Hodge Kirnon (13 May 1891 - November 1962)[1][2] was a Montserratian scholar, historian, and literary critic,[3] who also worked as an elevator operator at Alfred Stieglitz' gallery 291.

[3] He contributed regularly to publications such as The Messenger and Negro World, and associated closely with fellow Harlem radicals like Hubert Harrison and Joel Augustus Rogers.

[7] He wrote in support of the movement's "racial radicalism", but described it as "downright ignorance and unspeakable folly" not to work interracially in fighting for workers' rights.

[11][12][7] He was vice president of and a speaker for the International Colored Unity League (ICUL), which called for "Political Equality, Social Justice and Civic Opportunity".

[10] Art historian Tara Kohn has explored the uneasy space occupied by Kirnon at 291, where he was both a part of, and apart from, the gallery as an artistic and cultural center.

In the elevator, he crossed paths with artists—many of them foreigners and outsiders engaged in their own struggle of “getting up,” as the German-born painter Oscar Bluemner once put it, of negotiating the “vertical of American society”—who occasionally invited Kirnon into the inner sanctum of their circle.