Understanding history is tricky. Classes in grade school are generally uneven and whitewashed, if not outright sanitized. Fewer and fewer students are studying it in college at all. Textbooks focus on a select few figures who are painted as defining social movements, particularly those who are looked back on as favorable, or even palatable. In many cases, the more revolutionary commitments of America’s greatest trailblazers are often reduced to a footnote, if not omitted completely. I myself encountered this phenomenon recently when I was working on my contribution to the Prospect Patriots issue, a profile of Ida B. Wells (1862-1931), one of the country’s first muckrakers and a courageous civil rights activist.
Wells did more than just report on lynchings and use her findings to inspire her advocacy for social justice. She was a founding member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), but left the organization in part because of her insistence that centering the worthiness and potential of working-class Black people should be a top priority. At the time, leaders like W.E.B. Du Bois thought that if a select number of educated Black people were empowered, the race could be advanced under their guidance. This part of Wells’s story is often discounted in any retellings.
Such developments made me wonder what others were omitted, and furthermore, what people were reduced to no more than a mention. If the more radical bits of the most famous American activists rarely are understood, then what about those who dedicated their entire lives to confronting systems of oppression in innovative, and often unpalatable, ways? Hubert Harrison (1883-1927) is one of those people. It wasn’t until this past June that I learned who Harrison was, after attending the Caribbean Philosophical Association’s 2026 Annual Conference. Brian Kwoba, an associate professor of history at the University of Memphis, won the Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award for his recent publication, Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism.
Kwoba’s treatment of Harrison’s life and philosophy is an intellectual history of a man who was a radical journalist, educator, leftist, and freethinker. Harrison was involved in various social movements, contributing to their success, while challenging the ruling beliefs and structures. He left a mark on the Harlem Renaissance, the American Socialist Party, and was a fierce advocate for internationalism, amongst dozens of other commitments. His unbridled radicalism shaped history, but his name has remained relatively unknown. Our particular political moment has created an important space to understand the contours of Harrison’s worldview and activities.
“I hope readers will take away an expanded sense of possibility,” says Kwoba. “One of the beautiful things about history is that oftentimes we don’t know what we’ve achieved in the past, and that limits our horizons for what we can achieve in the future. By learning what Hubert Harrsison achieved in the early 20th century, a sense of possibility for the kind of social movements, the kind of political visions, and liberation politics that we can build today.”
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Naomi Bethune: You call Harrison a “crystallizer.” What does that mean, and how did he earn that title?
Brian Kwoba: No one can do everything, but everyone can do something. We all have different paths in life. We all have different contributions we can make to the world in which we find ourselves, and the quote about Harrison as a “crystallizer” actually came from Hodge Kirnon, a Harlem activist and protégé of Harrison, who described Harrison as the one who crystallized the radicalism of Black New Yorkers. I found that such an apt metaphor because a crystal is something that chemists work hard to synthesize, and once they have a breakthrough, the new crystal they synthesize can become of the seed form for the proliferation of new structures much more easily. Harrison was like that. He would crystallize and create new ideas, new organizations, and new political formulations that then had this ripple effect, including on the evolution of socialist, secular humanist, Black nationalist, pan-African, and free love politics.
What organizing did Harrison do within the Socialist Party? What were his contributions and relationship to the movement?
Harrison made a number of contributions to the socialist cause, both at a theoretical and practical level. In the realm of theory, he writes the series of articles on the Negro and socialism, which ranks among the first systematic analyses of the relationship between race and class politics in the United States by a secular Black socialist. Harrison’s basic argument was that Black communities are the most working-class communities in the country, thanks to the history of slavery and the fact that most people of African descent were brought here as enslaved people to do work. Therefore a party claiming to stand for the emancipation of the working class had to champion their cause and had to place the concerns of this most working-class element in the country at the center of its analysis. Capitalism was using racial oppression and anti-Black racism to divide the working class, and to prevent the kind of laboring-class solidarity that would threaten the system, in his view. Thus, socialists should oppose racism as something that was holding back the struggle for socialism and for working-class emancipation alike. At a practical level he founded Colored Socialist Club in Harlem, which is the first official Black-led party formation designed specifically to recruit Black workers and organizers to the Socialist Party by speaking to their special conditions and unique experience of disfranchisement, lynching, segregation, and other forms of racial oppression in the Jim Crow era.
