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Hubert Harrison’s Brand of Black Radicalism

In this interview with Brian Kwoba, The Nation talks with the author about his new book on the legacy of a little-known but influential activist.

Hubert Harrison’s Brand of Black Radicalism

In this interview with Brian Kwoba, “The Nation” talks with the author about his new book on the legacy of a little-known but influential activist.

Hubert Harrison was a Caribbean-born educator and activist who was a prominent advocate for labor rights, free speech, radical internationalism, and free love in the Jim Crow era. He inspired and contributed to political organizations and cultural movements as diverse as the Socialist Party, the Marcus Garvey movement, and the so-called “Harlem Renaissance.” Harrison also wrote a number of pieces for The Nation in the 1920s as the magazine’s first regular Black book reviewer.

Now an acclaimed new book by Brian Kwoba, an associate professor of history and director of the African and African American Studies program at the University of Memphis, examines the life and thought of this unjustly neglected figure. Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism has won the 2026 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and the 2026 Phillis Wheatley Book Award from the Sons and Daughters of the United States Middle Passage. The Nation spoke with Kwoba about Harrison’s legacy and its significance for political transformation today.

Peter Cole: Hubert Harrison was an incredible figure, but few people know about him outside of Black-studies departments. So tell us who he was and why he mattered.

Brian Kwoba: In September 1912, a century before Occupy Wall Street, a Black orator’s booming baritone occupied the attention of a large crowd in front of the New York Stock Exchange building on Wall Street. It was the voice of Hubert Harrison; he was making the case for socialism. The New York Times described him as “an eloquent and forceful negro speaker” who had “shattered all records for distance” in his address on behalf of working people and against the robber-baron oligarchs of the Gilded Age.

After blazing a trail for Black activists in the Socialist Party, Harrison called for an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Colored International alliance in the face of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Most spectacularly, Harrison’s Liberty League of Negro Americans catalyzed the rise of Marcus Garvey, who headed the largest international organization of Black people in modern history.

PC: How, when, and where did Harrison become
radicalized?

BK: Harrison was born on the island of St. Croix in 1883 and moved to New York City in 1900 as a teenager. There he saw firsthand vast wealth inequality and heard constant reports on the national epidemic of white racist lynchings of African Americans. Like so many other Caribbean migrants who had come to the United States, Harrison was shocked by the intensity of the racial........

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