Hubert Harrison was a brilliant 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, Chandler Owen, 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.

Harrison was the foremost black organizer, agitator, and theoretician of the Socialist Party of New York during its heyday in 1912. He was also the founder and leading figure of the militant World War I-era "New Negro" movement, the editor of Negro World, and the principal radical influence on the Garvey movement. An immensely skilled orator and educator, Harrison was a highly praised journalist and critic (reportedly the first regular Black book reviewer), an early proponent of birth control, a supporter of Black writers and artists, and a bibliophile who helped transform the 135th Street Public Library into an international center for research on Black culture. Jeffrey B. Perry's biography illuminates the thought of a forgotten visionary whose progressive stances on race and class matters, the creation of a viable radicalism, and the possibilities of an authentic democracy are as relevant today as they were revolutionary in the early years of the twentieth century.