Content note: An American book of 1920 that uses the racial terms of its day and describes lynching, the East St. Louis riot of 1917 and other racial violence. Shown as printed. This object is shown as it was published. Why
Hubert H. Harrison, a West Indian-born organiser and writer in New York, collected his own articles, speeches and petitions from the Liberty League and the Negro World in this 1920 book. It sets out his case for a race-conscious politics and his account of the New Negro movement, including how he introduced Marcus Garvey to Harlem audiences. The author wrote it as a private organiser, not for a government.
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- Introductory 1,014 words
- 1. The Beginnings 1,669 words
- 2. Democracy and Race Friction 3,205 words
- 3. The Negro and the War 4,163 words
- 4. The New Politics 4,223 words
- 5. The Problems of Leadership 6,751 words
- 6. The New Race Consciousness 5,874 words
- 7. Our International Consciousness 8,430 words
- 8. Education and the Race 3,756 words
- 9. A Few Books 3,938 words
- Epilogue: The Black Man’s Burden (A Reply to Rudyard Kipling) 373 words
Download as plain text 43,396 words, with the provenance header above the text
Provenance and rights
- Edition
- When Africa Awakes: The "Inside Story" of the Stirrings and Strivings of the New Negro in the Western World. New York: The Porro Press, 1920. Text from Project Gutenberg ebook #69712, derived from HathiTrust page images (Columbia, Chicago and Iowa copies).
- Text source
- Project Gutenberg, ebook #69712
- Text basis
- Transcription by Neal Caren from HathiTrust page images. The file's transcriber's note says obvious typographical errors were corrected after comparison with other occurrences and listed each change; the wording here is that corrected text.
- Rights
- Published in New York in 1920 by the Porro Press, so in the public domain in the United States; Project Gutenberg records the original publication and marks it public domain in the USA. Harrison died in 1927. Checked October 2, 2026.
- Changes made
- Project Gutenberg's licence header and footer, the title page, dedication, portrait marker, contents list and the transcriber's note are not included. Line wraps rejoined; chapter headings set as number and title. The closing poem is set with its line breaks. The author's own footnotes stay where Gutenberg places them. Wording, spelling and punctuation are Gutenberg's corrected text.
- Source file checksum
911f3aa11b577d2f…(SHA-256 of the download this text was made from)