Alain LeRoy Locke
American philosopher and writer (1885–1954) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
American philosopher and writer (1885–1954) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Alain LeRoy Locke (September 13, 1885 – June 9, 1954) was an American writer, philosopher, and educator. Distinguished in 1907 as the first African American Rhodes Scholar, Locke became known as the philosophical architect—the acknowledged "Dean"—of the Harlem Renaissance.[2] He is frequently included in listings of influential African Americans. On March 19, 1968, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. proclaimed: "We're going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe."[3]
Alain LeRoy Locke | |
|---|---|
| |
| Born | Arthur Leroy Locke[1] September 13, 1885 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. |
| Died | June 9, 1954 (aged 68) New York City, New York, U.S. |
| Resting place | Congressional Cemetery |
| Occupation | Writer, philosopher, educator, and patron of the arts |
| Language | English |
| Education | Harvard University Hertford College, Oxford University of Berlin |
| Official name | Alain Leroy Locke (1886–1954) |
| Type | City |
| Criteria | African American, Education, Professions & Vocations, Writers |
| Designated | 1991 |
| Location | 2221 S 5th St., Philadelphia 39.92065°N 75.15545°W |
He was born Arthur Leroy Locke in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1885,[4] to parents Pliny Ishmael Locke (1850–1892) and Mary (née Hawkins) Locke (1853–1922), both of whom were descended from prominent families of free blacks. Called "Roy" as a boy, he was their only child. His father was one of the first black employees of the U.S. Postal Service, and his paternal grandfather taught at Philadelphia's Institute for Colored Youth. His mother Mary was a teacher and inspired Locke's passion for education and literature. Mary's grandfather, Charles Shorter, fought as a soldier and was a hero in the War of 1812.[2][1]
At the age of 16, Locke chose to use the first name of "Alain".[4] In 1902, Locke graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia, second in his 107th class in the academic institution. He also attended Philadelphia School of Pedagogy.[5]
In 1907, Locke graduated from Harvard University with degrees in English and philosophy; he was honored as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society and recipient of the Bowdoin prize.[6] That year he was the first African American to be selected as a Rhodes Scholar to the University of Oxford (and the last to be selected until 1963, when John Edgar Wideman and John Stanley Sanders, a future notable writer and politician, respectively, were selected). In the early 20th century, Rhodes selectors did not meet candidates in person, but there is evidence that at least some selectors knew that Locke was African-American.[7] On arriving at Oxford, Locke was denied admission to several colleges. Several American Rhodes Scholars from the South refused to live in the same college or attend events with Locke.[6][7] He was finally admitted to Hertford College, where he studied literature, philosophy, Greek, and Latin, from 1907 to 1910. Alongside his friend and fellow student Pixley ka Isaka Seme, he was part of the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, contributing to its first publication.[8]
In 1910, he attended the University of Berlin, where he studied philosophy.
Locke wrote from Oxford in 1910 that the "primary aim and obligation" of a Rhodes Scholar
"is to acquire at Oxford and abroad generally a liberal education, and to continue subsequently the Rhodes mission [of international understanding] throughout life and in his own country. If once more it should prove impossible for nations to understand one another as nations, then, as Goethe said, they must learn to tolerate each other as individuals".[9][10][11]
Locke received an assistant professorship in English at Howard University in 1912.[12] While at Howard, he became a member of Phi Beta Sigma fraternity.
Locke returned to Harvard in 1916 to work on his doctoral dissertation, The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value. In his thesis, he discusses the causes of opinions and social biases, and that these are not objectively true or false, and therefore not universal. Locke received his PhD in philosophy in 1918.
Locke returned to Howard University as the chair of the department of philosophy. During this period, he began teaching the first classes on race relations. After working to gain equal pay for African-American and white faculty at the university, he was dismissed in 1925.[13]
Following the appointment in 1926 of Mordecai W. Johnson, the first African-American president of Howard, Locke was reinstated in 1928 at the university. Beginning in 1935, he returned to philosophy as a topic of his writing.[14] He continued to teach generations of students at Howard until he retired in 1953. Locke Hall, on the Howard campus, is named in his honor. Among his prominent former students is actor Ossie Davis, who said that Locke encouraged him to go to Harlem because of his interest in theatre. And he did.
