Locke, Alain (1886–1954)

The philosopher and black art champion Alain Leroy Locke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1886. His father, Pliny Locke, was a postal worker and school principal who died when Alain was only a child; his mother, Mary Hawkins Locke, was a teacher. Locke combined his concern for promoting the development of a distinctive African American literary and artistic canon with a pragmatic involvement in the adult education movement as another means of improving life for African Americans.

Battling to overcome the effects of rheumatic fever throughout his childhood, Locke became a voracious reader and an excellent student. He entered Harvard in 1904, completing the 4-year program by 1907. In that year, he was elected into Phi Beta Kappa and became the first African American to receive a Rhodes [Page 870]scholarship. Between 1907 and 1910, Locke studied at Hertford College of Oxford University and then went on to study at the University of Berlin for another year. Upon returning to the United States, he became a professor of philosophy and education at Howard University in 1912. After completing his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard in 1918, Locke returned to Howard and would remain there until he retired in 1953, becoming head of the philosophy department in 1921.

Locke gained his greatest renown by providing the philosophical foundation for the Harlem Renaissance, the flowering of African American arts and letters in New York City during the 1920s. In 1925, his anthology The New Negro argued for cultural pluralism, positing that groups like African Americans could turn their particular experiences into distinctive art forms. Locke himself fostered the rise of black art in Harlem by advising such writers as Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. In 1927, he began a long association with Charlotte Osgood Mason, a wealthy white woman with whose collaboration he would select young artists for patronage. By the early 1930s, several of these artists, most notably Hughes and Hurston, had parted ways with Mason, and their departures signaled the end of Locke's most influential period. He continued to be considered one of the principal men of African American letters. His argument for cultural pluralism would be revived in the Black Arts movement of the late 1960s.

Locke became involved in the adult education movement in 1924. He believed that the movement was essential to the struggle for racial equality because education would enable African Americans to improve the material circumstances of their lives. He published eight instructional pamphlets called the Bronze Booklets between 1936 and 1942, which focused on black history and culture. Locke was named the first African American president of the American Association for Adult Education in 1946. He died on June 9, 1954.