LOCKE, Alain>

LOCKE, Alain (b. 13 September 1886; d. 10 June 1954), teacher, writer, philosopher.

A powerful editor, scholar, and teacher, Alain LeRoy Locke is best known for his crucial role in inaugurating the New Negro Movement, or Harlem Renaissance, of the 1920s and 1930s. In 1925, Paul Kellogg, editor of Survey Graphic magazine, asked Locke to serve as editor for a special issue on race and black New York. Locke subtitled the special March issue Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro, and in it he included essays, poems, drawings, plays, and short stories by young intellectuals who would become some of the century's best-known African American artists and writers, including James Weldon Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Countee Cullen, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, and Angelina Grimké. The issue was an unprecedented success, and eight months later Locke published a revised and expanded version called The New Negro. With Locke's essay "Enter the New Negro," Survey Graphic and The New Negro announced an emerging cultural, political, and aesthetic vision for black Americans. The New Negro remains the central text of the Harlem Renaissance, and it launched the careers of its most famous participants.

Locke was born in Philadelphia, the only child of Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke. His parents were a well-established part of Philadelphia's black elite. Locke attended Central High School and then the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, where his father was a teacher. He entered Harvard University in 1904 and graduated magna cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa in 1907. As the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Locke studied at Oxford University in England. After graduating from Oxford, he spent a year studying philosophy at the University of Berlin. In 1912, he returned to the United States to teach English and philosophy at Howard University, a historically black institution in Washington, D.C. Locke took leave of Howard to return to Harvard, where he completed his doctorate in philosophy in 1918. He rejoined the faculty at Howard as a professor of philosophy and maintained his position until his retirement in 1952.

Although Locke's outstanding scholarship and his role in educating the black elite at Howard are noteworthy, he remains most celebrated for his role in the Harlem cultural world. Many of the major artists of the decades associated with the Harlem Renaissance were LGB; among the most notable were Cullen, "Moms" Mabel Hampton, Nella Larsen, McKay, Richard Bruce Nugent, Bessie Smith, Billy Strayhorn, and Wallace Thurman. At the time, Locke was the most prominent. Locke published Nugent's first short story,"Sadhji," in The New Negro,and Nugent, then known as Richard Bruce, became the first African American author to publish an openly gay story, "Smoke, Lilies, and Jade," in the 1926 issue of Fire!!,a journal he established with the painter Aaron Douglas, Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Thurman. Locke also fostered the careers of many younger, gay poets including Cullen, Hughes, and Thurman, the latter of whom published the gay-themed novel Infants in the Spring in 1932. A devoted supporter of black artists, Locke also helped several authors, among them Hughes, Hurston, and McKay, secure patrons so that they could continue their literary careers. About Locke, Nugent once said, "Almost everybody listened to his dictates" (Garber, p. 216).

One of Locke's protégés, Cullen, taught high school English to another young gay author, James Baldwin. Some critics argue that Locke and Cullen sustained a love affair at one time. If so, their relationship may have been a short one; Cullen married Yolande DuBois (daughter of W.E.B. DuBois) in 1928, though it should be noted that on his honeymoon Cullen brought along his best man and lover, Harold Jackman. His marriage ended in 1929. The white, gay socialite and patron of the arts Carl Van Vechten was also among Locke's friends, and the two helped to bring Harlem and its cultural offerings to the world.

Besides promoting literature, Locke was also known as a staunch advocate of the visual arts and theater. In his essay "The American Negro Artist" (1931), he named the painter Aaron Douglas "the pioneer of the African style among the American Negro artists." In drama, he celebrated the future of black playwrights who drew their work from black culture. There is no other senior intellectual of the era who matched Locke's commitment to meeting and encouraging younger artists. Beyond his role in the Harlem Renaissance, his philosophy, which many associate with pragmatism, has illuminated American philosophical studies, especially as he introduced new ways of thinking through questions of race and culture.

Bibliography

Harris, Leonard. The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.

Locke, Alain LeRoy. The Cultural Temper of Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture. Edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart. New York: Garland, 1983.

——. The New Negro. New York: Macmillan, 1992.

Washington, Johnny. Evolution, History, and Destiny: Letters to Alain Locke (1886–1954). New York: Peter Lang, 2002.

Shelly Eversley

see alsocullen, countee; grimkÉ, angelina weld; harlem renaissance; hughes, langston; mckay, claude; nugent, richard bruce; thurman, wallace; van vechten, carl.