Alain Locke: “Enter the New Negro”

About the Author

Alain Locke was born on September 13, 1885, in Philadelphia. His given name was Allen, but he changed it to the French “Alain” because of his love of French literature. His father had earned a law degree at Howard University but worked as a postal clerk in the city; his mother was a schoolteacher. He was raised in a cultured environment and as a child attended the progressive Ethical Cultural School and then graduated second in his class from Philadelphia’s Central High School. An early bout with rheumatic fever left him with heart damage, so he spent much of his time in sedentary activities such as reading and playing the violin and piano.

After studying at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, Locke entered Harvard University, graduating magna cum laude in just three years. At Harvard he was a member of Phi Beta Kappa, a prestigious national honorary society for top students, and won the Bowdoin Prize for the best essay in English. He did not feel much of a connection with other African American students at Harvard. Biographers Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth report that in a letter to his mother he said that he could not understand how they could “come up here in a broad-minded place like this and stick together like they were in the heart of Africa.” He also wrote that he found his Black peers “coarse.” It was this separateness that would motivate him to stress America’s multiculturalism and come to regard art as a way of dissolving racial barriers.

In 1907 Locke became the first African American Rhodes Scholar, a prestigious award that entitles the recipient to study at England’s Oxford University. At Oxford’s Hertford College—the only one that would accept a Black student—he studied literature, Greek, Latin, and philosophy and earned a bachelor’s degree in literature in 1910. Afterward he studied philosophy for a year at the University of Berlin in Germany. In 1912 he took a position teaching literature at Howard University, but in 1916 he returned to Harvard to study philosophy, completing a PhD in 1918. He returned to Howard, where he was appointed chair of the philosophy department, and remained there until 1953.

During his distinguished career at Howard, Locke was the author of numerous books and journal articles whose topics broadly spanned philosophy, art, and cultural studies. Among them were The New Negro, as well as Negro Art: Past and Present and The Negro and His Music (both 1936). He also edited The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art (1940). In 1942 he published a pioneering social sciences anthology, When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture Contacts, which he coedited with Bernhard Stern. Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s he was in high demand as a visiting scholar until he retired in 1953—but not before he was able to secure a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at Howard. After his retirement, he moved to New York City to finish what was to have been his major work, The Negro in American Culture. Unfortunately, the heart problems that had plagued him as a child recurred, and before he could finish the book, he died on June 9, 1954.