The New Negro The Life of Alain Locke Jeffrey C Stewart Full Chapter

The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
Jeffrey C. Stewart
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The New
Negro
Alain Locke by Winold Reiss. 1925. Private Collection.
The New
Negro
THE LIFE OF
A L A I N LO C K E
JEFFREY C. STEWART
1
1
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Jeffrey C. Stewart 2018
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Stewart, Jeffrey C., 1950–author.
Title: The new Negro : the life of Alain Locke / Jeffrey C. Stewart.
Description: New York, NY : Oxford University Press, 2018. | Includes
bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017026626 (print) | LCCN 2017026908 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780199723317 (Updf) | ISBN 9780190652852 (Epub) | ISBN 9780195089578
(hardcover : acid-free paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Locke, Alain, 1885–1954. | Locke, Alain, 1885–1954—Political
and social views. | African American philosophers—Biography. | African
American intellectuals—Biography. | African American college
teachers—Biography. | Harlem Renaissance. | African American
arts—History. | African Americans—Intellectual life. | BISAC: HISTORY /
United States / 20th Century. | HISTORY / Social History. | BIOGRAPHY &
AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Composers & Musicians.
Classification: LCC E185.97.L79 (ebook) | LCC E185.97.L79 S83 2017 (print) |
DDC 191—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017026626
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Edwards Brothers Malloy, United States of America
To John Wesley Blassingame (1940–2000)
scholar, mentor, and friend,
who set me on this course
CO N T E N T S
Acknowledgments xi
PART I T HE EDUC AT ION OF A L A IN LOCK E
1. A Death and a Birth 5

2. A Black Victorian Childhood 15
3. Child God and Black Aesthete 33
4. An Errand of Culture at Harvard College, 1904–1905 48
5. Locke’s Intellectual Awakening, 1905–1907 73
6. Going for the Rhodes 92
7. Oxford Contrasts 115
8. Black Cosmopolitan 135
9. Paying Second-Year Dues at Oxford, 1908–1909 161
10. Italy and America, 1909–1910 176
11. Berlin Stories 192
12. Exile’s Returns 209
13. Race Cosmopolitan Comes Home, 1911–1912 226
14. Radical Sociologist at Howard University, 1912–1916 243
15. Rapprochement and Silence: Harvard, 1916–1917 273
16. Fitting in Washington, D.C., 1917–1922 289
Contents
viii
PART II EN T ER T HE NEW NEGRO
17. Rebirth 311

18. Mother of a Movement, Mothered in Return, 1922–1923 332
19. Europe Before Egypt 354

20. Egypt Bound 379
21. Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1924 395
22. The Dinner and the Dean 408
23. Battling the Barnes 420
24. Looking for Love and Finding the New Negro 431
25. Harlem Issues 453
26. The New Negro and Howard 477
27. The New Negro and The Blacks 504
28. Beauty or Propaganda? 521
29. Black Curator and White Momma 545
30. Langston’s Indian Summer 567
31. The American Scholar 579
32. On Maternalism 599
PART III META MOR PHOSIS
33. The Naked and the Nude 629

34. The Saving Grace of Realism 657
35. Bronze Booklets, Gold Art 669
36. Warn a Brother 694
37. The Riot and the Ride 717
38. Transformation 740
39. Two Trains Running 755
40. The Queer Toussaint 771
41. The Invisible Locke 785
42. FBI, Haiti, and Diasporic Democracy 815
43. Wisdom de Profundis 837

Contentsix
44. The New Negro Lives 864
Epilogue 875
Notes 879
Select Bibliography 913
Index 915
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This biography of Alain Locke exists because of the inspiration of a community

of scholars, mentors, and friends, including Eleanor W. Traylor, E. Curmie Price,
Monifa Love Asante, Anissa Ryan Stewart, Fath Davis Ruffins, Marta Reid
Stewart, Julie Thacker, Gilbert Morris, Paula Lieberman, Hugo Hopping,
Prudence Cumberbatch, Lois Mailou Jones, Richard Long, Carl Faber Jr., Dr.
