Editing Hubert Harrison (section)

==Early life==
Hubert was born to Cecilia Elizabeth Haines, a working-class woman, on Estate Concordia, [[St. Croix]], [[Danish West Indies]]. His biological father, Adolphus Harrison, was born enslaved. One account from the 1920s suggested that Harrison's father owned a substantial estate.<ref>Winston James, [https://books.google.com/books?id=iSAjTDHiC4MC&dq=The+Horror+of+the+East+St.+Louis+Massacre.&pg=PA123 ''Holding Aloft the Banner of Ethiopia: Caribbean Radicalism in Early Twentieth-century America''] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20140629185935/http://books.google.com/books?id=iSAjTDHiC4MC&pg=PA123&lpg=PA123&dq=The+Horror+of+the+East+St.+Louis+Massacre.&source=web&ots=dpjHEKZ5q4&sig=gP1NLaYIry6m97DeXqPJvFqfbbI&hl=en&sa=X&oi=book_result&resnum=10&ct=result#PPA123,M1 |date=2014-06-29 }}, New York: Verso, 1998, p. 123.</ref> Harrison's biographer, however, found no such landholding and writes that "there is no indication that Adolphus, a laborer his entire life, ever owned, or even rented, land".<ref>Jeffrey B. Perry, ''Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883-1918,'' New York: Columbia University Press, 2008, p. 41.</ref> As a youth, Harrison knew poverty but also learned of African customs and the Crucian people's rich history of direct action mass struggles. Among his schoolmates was his lifelong friend, the future Crucian labor leader and social activist, [[D. Hamilton Jackson]].

In later life Harrison worked with many Virgin Islands-born activists, including James C. Canegata, Anselmo Jackson, [[Rothschild Francis]], Elizabeth Hendrikson, [[Casper Holstein]], and [[Frank Rudolph Crosswaith]]. He was especially active in [[Virgin Island]] causes after the March 1917 U.S. purchase of the Virgin Islands, and subsequent abuses under the U.S. naval occupation of the islands.