Double Pulitzer Prize honours
16 April 2019
A recent biography of Hertford alumnus Alain LeRoy Locke has been awarded the prestigious Pulitzer Prize for Biography in a ceremony at Columbia University in New York City. Meanwhile, alumna Carole Cadwalladr was recognised as a finalist in the National Reporting category for her investigative journalism.
Jeffrey C. Stewart’s panoramic biography, The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (published by Oxford University Press), explores the personal life of Locke and the definitive cultural movement that he inspired; the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s and 30s which proudly championed black intellectual and artistic production. Stewart investigates Locke’s relationships with his mother, his friends, his white patrons, and his lifelong search for love as a gay man. Stewart is Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where his research addresses issues of race and culture as they relate to art, history, literature, music and philosophy.
Alain Locke (1886-1954) came to Hertford in 1907, where he studied Philosophy, Greek, and Literae Humaniores (Classics) as the first African-American student to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. Despite outstanding success at Harvard University, racial prejudice at the time meant that Locke was rejected from several Oxford colleges before he was admitted at Hertford. He went on to become a prolific writer and editor with his 1925 anthology, The New Negro, proclaiming the Harlem Renaissance’s existence to a wider audience and presenting 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 and James W. Johnson, among others.
In April 2017, we unveiled a photographic portrait of Locke, taken by Carl Van Vechten in 1941, in our dining hall. At the ceremony, a current Rhodes Scholar at Hertford read from a 1944 essay by Locke:
If we can ever generally establish through education the implemented belief that ‘no one nation and no one race can and shall dominate the earth,’ we will have broken the intellectual backbone of prejudice, and certainly, so far as education is concerned, will have laid an intellectual foundation for effective democracy.
In addition to this win, Hertford alumna Carole Cadwalladr was a finalist – alongside her colleagues from the New York Times – in the National Reporting category of the Pulitzer Prize for her work on the Facebook and Cambridge Analytica data scandal. Congratulations to Carole, who is a reporter and features writer at The Observer and The Guardian. Links to articles considered as part of Carole’s nomination can be found on the Pulitzer Prize website.