Phyllis Daen, Lawrence Lee Jones, Margaret Rose Vendryes, Patricia Hills, Claudia
Tate, Richard Powell, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rose Cherubin, Laurie Monahan,
Renate Reiss, Ethelbert Miller, John S. Wright, Paul Coates, Kellie Jones, Joellen
El Bashir, Arthur Fauset, Clifford L. Muse, Richard Edward Jenkins III, Melvin
Oliver, Vincent Johnson, Harold Lewis, Doxey Wilkerson, Arthur Davis,
Sterling Brown, Sabrina Vellucci, Marion Deshmukh, Wilburn Williams, William
Banner, Charles Prudhomme, Linda Heywood, Shirley Moody-Turner, Jerry G.
Watts, Robin Kelly, Stephanie Batiste, Paul Ruffins, Suzanne Preston Blier, Steven
Nelson, Anna Scacchi, Meaghan Alston, Roberto Strongman, Gwendolyn DuBois
Shaw, Lowery Stokes Sims, Ossie Davis, Steven Jones, Stephanie Batiste, Sass
Smith, Leroy Odinga Perry, Marissa Parham, Joyce Owens, Jonathan Holloway,
Nell Painter, Esme Bhan, David Musto, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Peter
Fitzsimmons, Arcilla Stahl, Michelle Huneven, Bruce Johnston, Lizabeth Cohen,
Jamaica Kincaid, Stanley Crouch, Samella Lewis, Stephen Goldsmith, Nelson
Maldonado-Torres, Helen Vendler, Gordon Teskey, Thomas Richards, Cristina
Giorcelli, Azfar Hussain, Werner Sollors, Christa Clarke, Jacqueline Goggin, Bill
Pencak, Maurice Natanson, Gerald Early, Celeste-Marie Bernier, Kimberly Camp,
Chela Sandoval, Kathryn Coney, Alan Trachtenberg, Aida Hurtado, Isaac Julien,
Camara Dia Holloway, Alvia Wardlaw, Nathan A. Scott, John Hope Franklin, A’Lelia
Bundles, Robert Farris Thompson, Kobena Mercer, Judith Green, George
Lipsitz, Claudine Michel, David Levering Lewis, Aida Hurtado, Ellen Cummings,
Michael Winston, Thomas C. Battle, Donna M. Wells, David Driskell, Clifford Muse,
Clarence Walker, Christopher McAuley, Cornel West, Jane Duran, Corey Blechman,
Samella Lewis, Arnold Rampersad, Lydia Balian, Ashley Champayne, Charlotte
xi
xii Acknowledgments
Becker, Robert A. Hill, Francille Wilson, W. Tjark Reiss, and many others. Special
thanks go to my editor, Susan Ferber, Oxford University Press, for her unstinting
support, and my agent, Marie Brown, for her guidance and fealty. I also thank
the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University, Beinecke Library
at Yale University, the W. E. B. Du Bois Research Institute and the Charles
Warren Center at Harvard University, the Woodrow Wilson Center, George
Mason University, the Getty Foundation, the National Humanities Center, the
Terra Foundation, and the University of California at Santa Barbara for support
over many years of this project.
The New
Negro
PA RT I
THE EDUCATION OF ALAIN LOCKE

Mary Hawkins Locke, ca. 1921. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center,
Howard University.
