A contemporary journalist wrote, “Garvey publicly eulogized Harrison, joined the Liberty League and took a keen interest in its affairs… Harrison was the forerunner of Garvey and contributed largely to the success of the latter”. Harrison complained, “Everything that I did he copied”.
Yet, though Harrison’s Liberty League collapsed because it had neither the money nor the groundswell of support to keep going, Garvey launched his UNIA in 1918 and it grew rapidly. Harrison noted that “as a propagandist Garvey was without a peer”. Garvey approached Harrison to work with UNIA and he became associate editor of the UNIA’s newspaper,
Negro World, in December 1919. Perry writes that Harrison “significantly reshaped” the publication, making it “the nation’s foremost radical, race-conscious paper”.
He reduced the “almost endless” editorials and gave them, as he put it himself, “terseness, point, pungency and force”. He ended the practice of basing news stories on clippings from mainstream white papers and shifted the focus in a decidedly socialist direction.
Harrison was happy with the opportunity to engage this new mass audience, but never supported Garvey, describing him in his diary as “spiritually as well as intellectually a little man”.
The UNIA’s rapid growth terrified the Bureau of Investigation, forerunner of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and it launched repeated legal attacks, prodding particularly at Garvey’s irregular methods of fundraising. Harrison’s differences with Garvey came to a head over the UNIA’s showpiece convention in August 1920. Here, Garvey declared that “the problem of leadership has been settled once and for all” after he appointed himself “provisional president of Africa”, demanding that “his ruling on all things African…shall be obeyed by all Negroes”.
Harrison left his editorial role after the convention, though he continued to contribute to
Negro World. He later wrote, “Garvey is a worshipper of Garvey… It was his instinct for self-worship that prompted him to appropriate the entire front page of the
Negro World each week with his stupid declamations… It reduced the circulation…from 50,000 to 3,000”.