Rediscovering Hubert Harrison, a Major Influence on Harlem Radicalism

By Scott McLemee, Inside Higher Ed. Posted January 27, 2009.

Reading that piece, it seemed natural to suppose that Perry was a young African-American professor, somewhere. And one in a rather enviable position. After all, it’s one thing to carve out a professional niche — and something altogether more awesome to rediscover a lost continent.

As luck would have it, I ran into a guy handing out fliers for Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism at a conference at Columbia University last month. He was a retired postal worker (white like me) and prone to considerable animation as he talked about the book, which, it turned out, he had written.

I say “it turned out” because Perry is strikingly unproprietary about his book. He displayed very little ego regarding it. Starting to say something about the thoroughness of his research on this or that topic, he would catch himself, seem embarrassed at the presumption, then insist that younger scholars were bound to discover more than he had. (Having gone over his footnotes, I want to wish them luck with that.)

After a while, this began to seem less like shyness than a matter of absolute concentration on Harrison himself. But I wanted to find out how it had come to pass that Perry discovered Harrison – let alone persuaded Columbia University Press to publish a two-volume biography. (The second part, covering the final decade of Harrison’s life, is now in progress.)

It’s neither a short nor a simple tale. Perry graduated from Princeton in 1968 and attended the Harvard Graduate School of Education for a year or so — making straight A’s, he says, “until I had an opportunity to travel by land through the Americas and took it. I went to Argentina and back.” In 1974, he took a job at the New Jersey International Bulk Mail Center and joined the postal workers’ union. He retired in June 2007.

Clearly his years in postal work had their share of both drama (including a major strike in 1978) and danger (some of Tony Soprano’s friends were union leaders). He edited a couple of mail handlers’ newspapers, and received an M.A. in labor studies from Rutgers University. And while doing graduate work in history at Columbia University in the late 1970s — initially with an eye to writing a dissertation on how socialist and communist groups had understood “the Negro question,” as the old expression put it — Perry made a discovery that now looks like destiny.

“In the course of my research,” he told me, “I came across microfilm copies of Hubert Harrison’s two published books The Negro and the Nation and When Africa Awakes: The “Inside Story” of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture of the New York Public Library in Harlem. I was immediately arrested by the clarity of Harrison’s thought and the perceptiveness of his analysis. I knew that I had encountered a writer of great importance, and, within a short while, I decided to change my dissertation topic to a biography of Harrison.”

Digging through the available sources, Perry was several hundred pages into his project when, in 1983, mutual contacts put him in touch with Harrison’s daughter, Aida Harrison Richardson, and son, William Harrison. The family “had preserved the remains of Hubert Harrison’s once vast collection of papers and books in a series of Harlem apartments. After several meetings and discussions of their father’s work, they very generously (before William’s death in 1984) granted me access to some of their father’s materials, which were in a room in William’s Harlem apartment.”

Perry worked to preserve and inventory the material, much of it in fragile condition, and he helped the family to place the collection with the Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Columbia University. “I then worked with the Columbia staff,” he said, “to develop a finding aid.”

In 1986, his dissertation was accepted at Columbia University. By that point, Perry felt reasonably confident that he had examined all of Harrison’s papers. To celebrate the completion of his Ph.D. work, he took Harrison’s daughter — then 75 years old — out to dinner in New York. At the end of the meal, he says, “she reached into her bag and handed me his diary.... For a biographer, research efforts don’t get much better than this. After going through the extraordinarily insightful and revealing diary, many new avenues of research were opened and I was fully convinced that I had a two-volume biography on my hands.”

See more stories tagged with: socialism, hubert harrison, harlem, jeffrey b. perry, scott mclemee

Scott McLemee writes Intellectual Affairs each week. He also blogs at Quick Study.

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