Independent Historian

Jeffrey B. Perry is an independent, working-class scholar formally educated at Princeton, Harvard, Rutgers, and Columbia University. He worked as a community organizer and was active, for over thirty years, in the working class movement as a rank-and file activist, elected local union officer, and national union editor. His research focuses on the role of white supremacy in undermining efforts at social change and on the importance of the struggle against white supremacy to social change. Perry preserved and inventoried the Hubert H. Harrison Papers (now at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library) and is the editor of A Hubert Harrison Reader (2001) and of the forthcoming Writings of Hubert Harrison. He is also the literary executor for Theodore W. Allen, author of the two-volume The Invention of the White Race (1994, 1997). Dr. Perry is currently editing and inventorying Allen’s papers and edited and introduced Allen’s Class Struggle and the Origin of Racial Slavery: The Invention of the White Race ([1975] 2006).

Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Early 20th Century Harlem Radicalism

In the article below independent historian Jeffrey Perry discusses his 2008 book on early 20th Century Harlem activist Hubert Harrison. Hubert Harrison (1883-1927) is one of the truly important figures of early twentieth-century America. A brilliant writer, orator, educator, critic, and political activist, he was … Read MoreHubert Harrison: The Voice of Early 20th Century Harlem Radicalism