1
A Death and a Birth
Alain Locke rose early on April 23, 1922, a cool, clear Sunday after Easter in
Washington, D.C. It was also the Sunday before his mother’s sixty-seventh
birthday. He woke her, helped her dress, and then served breakfast. Afterward,
he read to her from the Sunday edition of the Evening Star. Headlines announced
that the secret Russian-German economic pact threatened to break up the Genoa
Conference, the Pan-American Conference of Women proposed a League of
Nations, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the Sherlock Holmes author, was to speak
in Washington as part of his nationwide tour. Only the last caught her inter-
est—she and her son shared an interest in psychic phenomena, and Sir Conan’s
lecture on spiritualism was sure to be provocative and revealing. She dozed off
when Alain launched into the details of his particular interest, the struggle be-
tween Germany and the Allies for trading rights with newly Communist Russia.1
That afternoon she was “stricken,” in the words of her son. He laid her down in
her bed, where, at 7 p.m., she died, leaving her son of thirty-seven years alone in
their home. The next day he taught his philosophy class at Howard University as
usual. Only later in that day did students learn that Dr. Locke’s mother had died.
Others learned of her passing from Tuesday’s Evening Star, which carried the
death notice, “Locke. Sunday, April 23, 1922 at her residence, 1326 R Street NW,
Mary Hawkins, beloved wife of the late Pliny Ishmael Locke and mother of Alain
Leroy Locke. Last reception to friends Wednesday evening, from 6 to 8 o’clock,
at her residence.”2
A student of Locke’s, poet Mae Miller Sullivan, recalls that her father, Kelly
Miller, a dean at Howard University, hurried her mother that Wednesday eve-
ning saying, “Mama, get your things together. We mustn’t be late for Dr. Locke’s
reception for his mother.”3 The Millers and other friends of the Lockes climbed
the stairs to the second-story apartment on R Street to find the deceased Mary
Locke propped up on the parlor couch, as though she might lean and pour tea at
any moment. She was dressed exquisitely in her fine gray dress, her hair per-
fectly arranged. She even had gloves on. Locke invited his guests to “take tea
with Mother for the last time.”4 After a short visit, most left quickly. On Thursday,
5
6 the education of al ain locke
Locke had her cremated and, according to his friend Douglas Stafford, he kept
“the ashes of his mother reposed in a finely embellished casket” on the White
grand piano in his home.5
The story of Locke’s “wake” for his mother became part of the folklore of
Washington’s middle class. On the one hand, it was common practice in the early
twentieth century for the deceased to be laid in state in a bedroom to be visited
by family friends. It probably did not surprise close friends that Locke had placed
gloves on his dead mother’s hands, since they were part of proper attire for tea
in a Victorian household. On the other hand, having her seated and dressed as if
alive struck most visitors as wildly eccentric. It was known that Locke and his
mother were close and that the two kept pretty much to themselves. When they
did entertain, it was together. Dr. Metz T. P. Lochard, a colleague and close friend,
recalled many Sunday strolls and stimulating conversations with Locke and his
mother, whom Lochard recalled as a refined, cultured, and well-read woman. “She
had all the ways of an old English aristocrat. She was gentle, affable, kind, toler-
ant and indulgent. That’s why Locke was so attached to her.”6 The obituary notice
that Locke published in the Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for
the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said Mary Hawkins Locke came
from “an old Philadelphian family.”7 Hers was a well-respected family whose
members had had close ties with the upper class in Philadelphia.
Such closeness between sons and mothers was not unheard of in the early
twentieth-century Black community, almost as compensation for the disruption
of maternal relationships under slavery. Certainly that “peculiar institution” had
not allowed slave mothers to provide anything like the undivided attention Locke
had enjoyed. The post-emancipation community tended to idealize mother-love,
especially among the northern bourgeoisie, where two-parent family relation-
ships symbolized class respectability and the nurturing, caretaking mother an-
chored Victorian families. Mother was a boy’s most reliable companion, especially
around the turn of the century when male mortality rates were high. It was no
accident that Langston Hughes’s famous poem about a boy’s struggle to survive
is dedicated to his mother, who consoles the son by sharing her burden with
him—“Son, life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”8
Life had been no crystal stair for Mary Locke, either. After her husband’s death
when Alain was six, she had taught school days and nights, and in the summer,
to earn enough to support the two of them during his long educational tenure.
