The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke (2018) is a biography by American author and historian Jeffrey C. Stewart. Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction and the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, The New Negro tells the story of Alain Locke, an African-American writer and philosopher who is frequently credited as the chief architect of the Harlem Renaissance, an intellectual movement of black artists and thinkers that lasted from around 1918 until the 1930s. The book takes its title from a 1925 anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays edited by Locke.

Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 13, 1885, Locke belonged to a family of prominent free black Americans. For example, his paternal grandfather was a teacher at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, the nation's oldest African-American school of higher learning. Meanwhile, his maternal great-grandfather served during the War of 1812 and was considered a war hero. His father, Pliny, was the first black employee ever hired by the U.S. Postal Service, while his mother, Mary, was a teacher who encouraged her son's academic pursuits from an early age. Stewart pinpoints Pliny's death when Locke was only six as a key point in his son's development as a black thinker. Pliny was an avowed political radical, and according to Stewart, Locke's capacity for political protest died with him. Throughout his life, Locke focused less on politics and protest as a means for African-American excellence and more on the arts, which fell firmly under the purview of his mother.

Locke graduated second in his class from Philadelphia's Central High School, the nation's second-oldest public high school. Locke's academic success continued at Harvard where he graduated with degrees in English and Philosophy and became one of the few students honored each year with the school's prestigious Bowdoin Prize. Shortly thereafter, Locke made history by becoming the first-ever African-American to receive the Rhodes scholarship, a postgraduate award that allowed international students to study at the University of Oxford in England. Because Oxford did not directly meet with candidates at that time, accounts vary as to whether the selectors knew Locke was African-American. In any case, Locke's selection resulted in a great deal of controversy as a number of Rhodes Scholars—particularly those hailing from the American South—refused to attend Oxford's various constituent colleges if they had to matriculate alongside Locke. As a result, many colleges denied entry to Locke on this basis. Finally, Hertford College agreed to admit Locke, who studied Greek, Latin, literature, and philosophy there from 1907 until 1910. Oxford wouldn't select a second African-American Rhodes Scholar until 1960, more than fifty years after accepting Locke.



After returning to America, Locke became an assistant English professor at Howard University, a historically black college in Washington, DC. After completing his doctoral dissertation at Harvard in 1918, Locke became the philosophy department chair at Howard. Stewart writes that much of Locke's own writing was targeted at an academic audience and therefore rarely achieved widespread recognition. Where Locke really made his mark was in mentoring and popularizing other writers and artists, and in interpreting the developments of the Harlem Renaissance to white mainstream audiences. He did so prominently in a 1925 issue of Survey Graphic magazine called "Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro." Later that year, Locke published his most famous work, The New Negro, an anthology of fiction, poetry, and essays by black writers including Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston. Locke also contributed the book's titular essay, in which he famously wrote, "The question is no longer what whites think of the Negro but of what the Negro wants to do and what price he is willing to pay to do it."

Stewart also devotes a great deal of attention to Locke's sexuality. Stewart writes that Locke knew that he was gay as early as his high school years, something he kept out of the public eye. That said, his close friends were surely aware of his homosexuality, Stewart argues. The author also suggests that Locke's homosexuality made him something of an outsider to some of his fellow intellectuals, perhaps resulting in his never reaching the upper-tier of black thinkers occupied by the likes of W.E.B. DuBois and Marcus Garvey. There is also a question of whether Locke's sexual proclivities affected his decisions about whom and whom not to mentor. Despite his strong patronage of Zora Neale Hurston, Stewart writes that Locke rarely mentored women, instead choosing to focus on relatively young men. Stewart cannot confirm whether any of Locke's romantic partners were under the age of eighteen, though there is some unsubstantiated gossip and innuendo suggesting that some were. The author also points out that while Harlem was important symbolically to Locke, he spent most of his time in New York in Greenwich Village.

In 1953, suffering from heart disease, Locke retired from Howard University and public life in general. The following year, he passed away at the age of sixty-eight.



According to The New York Times, The New Negro is a "majestic biography" that "gives Locke the attention his life deserves."