Hubert Harrison: The Voice of Harlem Radicalism, 1883–1918, by Jeffrey B. Perry (Columbia University Press, 624 pp., $37.50) If you were a black Harlemite in the late nineteen-teens, your favorite black leader was likely a short, coal-black West Indian famous for blazingly eloquent orations on street corners and in meeting halls. Before radio and television, soapbox oratory amounted to much more than the small-change affair it usually is today; speaking didactically at great length in the open air was how one got his message out. And as a young Henry Miller recalled, “there was no one in those days who...