Despite constant work, Mary had showered him with the kind of close attention,
constant encouragement, and special nurturing that this tiny, physically deli-
cate, often sickly child demanded. He, in turn, responded to this outpouring of
care by taking on and living up to her dreams and high expectations. He had
excelled first at Central High in Philadelphia and then again at Harvard College,
where he won several scholarships and graduated Phi Beta Kappa. In his final
year, he had been the first African American to be chosen as a Rhodes Scholar to
A Death and a Birth 7
Oxford. After further study at the University of Berlin, he had returned to the
United States and become a professor at Howard University.
Upon her retirement in 1915, Locke took his mother with him when he re-
turned to Harvard for graduate study that led to his PhD in philosophy in 1918.
Afterward, they lived together in his second-story apartment in Washington,
D.C., and he filled her declining years with the kind of reading material and trips
to museums and concerts that she had lavished on him as a child. If from her
deathbed, she had surveyed the work she had done, she would have concluded it
was a job well done. In turn, Locke’s wake to his mother and his tribute to her in
the Crisis testified to how much he valued her and how deeply he mourned her.9
Had Locke not chosen to invite members of the community to his bizarre
public wake, then perhaps his relationship with his mother and her dominating
role in his life would have gone unmentioned. Instead, people who knew nothing
else about Locke’s life and work knew of the tea with the mother propped up as
if alive. Locke’s obsessive attention to detail in staging the wake, down to the
finery of the lace on her dress and the placing of gloves on her hands, tended to
caricature his mother in the very act of honoring her, bringing his high-minded,
spiritual, self-sacrificing love down to the level of common snicker and unguarded
amusement. Such adulation forced the community to confront an unsettling issue.
In one theatrical gesture, Locke had symbolized the problem of an entire genera-
tion of young men and women who, because of their “proper honoring of elders,”
felt stifled by both their parents and the Victorian fetishes of decorous living,
social propriety, and group respectability. Like others of his talented generation,
Locke had been unable to separate from his mother. Even death did not finally
sever that cord.
Alain Locke was unknown to the general public, in part because he had de-
voted much of his adult life to a quiet caring for his aging mother, but also be-
cause he had failed to take on a major role as a Black intellectual, such as his
forerunner at Harvard and Berlin, W. E. B. Du Bois, had done.10 Locke had avoided
involvement with the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), had avoided involvement with more radical organizations like Marcus
Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), and especially
avoided such socialist organizations as Hubert Harrison’s International Colored
Unity League (ICUL). He did not like civil rights movements or more accurately
civil rights organizations, did not like the whole practice of protest that had al-
ready become definitive in Black political advancement in the early twentieth
century. Locke was not one to be found in a march, or a riot, or demonstrating
to bring about change—even of wrongs he agreed were despicable. Born and
bred in Philadelphia’s Black middle class, Anglophile in dress and class snobbish-
ness, a man who seemed to represent in his learning and bearing an old world
Black tradition that no one knew existed, he was a fish out of water in most situa-
tions of mass political organization because of his class consciousness and sense
of distance from most Negroes. And for years he had been insulated from any
criticism of this lack of public involvement in Black affairs by his caring for his
mother. Now, that excuse was gone.
There was one more thing. He was a tiny, effeminate, gay man—a dandy, really,
often seen walking with a cane, discreet, of course, but with just enough of a hint
of a swagger, to announce to those curious that he was queer, in more ways than
one, but especially in that one way that disturbed even those who supported
Negro liberation. His sexual orientation made him unwelcome in some commu-
nities and feared in others as a kind of pariah. And early on he had decided that
working with masses of Black people in close quarters like mass movements
rushed scandal and exposure he could not afford. So, he kept his distance from
the masses of Black people, the working and lower-middle classes of the race,
those his mother had taught him to avoid anyway.
