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.
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