Hubert Harrison: The church has always been the enemy of science and progress.

Hubert Harrison arrived in New York in 1900 from St. Croix (Ay Ay) in the Caribbean at the age of seventeen. He worked all day and then attended night school, winning academic prizes in history, literature, and debate. In this new place he also encountered American racism for the first time, and it changed everything.
In St. Croix, only 5% of the population was white and there was no history of lynching. What he found in the United States was something else entirely. Fellow Afro-Caribbean immigrant Claude McKay described it this way: “It was the first time I had ever come face to face with such manifest, implacable hate of my race, and my feelings were indescribable.”
Harrison responded by breaking away from religion. He identified as agnostic. “I prefer to go to the grave with my eyes wide open.”

Freethought in the Black Community
At the time, the church was a powerful institution in the Black community. It provided community, dignity, and hope in the face of brutal oppression. Harrison understood that. But he also believed that science, reason, and honest inquiry were tools of liberation. Superstition and deference to authority, he felt, were tools of oppression. As he wrote, “The church has always been the enemy of science and progress.”
What many people don’t know is that Harrison was part of a real tradition. Freethought has been central to Black political and intellectual life since the nineteenth century. It grew sharply in the early twentieth century as more Black Americans moved to cities, gained access to education, and grew frustrated with institutions that were not addressing their actual conditions. Harrison was at the center of all of that.

What It Cost Him
His positions went against the grain of folks like Booker T. Washington. Washington was advocating for small incremental change while tolerating continued inequality. Harrison felt Washington was being too pragmatic and downright disingenuous. In 1910 he published a sharp critique of Washington’s philosophy in the New York Sun.
Washington used his political power to get Harrison fired from his post office job. Harrison was left in poverty with a wife and five children for the rest of his life. He never recanted.
The FBI kept extensive surveillance files on him. He was considered a threat. That tells you something about how seriously his ideas were taken by those in power.

Why He Matters
Harrison died in 1927 at 44 when he got an infection with appendicitis. (penicillin was discovered in 1928 but not widely available until the 1940s.) His ideas echoed forward through the civil rights era. He championed science, freethought, public libraries, socialism, racial equality, and challenged white supremacy. Harrison is part of our history. The secular tradition is not a white tradition or a recent one. It has been fought for, at real personal cost, by people whose names deserve to be known.

Want to learn more?
Independent scholar Dr. Jeffrey B Perry wrote extensively about Hubert Harrison, including a two part biography
https://www.jeffreybperry.net/index.htm
These articles are also excellent resources to learn more:
https://www.harlemworldmagazine.com/hubert-harrison-the-father-of-harlem-radicalism/
https://blackpast.org/african-american-history/harrison-hubert-henry-1883-1927
https://truthout.org/articles/april-27th-is-the-130th-anniversary-of-the-birth-of-hubert-h-harrison-1883-1927-extraordinary-harlem-based-intellectual-and-activist/