3, 1912.
[9] HHH, "The Negro and Socialism, I," NYC, November 28, 1911; HHH, "Summary and Conclusion," NYC, December 26, 1911; HHH, "The Materialist Interpretation of Morals," NYC, November 3, 1912.
[10] HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912; HHH, "The Negro and Socialism," NYC, November 28, 1911; HHH, "Race Prejudice," NYC, December 4, 1911.
[11] HHH, "Race Prejudice," NYC, December 4, 1911; HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912; HHH, "The Negro and Socialism," NYC, November 28, 1911.
[12] HHH, "The Duty of the Socialist Party," NYC, December 13, 1911; HHH, letter, NYC, October 2, 1911, under the pseudonym "Nils Uhl."
[13] HHH, "Summary and Conclusion," NYC, December 26, 1911; HHH, "The Black Man's Burden," ISR, April 1912; HHH, "The Duty of the Socialist Party," NYC, December 13, 1911.
[14] HHH, "Summary and Conclusion," NYC, December 26, 1911; HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912; HHH, "How to Do It--and How Not," NYC, December 16, 1911. In November 1906 TR had cashiered 167 black soldiers, all or almost all of whom were certainly innocent of any wrongdoing. In keeping with his party's policy of cynically using blacks while actually oppressing them, TR waited until the eve of the midterm elections to announce the discharges. Black voters, therefore, learned of TR's insult and outrage only after they had voted. Harrison correctly perceived that TR's timing indicated his desire for black votes. In 1972, during the Presidency of Richard Nixon, the Secretary of the Army repudiated TR's action and changed the discharges (posthumously) to honorable.
[15] HHH, "How to Do It--And How Not," NYC, December 16, 1911; HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912. Philip Foner usefully reprints many of Slater's works, along with those of two other black Socialist ministers, in Black Socialist Preacher (San Francisco, 1983). However, "The Colored Man's Case as Socialism Sees It" has been lost.
[16] HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912.
[17] HHH, "What Socialism Means to Us," reprinted in NN, 48-58; HHH, "The Real Negro Problem," reprinted in NN, 30-40.
[18] ibid.
[19] HHH, "The Negro and Socialism," NYC, November 28, 1911; HHH, "The Duty of the Socialist Party," NYC, December 13, 1911; HHH, "The Real Negro Problem," reprinted in NN, 30-40.
[20] HHH, "What Socialism Means to Us," reprinted in NN, 48-58.
[21] HHH, "What Socialism Means To Us," reprinted in NN, 48-58.
[22] HHH, "How to Do It--and How Not," NYC, December 16, 1911.
[23] "To Push Agitation Among the Negroes," NYC, November 28, 1911.
[24] George Frazier Miller, "Organizing the Negroes," NYC, December 6, 1911; HHH, "Summary and Conclusions," NYC, December 26, 1911.
[25] George Frazier Miller, "Organizing the Negroes," NYC, December 6, 1911; HHH, "Summary and Conclusions," NYC, December 26, 1911; Du Bois, "Separate Organization," NYC, December 27, 1911; HHH, "No Segregation Intended," NYC, January 9, 1912.
[26] JBP, 159-250. Foner, American Socialism, 246-9, quotes and discusses Malkiel's letter.
[27] HHH, "Socialism and the Negro," ISR, July 1912.
[28] Harrison later quoted this statement in his "Race First Versus Class First," NW, March 27, 1920, reprinted in WAA. I discuss this important article in chapter 7, below.
[29] "Resolutions of Protest," ISR, February 1913, 623; JBP, 267-322. Sharing a widespread misconception, Perry states that the issue was whether Haywood should be expelled from the SP as well as recalled from the National Executive Committee. Actually, Haywood was never expelled from the SP, although the amendment to the SP's Constitution (Article 2, Section 6) under which he was charged called for expulsion. His local could have expelled him, in which case SP members outside of that local would have been powerless; the Resolutions of Protest were drafted precisely because Haywood's enemies, rather than disciplining him in his local, placed his recall from the NEC on a national ballot.
[30] JBP covers this controversy in detail, 267-8, 287-94, 297-307.
[31] JBP, 267-8, 287-94, 297-307. Harrison printed the letter to the New Review in NW, January 8, 1921. JBP discusses this letter, 304-307; the citation from the NW is on 320, note 44. The New Review was itself verboten at Local New York meetings, which banned it from sale at party meetings (JBP, 303).