In addition to teaching philosophy, Locke promoted African-American artists, writers, and musicians. He encouraged them to explore Africa and its many cultures as inspiration for their works. He encouraged them to depict African and African-American subjects, and to draw on their history for subject material. The library resources built up by Dorothy B. Porter to support these studies included materials which he donated from his travels and contacts.[15]
Locke was the guest editor of the March 1925 issue of the periodical Survey Graphic, for a special edition titled "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro": about Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance, which helped educate white readers about its flourishing culture.[16] In December of that year, he expanded the issue into The New Negro, a collection of writings by him and other African Americans, which would become one of his best-known works. A landmark in black literature (later acclaimed as the "first national book" of African America),[17] it was an instant success. Locke contributed five essays: the "Foreword", "The New Negro", "Negro Youth Speaks", "The Negro Spirituals", and "The Legacy of Ancestral Arts". This book established his reputation as "a leading African-American literary critic and aesthete."[14]
Locke's philosophy of the New Negro was grounded in the concept of race-building; that race is not merely an issue of heredity but is more an issue of society and culture.[18] He raised overall awareness of potential black equality; he said that no longer would blacks allow themselves to adjust or comply with unreasonable white requests. This idea was based on self-confidence and political awareness. Although in the past the laws regarding equality had been ignored without consequence by white America, Locke's philosophical idea of The New Negro allowed for fair treatment. Because this was an idea and not a law, people held its power. If they wanted this idea to flourish, they were the ones who would need to "enforce" it through their actions and overall points of view.
While his own writing was sophisticated philosophy, and therefore not popularly accessible, he mentored other writers in the movement who would become more broadly known, such as Zora Neale Hurston.[7] The "philosophical basis" of the Renaissance has since been widely recognized to originate from Locke.[19]
One author whose work Locke edited for both Survey Graphic as well as The New Negro was art collector, critic, and theorist Albert Barnes. Barnes and Locke were connected in their shared views on the importance of Negro art in America.[20] Barnes promulgated notions of the superiority of black art in terms of spirituality and emotion, owing to the collective suffering from which black artists draw to create their work.[20] Locke argued for the primacy of craft objects and the visual tradition as being the greatest contributor of black art to the American canon.[21] The commonalities between the two men's stance on black art led Barnes to believe Locke was stealing his ideas, creating a rift between the two men.[20] Locke touches on his feud with Barnes in his book The Negro in Art.[21]
Locke identified himself as a Baháʼí throughout the last half of his life (1918–1954).[22] He declared his belief in Baháʼu'lláh in the year 1918. Due to the lack of an official enrollment system for the religion, the date when Locke converted to that faith is unverified.[23] However, the National Baháʼí Archives discovered a "Baháʼí Historical Record" card that Locke completed in 1935 for a Baháʼí census from the National Spiritual Assembly.[23] He was one of seven African-American members from the Washington, D.C. Baháʼí movement to complete the card.[23] On the card, Locke wrote the year 1918 as the year he was accepted into the Baháʼí Faith, and wrote Washington, D.C., as the place he was accepted.[23] It was common to write to ʻAbdu'l-Bahá to declare one's new faith, and Locke received a letter, or "tablet", from ʻAbdu'l-Bahá in return.
