CALLING ALL CALIBANS

Cuban Harlem, little pockets of tropical dreams in alien tongues. Magnet Harlem… Melting pot Harlem—Harlem of honey and chocolate and caramel and rum and vinegar and lemon and lime and gall.” In 1920, a third of New York City’s black residents, most of whom lived in Harlem, had been born in the Caribbean. These immigrant ranks included a brazen purveyor of candor and gall: the brilliant editor, activist, educator and orator Hubert Harrison. Now all but forgotten, Harrison and his strivings are a compelling American story. Fondly known as “the Black Socrates,” he ran newspapers and political organizations, fostered activists and artists, decried racial injustice in articles and essays, called out black leaders for toadying to white patrons or espousing elitism—he scorned, a weekly he founded in 1917, had a reach estimated at 55,000 at a time when New York City was home to 60,000 African Americans. Harrison collected and traded books. He lectured on street corners and from podiums on topics from Tennyson’s poetry to the “World Problems of Race” and memorialized his love life in Latin. Buried in an unmarked grave in the Bronx, he led a remarkable life Jeffrey Perry chronicled in 2009’s .