Unfortunately, the white, moderate, and middle-class party leadership did not appreciate or understand why this mattered. There’s a great quote that applies here, which goes, “To those accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” For a party leadership that was accustomed to all the privileges of whiteness, this newfound drive for bringing Black people into the party on an equal footing with white people felt like oppression, and they moved against Harrison. He understood that this was, as he put it, a “contemptible form of persecution,” and he ultimately had to part ways with the Socialist Party due to their intransigence. I think the key lesson he drew was that if white socialists, much like white liberals and conservatives, are not interested in racial equality, then Black folks needed to rely only on themselves and not on any kind of white political formation, no matter how supposedly “radical” it was.
Harrison was instrumental in transforming the “Black press.” How did his actions influence journalism in the early 1900s?
It’s an exciting period of history, in the sense that, alongside the so-called Great Migration, when African Americans from the South are moving North, African Americans in Northern small towns are also moving to Northern urban centers (oftentimes fleeing anti-Black pogroms and massacres), and these newly urbanizing Black communities are rapidly gaining access to education and literacy. The number of Black folks that are reading newspapers is on the rise as the early 20th century is unfolding, and this creates a market for a whole number of new publications, including Black newspapers. That said, there’s a struggle over what the Black press would say, what it would mean, what it would represent. By the time you get to the World War I era, you do have a number of Black newspapers and magazines, including the NAACP’s famous magazine, The Crisis, edited by W.E.B. Du Bois. Harrison sees a need for something, as he put it, “more radical than the NAACP.” He sees the need for a Black newspaper that would be more radical than the Crisis magazine, that would be more radical than Chicago Defender or the Amsterdam News.
In 1917, he founds The Voice, as the organ of his grassroots pan-Africanist organization, the Liberty League of Negro-Americans. This inspires a range of Black radical papers like the Black socialist Messenger, Marcus Garvey’s Negro World, and Cyril Briggs’s Black communist Crusader. By 1920, Garvey taps Harrison to edit his newspaper, because of Harrison’s experience as a journalist, as a newspaper editor, and the crystallizer of Harlem’s radicalism. The Negro World reaches a circulation of tens of thousands under Harrison’s watch, and he redesigns the paper. There’s a whole period of sort of Black journalistic innovation that is going on in Harlem in the 1910s and ’20s, which Harrison is at the center of, and does some groundbreaking work to lead by example in that field.
Harrison was heavily involved in doing anti-imperialist, anti-capitalist, and race-conscious work, which served as the basis for his theory of “colored internationalism.” How did his engagement in this movement deviate from his peers?
I think Harrison’s internationalism—apart from himself being an international immigrant—was really shaped by his experience in the Socialist Party, because the Socialist Party on paper was an internationalist party. Harrison has learned from the sort of internationalism of the socialist left, but he’s race-conscious, and he’s realizing that the First World War is also, as he put it, a “white world war.” In short, the warring countries were all white imperial powers fighting over who would be the dominant force in the world, meaning who would have the most colonies in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Caribbean. In response, Harrison calls for a “Colored International.” Unlike the “Communist International,” which collected the Communist parties primarily within the white world, the Colored International was designed to bring all the colonized people, the “darker races” of the world, into a global alliance against capitalist imperialism, which, according to Harrison, “mercilessly exploits the darker races for its own financial purposes.” By being both anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and for racial justice, Harrison’s “colored” internationalism stood in contrast to almost every other formulation of internationalism that’s on offer in the immediate postwar moment.
What was the “New Negro” movement, and how was Harrison involved in it?
The early 20th century was a time of rapid industrial expansion and technological and economic power for the U.S. There’s talk of a “new freedom,” which was a slogan Woodrow Wilson was using to campaign with, and a book that he wrote about the expansion of democracy thanks to the expansion of the industrial economy. The talk of a “New Negro” was part of this milieu as the Wilson administration is entering the First World War supposedly to “make the world safe for democracy.” But there’s wanton destruction, millions of lives lost and entire countries and economies destroyed, which precipitates a world revolution and political awakening symbolized not just by the Russian Revolution, but by anti-colonial rebellions throughout Africa, the Caribbean, and in Asia. Harrison is conscious of all these developments, and he’s at the forefront of building the “New Negro” in Harlem by founding the Liberty League and by establishing the Voice newspaper. These were the first organizational and journalistic expressions of this movement, which symbolized the African American segment of a global political awakening.
