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Scholar, reverend, politician, and perhaps aristocrat... James Arthur Stanley Harley was certainly a polymath. Born in a poor village in the Caribbean island of Antigua, he went on to attend Howard, Harvard, Yale and Oxford universities, was ordained a priest in Canterbury Cathedral and was elected to Leicestershire County Council. He was a choirmaster, a pioneer Oxford anthropologist, a country curate and a firebrand councillor. This remarkable career was all the more extraordinary because he was black in an age - the early twentieth century - that was institutionally racist.
Pamela Roberts' meticulously researched book tells Harley's hitherto unknown story from humble Antiguan childhood, through elite education in Jim Crow America to the turbulent England of World War I and the General Strike. Navigating the complex intertwining of education, religion, politics and race, his life converged with pivotal periods and events in history: the birth of the American New Negro in the 1900s, black scholars at Ivy League institutions, the heyday of Washington's black elite and the early civil rights movement, Edwardian English society, and the Great War. Based on Harley's letters, sermons and writings as well as contemporary accounts and later oral testimony, this is an account of an individual's trajectory through seven decades of dramatic social change.
Roberts' biography reveals a man of religious conviction, who won admirers for his work as a vicar and local councillor. But Harley was also a complex and abrasive individual, who made enemies and courted controversy and scandal. Most intriguingly, he hinted at illicit aristocratic ancestry dating back to Antigua's slave-owning past. His life, uncovered here for the first time, is full of contradictions and surprises, but above all illustrates the power and resilience of the human spirit.
Contents
Foreword by Her Excellency Karen-Mae Hill, High Commissioner of Antigua & Barbuda to the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Antigua
2. Son of the Soil
3. A West Indian in New York
4. The Washington 400
5. The Interlopers
6. Second Best
7. A Crimson Man
8. Alain LeRoy Locke: 'The New Negro'
9. A Looming Crisis
10. Oxford Beckons
11. Dreaming Spires
12. An Edwardian Curate
13. Josephine Arrives in Marshside
14. The Appeal
15. A Damning Allegation
16. The Archbishop Intercedes
17. Within Touching Distance
18. A Black Canary
19. The General Strike
20. The Stormy Petrel
21. Ivanhoe
22. Loose Ends
Bibliography
Index
