This is all the more remarkable because Harrison died young, at 42, and became largely forgotten within just a few years.īy birth a “Crucian”-that is, born and raised in St. The latest, covering the period between 19 mines every detail known about Harrison. Jeffrey Perry, who can be said to have devoted a large chunk of his life to Harrison, knows his subject well and across thousands of pages in several volumes. Enter Hubert Harrison, an Anglophone Caribbean, like many of the significant figures around Garvey. Around its edges could be found not Du Bois himself, but much of the rest of the existing Black Left. Garveyism was larger than Garvey, even if it faded with his pursuit by the FBI and his deportation from the United States. That it arrived more or less simultaneously with Harlem as the Black metropolis of the world, and with the Bolshevik Revolution, meant it could not fail to be a crucial development within the U.S. But the energy that he, his newspaper, and his organization roused across African American life was like nothing seen before. Garvey proclaimed preposterous things on many subjects, including the number of his followers, and proposed an even more preposterous mass return to Africa. Du Bois understood, even though he was in sharp disagreement, that the vast movement around Jamaican immigrant Marcus Garvey was driven by this sentiment. Its contents cannot even be summed up because their full value will be found by each reader in the stirring prose, as well as the arguments.įamously, to Du Bois, “being a problem is a strange experience,” and not a good one. Washington the story of nearly forgotten Black nationalist Alexander Crummell as well as Du Bois’s comments on African American life, culture, prospects, religion, and sorrows. We find in these pages a saga of Du Bois’s own childhood and intellectual growth his early teaching experience in the rural South the excruciating narrative of his young son’s death a devastating critique of Booker T. ” A Pan Africanist and Marxist (and even Communist!) in his latter decades, “W.E.B.” remains, even now, the author ready-made to teach a new generation of socialists. Speaking at the 1963 March on Washington, Roy Wilkins, the least radical of black leaders, urged attendees to “go back and get a volume of The Souls of Black Folk. The latest, with a lively introduction by Jonathan Scott Holloway, the first Black president of Rutgers University, rehearses the immensity of Du Bois’s singular contributions. By now, The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois’s 1903 collection of essays, has been reprinted in more than twenty editions. An obvious reference point on any geography of the African American Left is W.E.B. racism and the overlaps of socialism and Black nationalism. The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X, by Les Payne with Tamara PayneĪ re-issued classic and recent biographies of two Black radicals-one obscure, one world-famous-remind us again of the cancer of U.S. Hubert Harrison: The Struggle for Equality, 1918–1927, by Jeffrey PerryĬolumbia University Press, 2020, 1000 pp, $36
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