Alain LeRoy Locke #1664
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Alain Leroy Locke
Alain Leroy Locke (September 13, 1885 June 9, 1954) was an American writer, philosopher, educator, and patron of the arts. In a popular publication, The Black 100, Alain Locke ranks as the 36th most influential African American ever, past or present. Distinguished as the first African American Rhodes Scholar in 1907, Locke was the philosophical architect—the acknowledged “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of cultural efflorescence connected with the “New Negro” movement from 1919 to 1934. Locke’s importance as the ideological genius of the Harlem Renaissance is of great historical moment, immortalized in the Harlem Number of The Survey Graphic 6.6 (1 March 1925), a special issue on race for which Locke served as guest editor. That edition was entitled, Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro, which Locke subsequently recast as an anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life, published in December 1925. A landmar in black literature (later acclaimed as the “first national book” of African America), 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.” 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.”
Alain L. Locke, in his famous 1925 anthology The New Negro declared that "the pulse of the Negro world has begun
to beat in Harlem.” Often called the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance", Locke had his finger directly on that pulse,
promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence,
Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey.
In the long-awaited first biography of this extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer, Alain L. Locke narrates
the untold story of his profound impact on twentieth-century America’s cultural and intellectual life. Leonard Harris
and Charles Molesworth trace this story from Locke’s Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard
where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism to his tenure as the first African
American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of their narrative illuminates Locke’s heady years in the 1920’s, N.Y. City
and his forty-year career at Howard University (where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the
1930’s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy.) Harris and Moles-
worth show that throughout this illustrious career, despite a formal manner that many observers interpreted as
elitist or distant, Locke remained a warm and effective teacher and mentor, as well as, a fierce champion of literature
and art (as a means of breaking down barriers between communities.) The multifaceted portrait that emerges from
this engaging account effectively reclaims Locke’s rightful place in the pantheon of America’s most important minds.
