Throughout his brief life, Harrison insisted on linking the fight against racial oppression with the fight against capitalism. His life’s work is a vital resource for radicals today attempting to join those two struggles.

Harrison was also one of the earliest black socialists in the United States. In his time in the Socialist Party, Harrison developed an analysis of how capitalism produces racial inequality and pressed the labor movement to directly confront that inequality. A supporter of the party’s radical left wing, Harrison was pushed out during factional struggles before World War I. He went on to form his own newspaper and lead the black radical upsurge in Harlem that followed the war.

Linking Anti-Racism to Socialism

Harrison was born in Saint Croix, a small Caribbean island, in 1883. By the age of seven, he was working as a domestic servant. When his mother died in 1898, Harrison immigrated to New York, finishing high school there and taking a job in the post office. He quickly established himself as an intellectual leader, organizing political discussion groups among his coworkers and throwing himself into New York’s vibrant scene of street lectures and debates.

A fierce advocate for racial equality, Harrison soon ran afoul of the most important black political figure of his generation, the accommodationist Booker T. Washington. Harrison had written a letter to the New York Sun in response to Washington’s recent contention that “the Southern States of the Union offer the Negro a better chance than almost any other country in the world.” In his reply, Harrison excoriated Washington for his silence about the outrages of American racism and accused him of holding his position as race leader “by grace of the white people who elect colored people’s leaders for them.”

Washington never deigned to respond to Harrison in print, but instead replied with action. Using his position as a distributor of patronage jobs to black Americans as part of the Republican Party machine, Washington had Harrison fired from the post office.

Yet if Washington’s intent was to silence Harrison, his plan failed miserably. Less than a month after losing his position, Harrison found work again, this time as a lecturer and organizer for the Socialist Party.

The Socialist Party was a formidable organization, particularly in New York, when Harrison joined it in 1911. Across the country, socialists were winning election to city councils and state assemblies; in Wisconsin, socialist leader Victor Berger even secured a seat in Congress. The party was less successful organizing black workers, despite considerable debate since its founding over the “race question.”

Harrison’s task was to change that. Brought on as an organizer in the middle of the 1911 municipal campaign, the young intellectual’s remit was to help the party build support among black voters. He proved extremely effective, pioneering the use of socialist campaign materials directed at black Americans. When the results came in, the party’s vote total had jumped by six thousand since the last contest, driven in part by an increase in support among black voters. The party, clearly impressed with Harrison’s acumen, hired him as a full-time speaker and organizer “for the purpose of establishing a nucleus of an organization among the colored people.”

Harrison got to work immediately, helping set up a “Colored Socialist Club” in the city and writing a string of articles on “The Negro and Socialism” in the New York Call . The five-part series laid out an analysis of racial oppression in the United States more sophisticated than anything yet produced by American socialists. Harrison’s was a materialist understanding of racism, holding that it resulted neither from “natural” race prejudice, nor from the bad ideas of whites, but from “the fallacy of economic fear,” by which “economic competition create[s] race prejudice.” It was “in the interests of the capitalists of America,” he wrote, “to preserve the inferior economic status of the colored race, because they can always use it as a club for the other workers.”

And it was in the interest of the Socialist Party (SP) to divest them of that club. The party, Harrison argued, had to take up the cause of “all sections of down-trodden humanity,” and reject the suicidal policy of excluding black workers (as many unions in the American Federation of Labor did at the time). For Harrison, socialists and black Americans needed each other:

If the overturning of the present system should elevate a new class into power; a class to which the Negro belongs; a class which has nothing to gain by the degradation of any portion of itself; that class will remove the economic reason for the degradation of the Negro. That is the promise of Socialism, the all-inclusive working-class movement. In the final triumph of that movement lies the only hope of salvation from this second slavery; of black men and of white.

Unfortunately, just as Harrison was publicizing his pioneering analysis of racism, larger events in the party were working against him. Factionalism between the left and right wings was coming to a head, largely over attitudes toward the revolutionary unionists of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW).

The IWW embraced class-struggle unionism and scorned both cooperation with employers and the “pure-and-simple” unionism of the AFL. Crucially for Harrison, the IWW also actively organized black workers. The right wing of the party, meanwhile, prioritized its alliance with AFL unions and viewed the IWW as wild-eyed revolutionaries. They reserved special contempt for IWW leader Big Bill Haywood, a member of the party’s executive committee. In 1912, the right wing successfully booted Haywood from the SP, leading many left wingers in the party to leave with him.

Harrison’s strong support for the party’s left put him in a precarious position in New York, where one of Haywood’s chief enemies, Morris Hillquit, helmed the SP. The party leadership in the city began restricting Harrison’s work, forbidding even his own branch from scheduling him as a speaker. Harrison, never one to back down from a fight, sent off a short note to the city executive committee, telling it to “go chase itself ,” and adding, “By the way, if my color has anything to do with it this time I should thank you to let me know.”

The local found Harrison in contempt of the executive committee and suspended his membership for three months. By the time his punishment was up, Harrison had moved on from the Socialist Party.