Rediscovering Hubert Harrison, a Major Influence on Harlem Radicalism

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

As he completed his dissertation, Perry was an elected labor official at a 4,000 worker postal facility while also editing and writing for The Mail Handler’s Voice, a newspaper challenging the mobbed-up union leadership. His articles appeared under pseudonyms. Otherwise it might have been, so to speak, a publish-and-perish situation. (Here, his activism echoed his scholarship: Harrison had edited a paper called The Voice.)

“I did not feel under the pressures often faced in the academic community to publish as a step related to employment and tenure,” Perry recalls. In the early 1990s, he submitted a manuscript to a university press that, all things considered, should probably go nameless. “It was volume 1 of my proposed two-volume Harrison biography and it received extraordinarily positive reviews. I was asked to rework the manuscript, to make it shorter, and to turn it into one volume if possible.”

While making revisions, Perry found still more Harrison material, then re-submitted the manuscript — insisting, once more, that it would be the first of two volumes. “Again, the reviewers’ comments were extremely favorable,” he says, “and again no decision on publication was ever made.” This kind of back-and-forth continued for more than a decade.

“The Harrison biography was in limbo.... Essentially, I think that the publisher was confronted with the question of whether or not it wanted to go with a two-volume biography of an unknown subject by an unknown author. It was undoubtedly a daunting proposition for them.” Perry eventually asked to be released from his contract.

Along the way, however, his dissertation from the mid-1980s came to the attention of Winston James, now a professor of history at the University of California at Irvine, who wrote about Harrison in his book Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth Century America (Verso, 1998). James introduced Perry to Peter Dimock, an editor at Columbia University Press — which is how the first volume of this Harrison biography came to be published in its present form.

In an e-mail note, Perry describes “the hunger to write about and discuss Hubert Harrison that I have encountered, especially in some younger Black historians.” He mentions the example of Ousmane Power-Greene, an assistant professor of history at Clark University, who eagerly discusses Harrison with his colleagues. “Power-Greene suggests that Harrison is already beginning to enter ‘the canon’ in an important way,” says Perry. “And since Harrison touches so many areas — politics, history, the arts, science, religion and so on — he will continue to attract increased attention.”

The forthcoming digital edition of Harrison’s collected works (running to some seven hundred articles) will certainly help with that. Perry also notes that the younger Harrison-minded scholars he has been in touch with “often benefited from non-university mentors ... and are attracted to intellectuals like Harrison who are visible in the community and haven’t received the attention they, or their work, merit.”

In that regard, Perry is being a bit autobiographical: his own mentor was the late Theodore W. Allen, another working-class historian and author of the two-volume study The Invention of the White Race. He now has the responsibility of handling Allen’s posthumous papers, including some book manuscripts that sound more or less ready for publication. While readers may look forward to the second volume of the Harrison biography, we probably shouldn’t start holding our breaths just yet.

Unless, of course, some far-sighted cohort of graduate students is ready to help the man out by serving internships with him. I think hanging around Jeff Perry for a while would be an education in itself.

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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