Research Catalog

Details

Description

1. xiv, 305 pages : illustrations; 24 cm

Summary

1. 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. --

Subject

1. Harley, James Arthur, 1873-1943
2. 1900-1999
3. Clergy, Black > Great Britain > Biography
4. Anthropologists > Great Britain > Biography
5. County council members > Great Britain > Biography
6. Black people > Intellectual life > 20th century
7. Black people > Great Britain > History > 20th century
8. Black people
9. Black people > Intellectual life
10. Clergy, Black
11. Anthropologists
12. County council members
13. Great Britain

Genre/Form

1. History.
2. Biographies.

Contents

1. Antigua -- Son of the soil -- A West Indian in New York -- The Washington 400 -- The interlopers -- Second best -- A crimson man -- Alain LeRoy Locke: 'The New Negro' -- A looming crisis -- Oxford beckons -- Dreaming spires -- An Edwardian curate -- Josephine arrives Marshside -- The appeal -- A damning allegation -- The archbishop intercedes -- Within touching distance -- A black canary -- The general strike -- The stormy petrel -- Ivanhoe -- Loose ends.

Call number

1. Sc D 23-387

Bibliography (note)

1. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Author

1. Roberts, Pamela (Cultural heritage professional), author.

Title

1. The adventures of a black Edwardian intellectual : the story of James Arthur Harley / Pamela Roberts.

Publisher

1. Oxford : Signal Books Ltd, 2022.

Type of content

1. text
2. still image

Type of medium

1. unmediated

Type of carrier

1. volume

Bibliography

1. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Local note

1. Schomburg copy with dust jacket.

Chronological term

1. 1900-1999

Local subject

1. Black author.

ISBN

1. 1838463062 hardback
2. 9781838463069 hardback

Research call number

1. Sc D 23-387