During the fall of 1934 the typescript of an article John P. Davis was writing for Fortune magazine on "The Negro in Washington" circulated among a few social scientists at Howard University. In it, Davis claimed that Washington, D.C., had come to surpass New York as the nation's black cultural center, and he located a key reason for the city's vibrancy in a group of African-American intellectuals based at Howard, among them Abram Harris, Ralph Bunche, and Emmett Dorsey. Davis singled out Harris as the exemplar of this cohort, which he dubbed "the Harris Wing" and compared to past movements embodied by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. Abram Harris "not only sets the tone of the Howard group," Davis observed, "but is the national leader of that strong, growing wing of Negro opinion that views the race problem in light of a class problem." Harris, Bunche, and Dorsey bristled when they saw a copy of the forthcoming article. Writing to the editor of Fortune, they took exception to being labeled Marxist. But when the essay appeared, other readers took another kind of exception. The guffaw of black journalist George Streator was nearly audible when he wrote Bunche, "I confess I had to laugh when I was given to believe that Dr. Abram Harris would ever be at the center of a movement, except that he sometimes centers his movements." Streator's sarcasm was probably justified. Harris was, as his friend W.E.B. Du Bois characterized him, someone who was "primarily a scholar" who "in times of storm" would "rather be writing about Marx" than leading a fight. Abram Harris would never be mistaken for a charismatic leader, and his "movement" would never cohere in the way Davis seemed to predict.

Still, John P. Davis's depiction of "the Harris Wing" in Fortune did capture a particular moment in African-American intellectual history. Washington, D.C., during the 1930s was home to the leading academic advocates of perhaps the key current in African-American social thought between the 1920s and 1940s: the attempt to understand the concept of race as an economic construct. This decidedly anti-capitalistic endeavor was Abram Harris's central scholarly mission between 1919 and the mid-1930s, and was one shared by other leading academic thinkers of his generation, including colleagues at Howard, such as Bunche, Dorsey, Sterling Brown, and E. Franklin Frazier, and Atlanta University sociologist Ira de Augustine Reid, among others. The position they took meant doing more than write scholarly critiques of capitalism. Harris, in particular, believed himself responsible for providing intellectual guidance. He held that the success of any effort to achieve full citizenship for black Americans rested on the advent of interracial working-class unity, and attempted to steer the nation's leading betterment organization - the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) - in a direction that might foster such unity.

Of course, Harris's formal proposal to the NAACP, the well-known "Harris Report," was but one aspect of a broader engagement among black intellectuals with the economic underpinnings of race and civil rights efforts. In this paper I will explore the social thought of Abram Harris, and other compatriot African-American academic intellectuals, in order to try to answer why the challenge "the Harris Wing" posed against capitalism never transformed the ongoing black freedom movement. Indeed, as historians August Meier and John Bracey suggest, the aims of mid-twentieth-century civil rights leadership to legislate anti-discrimination was not too distant from the efforts of those who founded the NAACP in 1909. To understand this continuity necessitates specific focus on the particular works of scholarship produced by Harris, Bunche, and others, as well as attention to the roots, strength, and scope of contemporary civil rights efforts. But examining the intersection between these African-American scholars and the civil rights struggle also reveals the relevance of a broader decline in anti-capitalism in American social thought during the mid-twentieth century. In this way my paper demonstrates, at once, the significance of the movement for black citizenship rights to considerations of political and intellectual flux during the mid-twentieth century, and the connection black intellectuals had with such currents despite their status, as historian Francille Rusan Wilson puts it, as "segregated scholars."

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