“Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism” Book Presentation By Professor Brian Kwoba
Zoom event
This event was rescheduled on this day originally from July 23
Book Presentation of “Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism” By Professor Brian Kwoba – Associate Professor | Director of African and African American Studies (AAAS).
The fight against racism in the US has been historically tied to the fight of the working class for power. Hubert Harrison is one of the most important theoreticians and political activists in the Black working class movement and in solidarity with socialists like Eugene Debs who led the Socialist Party.
In an important book “Herbert Harrison Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism,” Brian Kwoba looks at his life and the political development of Hubert Harrison and his political and theoretical contributions. He was a supporter of the Socialist Party and was influenced by the Russian revolution in 1917 which shook the world. The radical changes brought by the revolution encouraged workers and the oppressed in the US to look at what a radical transformation would mean particularly for women and the Black people of the United States.
Harrison understood that imperialism leads to world war and he educated workers in the United States that these wars were a direct result of the capitalist system and it’s crisis. Kwoba’s work is an important contribution to his life and understanding the issues we face today as another world war is in front of us.
Hubert Harrison: Forbidden Genius of Black Radicalism is an intellectual biography of the Caribbean-born working-class journalist, activist, and educator Hubert Henry Harrison (1883-1927), who generated an array of visionary solutions to the systemic injustices of his day. After blazing a trail for Black workers and organizers in the Socialist Party of America and the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), Harrison emerged as the most prominent Black freethinker and free lover of his generation. He supported the Seattle General Strike, practiced armed self-defense, and called for an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist “Colored International” alliance in the face of European colonialism in Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Ireland. His Liberty League of Negro Americans catalyzed the rise of Marcus Garvey and the largest international organization of African people in modern history. And most spectacularly, Harrison’s critique of the scientific establishment opens the door to a visionary solution to the problem of climate catastrophe…
Because of his fearless radicalism, however, the full scope of Harrison’s revolutionary legacy has been erased from popular memory until now.
“Brian Kwoba has written a beautiful, intellectual biography as radical and original as its subject.” –Robin D.G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
The book has won the 2026 Frantz Fanon Outstanding Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association and is also a 2025 INDIES finalist for biography.
More about the book:
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yPRYhs7dzE4MidUFDsvp6pYJh2QM74YL/view