[32] JBP, 307-315. Interestingly, Harrison was repeatedly acquitted by the judge, whom he later publicly thanked.
[33] Spero and Harris, Black Worker, 409.
[34] HHH, "On a Certain Conservatism in Negroes," NN, 41-47.
[35] HHH, NN, 3, speaking in the third person.
[36] HHH, "Leaves Torn from the Diary of a Race Critic--the Race in Drama," Amsterdam News c. July 1916, quoted in JBP, 379-85.
[37] HHH, Introduction to Chapter III, WAA p. 25.
[38] HHH, "Launching the Liberty League," TV, July 4, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 9-11.
[39] HHH, "Launching the Liberty League," TV, July 4, 1917; "Resolutions Passed at the Liberty League Meeting," "Liberty League's Petition to the House of Representatives," all in TV, July 4, 1917, and reprinted in WAA, 9-13. JBP says that Harrison added a reference to Marcus Garvey, absent from the original article, when he reprinted it in WAA. Perry reprints the original in HHHR, 86-93.
[40] HHH, "The New Politics for the New Negro, TV, September 4, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 39-40; HHH, "Shillady Resigns," NW, June 19, 1920, reprinted in WAA, 60-1; HHH, "Our Professional Friends," TV, November 7, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 55-60. White had written Harrison that "I don't see any reason for another organization, or another paper. If you printed straight socialism it might be different."
[41] HHH, "The East St. Louis Horror, TV, July 4, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 14-16; HHH, "Arms and the Man," TV, July 17, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 17-20. JBP, 487-488, says the New York Times for July 5, 1917, reported Harrison's speech of the previous day exhorting blacks to defend themselves against white depredations, in "Urges Negroes to Get Arms." Du Bois, of course, would not deny blacks their right of defending themselves against white violence.
[42] HHH, "The Negro and the Labor Unions," WAA, 20-22. JBP, 494, says that this was an editorial in TV; he reprints it in HHHR 79-81. It has all the hallmarks of having been written shortly after the East St. Louis pogrom.
[43] JBP, 498-503.
[44] HHH, "Why Is a Negro?," TV, September 4, 1917, quoted in JBP 552-554. Some black troops, exasperated by vicious, degrading, and at times homicidal treatment, were "guilty" (though not nearly so much as the whites who had provoked them. The question--unanswered because Wilson had the troops tried by secret court and hanged before they could appeal--was which ones.
[45] HHH, "Leaves Torn from the Diary of a Critic--the Race in Drama," July 1916, quoted in JBP, 375-388; HHH, "Negro Society and the Negro Stage," TV, September 19, 1917, in HHHR, 370-373.
[46] HHH, "Negro Society and the Negro Stage," TV, September 19, 1917, in HHHR 370-373; HHH, "Negro Society and the Negro Stage, Part 2," TV, October 3, 1917, in HHHR 373-376; HHH, "Leaves Torn from the Diary of a Critic--the Race in Drama," July 1916, quoted in JBP, 375-388.
[47] HHH, "Negro Society and the Negro Stage, Part 2" TV, October 3, 1917, quoted in JBP, 385-388 (also in HHHR, 373-376).
[48] HHH, "Are Negro Actors White?," NW article reprinted in TCR, April 1921.
[49] ibid.
[50] HHH, "The White War and the Colored World," TV, August 14, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 96-98.
[51] HHH, "The White War and the Colored World," TV, August 14, 1917, reprinted in WAA, 96-98.
[52] HHH, "Our Civic Corner," New York News, September 2, 1917, quoted in JBP, 395.
[53] "The Drift in Politics," TV, July 1917, reprinted in WAA, 41-43.
[54] HHH, "Charles W. Anderson," TV, October 31, 1917, quoted in JBP, 647-8; HHH, "The Coming Election," TV, October 18, 1917, quoted in JBP, 627-635 and reprinted in HHHR, 140-143.
[55] "The Coming Election," TV, October 18, 1917, quoted in JBP, 627-635.
[56] HHH, "Women Suffrage," TV, October 31, 1917, quoted in JBP, 650-652.
[57] HHH, "Election Results," TV, November 14, 1917, quoted in JBP, 665-668.
[58] JBP, 505-6, 647. Perry was referring to Harrison's attack on Edward Morgan, a white politician who advertised in the Voice; Morgan was one of the conspirators who had deprived Harrison of his Post Office job.
[59] JBP, 554, 557, 506-7.
[60] "The (New) Voice," July 11, 1918, from FSAA, Reel 11.