Henry Hubert Harrison | When Africa Awakes
April 27, 1883 - December 17, 1927
Hubert Henry Harrison was born in 1883 to plantation workers of African descent on the Caribbean island of St. Croix. He obtained a grade school education as well as some religious training in the Anglican Church. Orphaned as a teenager, Harrison managed to relocate to New York City in 1900 thanks to his sister Mary.
Harrison’s greatest contribution to Black intellectual culture came from his prodigious work establishing the “Outdoor University,” as some community residents called the street corner oratorical method of popular education he established. Speaking from “the Campus” on the corner of 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, his intellectual range covered a vast array of topics, including anthropology, English literature, evolutionary biology, Black culture, economics, theological criticism, African civilizations, sexuality, and global geopolitics. His oratory was so popular that ordinary people regularly turned out to hear him in numbers large enough to block traffic. As one observer put it after witnessing Harrison in action, “the Age of Pericles and Socrates in ancient Athens had nothing on the present age of Harlem in New York.” — Brief bio sourced from here.
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Below are a few passages from Harrison’s work ‘When Africa Awakes’ coupled with a few images from my archives. The emphasis here is on thinking with and through these ideas, not so much whether you ‘agree’ or ‘disagree’ with the pasasge. You can obtain a copy of the whole book yourself through Diasporic Africa Press - Purchase here.
Young man! If you wish to be spiritually alert and alive; to get the very best out of yourself- shun a rut as you would shun the plague! Never bow the knee to Baal because Baal is in power; never respect wrong and injustice because they are enshrined in “the sacred institutions of our glorious land”; never have patience with either cowardice or stupidity because they happen to wear venerable whiskers. Read, reason and think on all sides of all subjects. Don’t compare yourself with the runner behind you on the road; always compare yourself with the one ahead; so you will only go faster and farther. And set it before you, as a sacred duty to always surpass the teachers that taught you – and this is the essence of irreverence.
The object of the capitalist international is to unify and standardize the exploitation of black, brown and yellow peoples in such a way that the danger to the exploiting groups of cutting each other's throats over the spoils may be reduced to a minimum. Hence the various agreements, mandates and spheres of influence. Hence the League of Nations, which is notoriously not a league of the white masses, but of their gold-braided governors. Faced by such a tendency on the part of those who bear the white man's burden for what they can get out of it, the darker peoples of the world have begun to realize that their first duty is to themselves. A similarity of suffering is producing in them a similarity of sentiment, and the temper of that sentiment is not to be mistaken.
Charity begins at home, and our first duty is to ourselves. It is not what we wish but what we must, that we are concerned with. The world, as it ought to be, is still for us, as for others, the world that does not exist. The world as it is, is the real world, and it is to that real world that we address ourselves.
Let us learn and know Africa and Africans so well that every educated Negro will be able to glance to put his hand of the map of Africa and tell where to find the Jolofs, Ekois, Mandingos, Yorubas, Bechuanas or Basutos and cand tell something of their marriage customs, their property laws, their agriculture and systems of worship. For not until we can do this will it be seemly for us to pretend to be anxious about their political welfare.
Many Negroes have a wish-bone where their back-bone ought to have been doing this.
