Huey Hewitt is an interdisciplinary historian of political theory, activism, and black life. He is currently completing his PhD in the Department of African and African American Studies at Harvard University, where he also received a Master’s degree in History. His research and teaching interests include late-nineteenth and twentieth-century intellectual history, global black radicalism, African American political thought, and gender and sexuality. He is especially interested in how political theory directly relates to concrete practices of mass action in the history of social movements. 

His dissertation—which will serve as the basis of his first book, Black Anarchism: The Making of an Alternative Black Radical Tradition—argues that anarchism represents an under-recognized but important thread in the history of African American political thought, one with much to teach us about resistance to racism, capitalism, and imperial rule. The black anarchist tradition developed in two historical phases, across two generations of thinkers. The first generation, active from the 1870s through the end of the First World War, was embedded in the labor movement and concerned with building interracial union struggles as the pathway to an anarchist future; this generation is well-represented by the political theories of Lucy Parsons and Ben Fletcher, who are the subjects of chapters one and two. The second generation, active from the late 1960s through the 1990s, was embedded in the Black Power movement and its outpost in American prisons. Three thinkers—Lorenzo Ervin, Ashanti Alston, and Kuwasi Balagoon—were some of the most vocal black anarchist theorists of this generation; across chapters three, four, and five, their intellectual production is examined to uncover how they eschewed interracial unionism and infused their idea of anarchism with a quasi-nationalist, quasi-separatist racial identity politics, one informed by the ethos of Black Power. Amidst the global decolonial upheavals of the midcentury moment, this second generation of black anarchists thought critically about the limitations and contradictions of state-socialist visions for national liberation, proposing instead the creation of transnational black federations built not around states but instead, from the bottom-up, around grassroots democratic institutions. 

Drawing primarily on the writings and speeches of black anarchists themselves—as well as on oral history interviews, prison letters, newspapers, and FBI and other law enforcement documents—the project’s methodology is one of historical and rational reconstruction: that is, it aims to form an impression, a model, of the ideas, questions, and concerns which have animated the black anarchist tradition in different historical moments. In so doing, Hewitt demonstrates that, despite their being mischaracterized as irrational extremists, Afro-American anarchists have been democratic and ethical organic intellectuals concerned with eradicating inequality, building a truly postcolonial and egalitarian world order, and fully manifesting the ideal of human freedom. 

His work has been published in Spectre and South Atlantic Quarterly, and presented at conferences and symposia at The Chicago Center for Contemporary Theory (3CT), the Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH), and the Association for Global Political Thought. 

Born in "Chocolate City" (Washington D.C.) and raised in Hungary, Bangladesh, and the Philippines, he holds a B.A. in History and Black Studies from Amherst College, where he graduated summa cum laude in 2019.