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Public
Employee Press Book Talk The
father of Harlems radicals The writer and union
activist Hubert Harrison was one of Harlems most influential radical voices
in the early 1900s. His analyses of racism and the exploitation of workers had
a profound impact on important historical leaders, including Marcus Garvey, A.
Phillip Randolph and Arturo Schomburg. Randolph, the head of the Brotherhood of
Sleeping Car Porters, called Harrison the father of Harlem Radicals.
Harrison,
however, was not as well known as those he influenced. He may get more credit
for his ideas now that the independent scholar Jeffrey Perry has published a collection
of his writing and a biography.
Perry visited DC 37 Jan. 27 to discuss
his recent book Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918,
in a program sponsored by the Education Funds Authors Talk Committee.
He
is the clearest thinker on race and class that Ive come across, said
Perry, as he began his presentation to an audience of over 80 union members and
friends. He believed that whites did not benefit from racism.
A
popular soapbox orator who captivated listeners on the street corners of Harlem,
Harrison spoke six languages, wrote for many Black publications, became the first
Black reviewer for The New York Times Review of Books and was the leading Black
organizer and theoretician of the Socialist Party.
Perry, who preserved
and inventoried Harrisons papers and helped place them in Columbia Universitys
library of rare book manuscripts, also edited the Hubert Harrison Reader.
Both are available in the Ed Fund Library.
We have to tell these
stories as accurately as possible because that is what we are going to learn from,
said Perry, before taking questions from the audience.
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