'Race first versus *class first': An intellectual history of Afro-American radicalism, 1911--1928

My dissertation examines the Great Debate among Afro-American liberals, Socialists, and nationalists from Hubert H. Harrison's first effort at mobilizing a mass Socialist movement among African Americans until the end of the Harlem Renaissance. I argue that this era of intellectual ferment comprises a neglected part of Afro-American history that has far more relevance for us than the better-known Washington/Du Bois debate that preceded it or the 1920s literary controversies that partly overlapped it. Our contemporary resolution of the debate over "race first versus class first" remains central to the future of American society.;I also argue that the traditional distinction between hegemony and raw violence as mechanisms of ruling-class control is exaggerated. Hegemony depends upon violence, and violence underwrites hegemony. In the United States of the 1910s and 1920s and beyond, violence created a world in which blacks (and women) were consigned to their specified and subordinate place; everyone, of whatever race or gender, matured in this world, and usually perceived it as natural and inevitable. When white and black radicals insisted that workers of both races were essentially similar, their claim seemed belied by the realities of everyday life. Afro-Americans and whites simply were different in the eyes of the vast majority of both races. Moreover, America's capitalist, white supremacist, and patriarchal society generated a cultural conservatism of the oppressed: whites and blacks hewed to inherited identities of race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, and religion which provided "havens in a heartless world" and yet militated against a class-based alliance that could genuinely liberate everyone.;In presenting this thesis, my dissertation discusses Hubert H. Harrison, the Liberty League, and the Voice; W. E. B. Du Bois, the NAACP, and the Crisis; A. Philip Randolph, the Friends of Negro Freedom, and the Messenger; Marcus Garvey, the Universal Negro Improvement Association, and the Negro World; Cyril Briggs, the African Blood Brotherhood, and the Crusader; Wilfred A. Domingo and the Emancipator; and the various people and publications associated with the Harlem Renaissance.