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NY Times Sunday Book Review, Feb. 25, 2018
The Philosopher Who Believed That Art Was Key to Black Liberation
By MICHAEL P. JEFFRIES
THE NEW NEGRO
The Life of Alain Locke
By Jeffrey C. Stewart
932 pp. Oxford University Press. $39.95.
Alain LeRoy Locke’s drive to revolutionize black culture was fueled in
no small part by his sense of self-importance. “When a man has something
to be conceited over,” he wrote, “I call it self-respect.” Unlike many
of his colleagues and rivals in the black freedom struggle of the early
20th century, Locke, a trailblazer of the Harlem Renaissance, believed
that art and the Great Migration, not political protest, were the keys
to black progress. Black Americans would only forge a new and authentic
sense of themselves, he argued, by pursuing artistic excellence and
insisting on physical mobility. Psychological devotion to
self-determination would transcend white racism and render stereotypes
of black people obsolete. As Locke wrote in a draft of “The New Negro,”
his seminal 1925 essay, “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.”
Jeffrey C. Stewart’s majestic biography, also titled “The New Negro,”
gives Locke the attention his life deserves, but the book is more than a
catalog of this now largely overlooked philosopher and critic’s
achievements. Stewart, a historian and professor of black studies at the
University of California, Santa Barbara, also renders the tangled knot
of art, sexuality and yearning for liberation that propelled Locke’s
work. Locke never completely untied that knot for himself, but he
grappled with it until his death.
Locke was born in Philadelphia in 1885. His father, Pliny, was a law
school graduate and frustrated radical who died when Locke was 6.
Locke’s mother, Mary, provided a tenuously middle-class life for Alain
with her salary as a teacher, and raised her son to play the aristocrat
from the time he was young. Locke dressed immaculately and was taught
not to kiss or touch strangers, for fear of germs. He and his mother
disdained contamination in all forms, and made every effort to distance
themselves from poor black people, to avoid being stained by
association. Locke grew up determined to demonstrate his worth not by
uplifting those less fortunate, but by cultivating a reverence for the
arts. He was educated among wealthy white students at one of the city’s
finest public high schools, and enrolled at Harvard at 19.
Even before college, Locke knew he was gay and that he would live his
life as a gay man. These contradictory commitments — to respectable,
elitist and homophobic black Victorianism on the one hand, and to his
gay lifestyle on the other — produced a friction that sparked Locke’s
intellectual fire. He was discreet about his queerness, but it was a
public secret among those who knew him. After a stint at Oxford as the
first African-American Rhodes scholar, Locke returned to Harvard and
earned a Ph.D. in philosophy. Upon attaining his degree, he stepped
confidently into the black intellectual vanguard, although he never
gained the celebrity of the hetero-patriarchal “race men” of his time,
like W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey.
In Locke’s view, publicly lauded black leadership was inhibited by its
obsession with politics, protest and propaganda. In Stewart’s words,
Locke believed that “the function of literature, art, the theater and so
on was to complete the process of self-integration” and “produce a black
subjectivity that could become the agent of a cultural and social
revolution in America.” Locke turned his beliefs into action during the
Harlem Renaissance, when he developed his theory of the “New Negro,”
which became popular among black thought leaders. Locke’s version was
distinguished by his ideas about migration, modernity and the city. He
preferred Greenwich Village, where he eventually bought an apartment,
but Harlem was a symbol: a caldron of black diversity and cultural
production. The urban black citizen of Harlem would be a new man, an
artist with a novel voice and purpose, unburdened by antiquated folk
traditions and tired racial stigma.
Stewart suggests that Locke’s forays into poetry and fiction were
stunted by his inability to speak openly about his sexuality. But he was
a prolific essayist and critic, reviewing the work of black writers like
Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen and René Maran. He edited a series of
influential “Bronze Booklets,” including Ralph Bunche’s treatise “A
World View of Race,” and managed fraught relationships with
paternalistic white patrons to protect the artists he cared for and
strengthen his own position in the art world. By the time Locke curated
the American Negro Exposition in Chicago in 1940, his status as one of
the most prominent figures in black art was beyond question.
Under Locke’s stewardship, the black arts revolution of the 1920s was
undeniably, if obliquely, queer. As a mentor of black artists, he was
sexist and often exploitative. He ignored women almost completely and
was prone to infatuation with younger, intellectually stimulating men.
In some cases, his objects of affection fell in the gray area between
adolescence and adulthood, though Stewart is uncertain whether Locke had
partners under the age of 19. Many of these men welcomed Locke’s
advances as they searched for artistic direction and comfort with their
own sexuality. Locke was a guide, teaching his students about fine art
and gay manhood, a dance between raindrops in a storm of homophobia and
racism.
Locke’s romantic partners were also muses. He indulged in their bodies
and ideas, benefiting intellectually from the exchange even when his
sexual desires went unconsummated. Perhaps the best example of this
pattern is Locke’s courtship of Langston Hughes, the poet laureate of
the Harlem Renaissance, with whom Locke fell in love. Hughes never quite
reciprocated Locke’s adoration, but his virtuosity was magnetic. He
propelled Locke toward a new appreciation of the crises and triumphs of
ordinary black people. Locke’s conception of black brilliance evolved
through his exposure to young and attractive thinkers.
The breadth of Locke’s work is stunning, and Stewart refuses to
emphasize Locke’s activities during the Harlem Renaissance at the
expense of other contributions. Locke was never truly revered as a
philosopher, but he produced original research in the field of value
theory, including, for example, on the role emotions play in the
formation of values and opinions. He was the first among his peers to
take the anthropologist Franz Boas’s work to its logical end and declare
racial science illegitimate, pointing out that races were national and
social groups rather than biological categories. Locke also advocated a
return to African aesthetic principles, not as a counternarrative to
Western racism but as a means of exalting African forms and techniques.
He made a home at Howard University, where he worked for four decades
despite uneasy relationships with administrators, who did not care for
his lifestyle or his intellectual interests. Frail and prone to a
variety of ailments, Locke died from cardiac illness in 1954.
Stewart treats seemingly every sentence Locke wrote with great care,
reconstructing his wanderings through Europe and Africa, black theater,
communism and other geographic and intellectual terrain. The cost of
this choice is the length and pace of the book, which is sharply written
but unlikely to get readers’ adrenaline pumping. The benefits of his
thoroughness, however, are manifold. Chief among them is the book’s
example as a master class in how to trace the lineage of a biographical
subject’s ideas and predilections. The attachment and longing Locke
experienced in relationships with his mother, friends and lovers exerted
as much influence on his work as the texts he read and lectures he
attended. One finishes Stewart’s book haunted by the realization that
this must be true for us all.
Michael P. Jeffries, a professor of American studies at Wellesley
College, is the author of three books about race in American culture,
the latest of which is “Behind the Laughs: Community and Inequality in
Comedy.”
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