When ʻAbdu'l-Bahá died in 1921, Locke enjoyed a close relationship with Shoghi Effendi, then head of the Baháʼí Faith. Shoghi Effendi is reported to have said to Locke, "People as you, Mr. Gregory, Dr. Esslemont and some other dear souls are as rare as diamond."[6] He is among some 40 African Americans known to have joined the religion during the ministry of ʻAbdu'l-Bahá before the leader's death in later 1921.[24]
Locke was homosexual, and may have encouraged and supported other gay African Americans who were part of the Harlem Renaissance.[25] Given the discriminatory laws against it, he was not fully open about his orientation.[7] He referred to it as a point of "vulnerable/invulnerability", representing an area of both risk and strength.[6]
After his retirement from Howard University in 1953, Locke moved to New York City.[26] He had heart disease.[26] Following a six-week illness, he died at Mount Sinai Hospital on June 9, 1954.[27] During his illness, he was cared for by his friend and protégée, Margaret Just Butcher.[28][29]
Butcher used notes from Locke's unfinished work to write The Negro in American Culture (1956).[30]
Locke was cremated, and his remains given to Dr. Arthur Fauset, Locke's close friend and executor of his estate. He was an anthropologist who was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. After Fauset died in 1983, and the remains were given to his friend, Reverend Sadie Mitchell, who ministered at African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia. Mitchell retained the ashes until the mid-1990s, when she asked Dr. J. Weldon Norris, a professor of music at Howard University, to take the ashes to the university.
The ashes were held at Howard University's Moorland–Spingarn Research Center until 2007. That year they were discovered when two former Rhodes scholars were working on the Centennial of Locke's selection as a Rhodes Scholar. Concerned that the human remains were not properly cared for, the university transferred them to its W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory, which had extensive experience handling human remains (and had worked on those from the African Burying Ground in New York). Locke's ashes, which had been stored in a plain paper bag in a simple round metal container, were transferred to a small funerary urn and locked in a safe.[7]
Howard University officials initially considered having Locke's ashes buried in a niche at Locke Hall on the Howard campus, as the ashes of Langston Hughes had been interred in 1991 at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in New York City. But Kurt Schmoke, the university's legal counsel, was concerned about setting a precedent that might lead to too many people trying to gain burials at the university. After reviewing legal issues, university officials decided to bury the remains off-site. They thought to bury Locke beside his mother, Mary Hawkins Locke. However, Howard officials quickly discovered a problem: she had been interred at Columbian Harmony Cemetery in Washington, D.C., but that cemetery closed in 1959. Her remains and others from that cemetery were transferred to National Harmony Memorial Park. (She and 37,000 other unclaimed remains from Columbian Harmony were buried in a mass grave, with no markers.)[7]
University officials eventually decided to bury Alain Locke's remains at historic Congressional Cemetery in Washington, DC. Former African-American Rhodes Scholars raised $8,000 to purchase a burial plot there. Locke was interred at Congressional Cemetery on September 13, 2014. His tombstone reads:
1885–1954
Herald of the Harlem Renaissance
Exponent of Cultural Pluralism
On the back of the headstone is a nine-pointed Baháʼí star (representing Locke's religious beliefs); a Zimbabwe Bird, emblem of the nation Locke adopted as a Rhodes Scholar; a lambda, symbol of the gay rights movement; and the logo of Phi Beta Sigma, the fraternity Locke joined. In the center of these four symbols is an Art Deco representation of an African woman's face set against the rays of the sun. This image is a simplified version of the bookplate that Harlem Renaissance painter Aaron Douglas designed for Locke. Below the bookplate image are the words "Teneo te, Africa" ("I hold you, my Africa"). This represented Locke's belief that African Americans needed to study African culture to enlarge their sense of self.[7]
Schools named after Locke include:
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In addition to the books listed below, Locke edited the "Bronze Booklet" series, a set of eight volumes published in the 1930s by Associates in Negro Folk Education. He regularly published reviews of poetry and literature by African Americans in journals such as Opportunity and Phylon. His works include:
Alain Locke's previously unpublished, posthumous works include:
Locke, Alain. "The Moon Maiden" and "Alain Locke in His Own Words: Three Essays". World Order 36.3 (2005): 37–48. Edited, introduced and annotated by Christopher Buck and Betty J. Fisher.
Four previously unpublished works by Alain Locke:
Locke, Alain. "Alain Locke: Four Talks Redefining Democracy, Education, and World Citizenship". Edited, introduced and annotated by Christopher Buck and Betty J. Fisher. World Order 38.3 (2006/2007): 21–41.
Four previously unpublished speeches/essays by Alain Locke:
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