Pamela Roberts tells Historia the remarkable story of a man, born in poverty on Antigua, who overcame prejudice and racism to win places at some of the world’s most prestigious universities and become first a priest and then a local politician. He’s the subject of her new biography, The Adventures of a Black Edwardian Intellectual – The story of James Arthur Harley.
Harley was an intellectual polymath who served as a politician, reverend, and scholar. Educated at Howard, Yale, Harvard, and Oxford Universities, he made no apologies for being an outspoken, articulate black man challenging and provoking any white man; a dangerous undertaking at the turn of the 20th century.
A throwaway remark made by a tourist guide while I was on holiday in New Zealand led me to discover the archives of James Arthur Harley languishing in a battered suitcase in a family home in Shepshed, Leicestershire. I wrote about Harley in my first book, Black Oxford – The Untold Stories of Oxford University’s Black Scholars. His story was compelling, but only a profile. It provided a snapshot, but I wanted to know more about him. I wanted to examine and explore his background, his motivations, his family, and what impact they had upon him. What could the disintegrating contents in the suitcase tell me or lead me? In short, I wanted to tell a fuller story.
I began a five-year journey of discovery, conducting audio and visual research by following Harley’s footsteps, visiting Antigua, Barbuda, America, Kentish villages, and coastal towns in England. The result is my new book, The Adventures of a Black Edwardian Intellectual – The story of James Arthur Harley, which tells Harley’s hitherto unknown story.
Harley was born on May 15, 1873, in the village of All Saints, Antigua, to a white father — a landlord, Henry James Harley — and a black seamstress mother, Josephine Eleanor Lake. He was a poor island boy who dared to dream… and James Arthur Harley dreamed big.
His early education took place at the Mico School, noted as the best school on the island. He completed further studies at the teacher’s training college at Spring Gardens and qualified as a teacher, later becoming a headmaster. However, his childhood vocation was to become a priest in the Protestant Episcopal Church (the American version of the Anglican Church). He left Antigua in 1899 for America to attend the oldest seminary of the Episcopal Church and a leading centre for theological education in the Anglican Communion: the General Theological Seminary in New York (GTS).
He arrived on the cusp of the 20th century in 1899, an era steeped in horrific racial prejudice. In 1896, three years before his arrival, Plessy v Ferguson‘s historic case had implemented the overt racial separatist laws in the South of Jim Crow – separate but equal.
He was immediately beset with a devastating setback; the GTS turned him away despite personally-addressed references to the Seminary’s Dean, Reverend Hoffman. Instead, he was directed with insistence to King Hall, Washington DC.
Despite his protests, Harley travelled to Washington and learned that King Hall, based at Howard University, was a college to train black clergymen. He enrolled on a law course instead of theology and began the start of an academic career.
Harley took a series of jobs to support himself at Howard, including as a Sunday school teacher and choirmaster at the pinnacle church for the Washington black elite, St Luke’s, where he met his future wife, Josephine Marchita Lawson. Josephine’s parents, Jesse and Rosetta Lawson, were founders of Frelinghuysen University, which provided adult education classes.
In the proceeding years, Harley navigated the double complexities of the hostilities of white America and faced and dealt with African Americans’ resentment towards him as a colonial man of mixed-race heritage. He competed as an outsider against overt racism and financial difficulties to accomplish an esteemed education at Howard, Yale, and Harvard universities, winning qualifications in law, Semitic languages and several academic prizes.
At Harvard, he formed a friendship with Alain LeRoy Locke. They travelled to England to attend the University of Oxford. Both made history: Locke, as the first black Rhodes scholar in 1907, and Harley, as the first black student to achieve the Diploma of Anthropology.
After an eight-year long-distance relationship, Harley married Josephine in July 1910. They settled in the parish of his first curacy, Shepshed in Leicestershire. A curate at St Botolph’s Church under the direction of the incumbent vicar, Reverend William Franklin Hepworth, Harley packed the church; people came to listen to his sermons, much to the disdain of some folk who considered the church to be packed with scum when he preached.
Harley’s sermons were described as eloquent and inspiring. He inaugurated a men’s service, a men’s Bible class, and an English class for the study of Shakespeare, and roused the population to the ‘true meaning of life’. Harley’s childhood vocation to become a priest was nearing realisation when a damning allegation threatened his ordination.
Based on Harley’s letters, sermons, writings, contemporary accounts, and later oral testimony, The Adventures of an Edwardian Black Intellectual is my account of a man’s trajectory through seven decades of dramatic social change and reveals a man of religious conviction who won admirers for his work as a vicar and local councillor.
Harley was a complex and uncompromising 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 is full of contradictions and surprises but, above all, illustrates the power and resilience of the human spirit.
The Adventures of a Black Edwardian Intellectual – The story of James Arthur Harley by Pamela Roberts is published on 31 October, 2022.
Pamela Roberts is an award-winning creative producer and historian. Her work as founder and director of Black Oxford Untold Stories has raised the profile of many black scholars from the turn of the 20th century. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, and an Eccles Centre Visiting Fellow at the British Library. She writes about her research journey in Following in the footsteps of Harley.
Pamela is speaking at two events later this month: a performance and book signing at the British Library on 21 October, 7.15–8.30pm, and at Jesus College, Oxford, on 27 October, 7–9.00pm (free).
Images:
- James Arthur Harley in later life: supplied by the author (private collection)
- Ninth Ave front of the General Theological Seminary, New York, 1890: NYPL Digital Gallery via Wikimedia (public domain)
- The day of the practical examination at the Pitt Rivers Museum, 1908: supplied by the author (© Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)
- Harley’s Diploma in Anthropology, Jesus College, Oxford, 1909: supplied by the author (private collection)
