Alain LeRoy Locke

And his storied history with the Philadelphia art establishment, his collection of African art and how his first art show was panned.

by the establishment because of all the African elements in it, his relationship with Alain Locke and W.E.B. Du Bois and people who were wrapped around the Black education movement, whether you're a Booker T. Washington mindset or a Du Bois mindset, Albert Barnes sat in those spaces.

And he was a large part of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance.

And where's hip hop on paper in the Bronx? So there's this history of.

Centered in the Harlem neighborhood of Manhattan in New York City, the era was originally known as the New Negro Movement.

This name was derived from a 1925 anthology titled The New Negro, which was edited by the philosopher Alain Locke.

As a leading figure of the time, Locke is often referred to as the dean of the movement.

While the activity was concentrated in New York, it also included cultural expressions in various urban areas across the northeastern and midwestern United States.

Regardless of the debate over its origin, the era brought a new sense of acceptance for writers.

Langston Hughes noted that it gave artists the courage to express themselves without fear.

The anthology titled The New Negro, edited by Alain Locke, is considered a foundational text of this revolution.

It featured a wide range of authors, including well-known figures like Zora Neale Hurston and Claude McKay, as well as poets like Anne Spencer.

[laughs]

Um, and basically, W.E.B. Dubois was the, and Alain Locke, were the two godfathers of the Harlem Renaissance.

Mm-hmm.

They would find the boys, find the girls, and say, "Y'all are, y'all are it." Like, "Let's protect what you're doing.

Let's get you a..." Alain Locke, though, really fun thing about him.

He, because he was gay and was reading all these white gay writers that were out, and sort of like on their Walt Whitman, he was const- any time someone had a little bit of faggotry to them, he was like, "So you're gay."

Mm-hmm.

"You need to be out.

He was asking a philosophical question, which is, what happens to a people when they begin to understand themselves as the authors of their own culture? It is this question that I think is the center of Locke's work.

It is also what makes Alain Locke particularly interesting if we approach him from the perspective of philosophy rather than literary history.

Locke was deeply concerned with questions about identity, recognition, democracy, pluralism, aesthetics, and the relationship between cultural and political emancipation.

His writings ask us to think about how racial groups become visible to themselves and to others, how cultural forms can challenge inherited stereotypes, and how art can participate in the reconstruction of a democratic society.

And he thought race consciousness, like the poetry of Richard Wright, there's something creative and new that could possibly be

there.

I don't know if that's still possible now, but I think it's interesting to try to think through, well, how has the function of art changed for us? Is it possible for there to be another Alain Locke in this particular moment? Is it possible for him, for someone to produce an anthology of, here's the new, new Negro? They probably wouldn't say Negro.

But you know what I'm saying.

Then even the monsters we defy shall be constrained to honor us, though dead.

The editor of this historic issue of the Survey Graphic was Alain Locke.

Locke, the first Black American to earn a Rhodes Scholarship, received both his undergraduate degree and Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard.

He would go on to teach at Howard University and publish a book called The New Negro, a manifesto and collection of essays that embodied the spirit of the movement and expounded upon the importance of the Harlem Renaissance.