Jeffrey B. Perry is an independent scholar of the working class formally educated at Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, and Columbia University. Perry preserved and inventoried the Hubert H. Harrison papers (now at Columbia University's Rare Book and Manuscript Library) and is the editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader. He is also literary executor for Theodore W. Allen and edited and introduced Allen's Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race.

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Hubert Harrison was an immensely skilled writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist who, more than any other political leader of his era, combined class consciousness and anti-white-supremacist race consciousness into a coherent political radicalism. Harrison's ideas profoundly influenced "New Negro" militants, including A. Philip Randolph and Marcus Garvey, and his synthesis of class and race issues is a key unifying link between the two great trends of the Black Liberation Movement: the labor- and civil-rights-based work of Martin Luther King Jr. and the race and nationalist platform associated with Malcolm X.The foremost Black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York, Harrison was also the founder of the "New Negro" movement, the editor of Negro World, and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement. He was a highly praised journalist and critic (reportedly the first regular Black book reviewer), a freethinker and early proponent of birth control, a supporter of Black writers and artists, a leading public intellectual, and a bibliophile who helped transform the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research in Black culture. His biography offers profound insights on race, class, religion, immigration, war, democracy, and social change in America.

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List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgments A Note on Usage Introduction Part I. Intellectual Growth and Development 1. Crucian Roots (1883--1900) 2. Self-Education, Early Writings, and the Lyceums (1900--1907) 3. In Full-Touch with the Life of My People (1907--1909) 4. Secular Thought, Radical Critiques, and Criticism of Booker T. Washington (1905--1911) Part II. Socialist Radical 5. Hope in Socialism (1911) 6. Socialist Writer and Speaker (1912) 7. Dissatisfaction with the Party (1913--1914) 8. Toward Independence (1914--1915) Part III. The "New Negro Movement" 9. Focus on Harlem: The Birth of the "New Negro Movement" (1915--1917) 10. Founding the Liberty League and The Voice (April--September 1917) 11. Race-Conscious Activism and Organizational Difficulties (August--December 1917) 12. The Liberty Congress and the Resurrection of The Voice (January--July 1918) Appendix: Harrison on His Character Abbreviations Notes Select Bibliography Index