There’s this massive awakening and political radicalization that the “New Negro” movement was meant to describe in Harrison’s day, and even postwar U.S. military intelligence reports are alarmed at the emergence of a “New Negro” that, in their view, is fighting for rights and dignity, and willing to use force if necessary to achieve them. Harrison helped create a culture that could facilitate Black intellectual and political awakening within and beyond Harlem, a development that would eventually get reframed and repackaged as a “Negro Renaissance” by Alain Locke, who laid the foundation for the narrative we know as the “Harlem Renaissance” of arts and culture in the 1920s. But it was really much deeper than that. Locke’s “renaissance” framework was in many ways a neutering of the politically radical and militant New Negro that emerged in the context of the war, including the growth of Black socialists, Black communists, Garveyists, free lovers, freethinkers, and other Black radicals.
In Harlem, Harrison was known for his informal style of educating, a practice that you call “Outdoor Grioversity.” What is that, and how does it reflect his relationship to education?
Harrison had a genius-level intellect, and he read multiple books a day, so he developed encyclopedic knowledge in a short span of time. He also believed that this knowledge should be shared with the people and reach the people. It shouldn’t just be cloistered in the ivory tower. The most common way that people experienced Harrison was as a street-corner speaker. Harrison is a trailblazer in the art of “stepladder oratory,” where he would literally speak to audiences large enough to block traffic, and on a whole range of different subjects: everything from ancient African history to global geopolitics, to religion and science, and technology to sexuality and racial psychology. Some Harlemites called this tradition of street-corner speaking that Harrison is helping to inaugurate an “outdoor university” because of the high level of knowledge and education that one could receive listening to these stepladder orators. I remixed this descriptor as “Outdoor Grioversity” because I wanted to bring in the West African element, the oral call-and-response tradition of the “griot,” which is in West African cultures someone in the community who is an orator and a historian and a knowledge-keeper and oftentimes a musician or a poet or a public performer of some kind as well.
The Outdoor Grioversity is a truly revolutionary and innovative model of education, because it stood in such stark contrast to the industrial education of Booker T. Washington and the Tuskegee Institute–style schools that were basically trade school–level education for Black communities. It also stood in contrast to the liberal arts tradition of W.E.B. Du Bois, who is Harvard-educated, and throughout the 1920s focused on empowering a “talented tenth” of folks like him who had access to the Harvards of the world, which most Black communities did not. Harrison’s model of education is truly grassroots education. It’s a pedagogy of the oppressed. Before radio, TV, and the internet, Black communities cohered through a very oral culture, and the Outdoor Grioversity was educating working-class Black people and opening minds in ways that had never been done before.
What is “Black free love politics,” and what was Harrison’s understanding of gender expression and sexuality?
Harrison was one of, if not the first, Black figure in U.S. history to denounce church and state repression of sexuality, to give a public-facing lecture series on sex education, to call for decriminalizing access to contraception, and also to explicitly defend free love in part on the grounds that we’re not monogamous by nature, in his view, but instead that we were living under a regime of compulsory monogamy because of the church, state, and the needs of capitalists. There’s a whole strand of radical white women’s advocates who were talking about free love and who were rejecting monogamy as the be-all, end-all format for personal romantic and sexual relations. Harrison is learning from the white sex radical tradition, but he’s also synthesizing and integrating it with other cultural influences, like his African roots. African communities and Black communities in the United States never had placed monogamy at the center of their universe. You had polygamy in Africa, both in Islamic and non-Islamic contexts, but then under slavery the nuclear family was an impossibility, because enslaved people could be bought and sold at any moment. There was no such thing as a sort of model nuclear family. He was able to connect capitalism and colonialism and white supremacy and Christianity to compulsory monogamy, and seeing these all part of one package deal, which was sort of shaping the way people could relate based on a very narrow set of interests and not something that was contributing to human liberation. His interest in the free love movement is part of his interest in human liberation more generally, because I think he realized that you can’t have economic liberation or political liberation without sexual liberation.
Why is it important to understand Harrison’s intellectual contributions today?
All of the structural injustices that Harrison was fighting against, we’re still living with today. They were called “robber barons” in Harrison’s day; now we call them billionaire oligarchs. Harrison dealt with a virulent racial supremacy of lynching and white racist pogroms during the Jim Crow era; we still have a lot of white nationalism in the country today that’s directed against Black folks and immigrants from ICE, and I think there are key lessons to learn from the generations of people who fought these forces that came before us. Otherwise, we end up either reinventing the wheel, or make some of those same mistakes by our ignorance or disavowal of some of the hard-won lessons that history has to offer us. I think Harrison remains relevant today because he was ahead of his time, and because he developed and crystallized some truly visionary solutions to the problems of capitalism and imperialism and racism and so many other injustices that are interlinked and continuing to damage and retraumatize the world today.
