Alain LeRoy Locke (1886-1954)

A highly distinguished American writer and philosopher, Locke’s influence on early twentieth century culture can hardly be overstated. Locke is often identified as the father of the Harlem Renaissance, the cultural movement of the 1920s and 1930s that proudly championed black intellectual and artistic production. It was vital to the formation of black modernity. ‘Harlem is the precious fruit in the Garden of Eden, the big apple,’ Locke said.

Born in 1886 in Philadelphia, Locke was the first African American Rhodes Scholar to come to Oxford. Despite outstanding work at Harvard, he was denied admission to several Oxford colleges because of race prejudice. He was admitted to Hertford, where he studied philosophy, Greek, and Literae Humaniores from 1907–1910. He co-founded the African Union Society.

After obtaining a PhD from Harvard in 1917, he went on to a distinguished academic career. He taught philosophy at Howard University from 1912 to his death, in 1954.

Along with W. E. B. Du Bois, Locke was one of the intellectual lights behind the rebirth of the black arts movement in the early 20th century. In The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art (1940) and other publications and articles he contended that art could function as propaganda, but that artists should be free to choose their subjects. Locke perceived European interest in African art as a means of emphasising African-American modernity and black Modernism.

He was a prolific writer and editor. Locke’s anthology, The New Negro (1925) proclaimed the Harlem Renaissance’s existence to a wider audience and presented the “new Negro” as a representative of high culture. This seminal publication included works by Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Countee Cullen, Zora Neale Hurston, Jessie Fauset, Arthur A. Schomburg, James W. Johnson, and others.

for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being –a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden…. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation…. With this renewed self-respect and self-dependency, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase. [as Locke explained in The New Negro‘s introduction]

In 2020, Locke featured in the exhibition Making History: Christian Cole, Alain Locke & Oscar Wilde at Oxford, organised by Magdalen College Library & Archives. Telling the story of three 19th and 20th century trailblazers, the exhibition showcases the shared histories of black and queer Oxford undergraduates at that time. Making History is available as an online exhibition on the Magdalen College website.