But Locke did something remarkable with his alienation. He decided to use
art, the beautiful and the sublime that nurtured his and his friends’ subjectivi-
ties in a world of hate, to subjectivize the Negro, to transform the image of the
Negro from a poor relation of the American family to that of the premier creator
of American culture. Rejecting the notion advanced by W. E. B. Du Bois that the
political struggle for civil rights should be the focal point of Black intellectual
life, Locke argued that what really made the Negro unique in America was the
extent to which Black people had produced the only indelible art that America
had produced. At a time when radicals argued that the rioting of Blacks in Chicago
in 1919 against racial attacks by Whites was the essence of the New Negro, Locke
argued that a new consciousness had emerged since World War I of positive pos-
sibility for Black people in the twentieth century despite the constraints of
American segregation. At a time in the early 1920s when the popular discourse
about Negroes even in liberal progressive circles was that of a tragic problem of
American democracy that needed fixing, Locke created a counter-image—that
of a New Negro who was reinventing himself or herself in a new century often
without the help of Whites. The New Negro was a cultural giant held down by
White Lilliputians and all that was needed was for this giant to throw off the in-
tellectual strings that bound this intellect to self-pitying despair about Black
people’s plight in America, and assume his or her true role—as the architect of a
new, more vibrant future called American culture if those in his or her path
would just get out of the way.
In the 1920s, these views were radical, but Locke found a way to advance them
by using Beauty to subjectivize Black people. By focusing his advocacy of the New
Negro on art, literature, music, dance, and theater, arenas in which queer Black
people of color like himself found sanctuary, Locke shifted the discussion of the
Black experience to the creative industries that even racists admitted were mas-
tered by Black people. The spirituals, to take his favorite example, had transformed
Anglican hymns into something fundamentally American but also transformed
the attitudes of Whites and Blacks who heard them. "Afro-Americans," a term he
used frequently, manifested a creative genius from the moment they landed in
the Americas by taking a foreign culture and making something new out of that.
The enslaved were just that—temporarily bound but spiritually free people, who,
despite earthly oppression, could create works of beauty, as the “sorrow songs”
had shown. Those songs showed Locke, a philosopher, that a consciousness ex-
isted even in the most oppressive people who could change their perspective on
their life through art. Beauty, in other words, was a source of power for it could
transform the situation of Black people by transforming how they saw them-
selves. By focusing on Black cultural production, Locke sought to revitalize urban
Black communities, elevate Black self-esteem, and create a role for himself as a
leader of African-derived peoples.
Something about the death of his mother in 1922 released him to take on this
daunting, Herculean task. Her death loosened the grip of her Black Victorian
culture on his thinking, but it also left him with a crushing longing for the un-
conditional love she bestowed on him. The process was not immediate or easy.
At first he was inconsolable, dogged by pangs of loneliness and anxiety that left
him wandering the streets of Washington, D.C., with a faraway look in his eyes.
Although he continued to teach classes, those who knew him better realized that
a sharp pain lingered behind the hungry look in his eyes. One friend in particu-
lar offered herself as a kind of mother-surrogate and helped Locke through this
difficult period. That woman was Georgia Douglas Johnson, a well-known
Washington, D.C. poet, who was married to a prominent attorney and the
Recorder of Deeds for the District of Columbia. Most important, Mrs. Johnson
was the organizer of the “Saturday Nighters,” an informal salon of writers who
met at her home to eat, drink, and talk literature. She nurtured the controversial
bright lights of literary Washington, such as Jean Toomer, one of the most ex-
perimental and respected novelist of the Harlem Renaissance period, and Richard
Bruce, the enfant terrible whose drawings and short stories elaborated on the
theme of male homosexuality. Johnson was able to provide a literary family for
these young rebels because she identified with the generational struggle of youth
to free itself from the constraints of living in aggressively assimilated, bourgeois
Washington. She believed passion, however controversial, was better than cold
Victorian moralism, and as she watched Locke trudge the steep hill toward Howard
University every day, she felt the pain of his loss. Moreover, as a woman married
to a strict Victorian twenty years her senior, a man who derided her activities
with “artistes,” Johnson could identify with the generational crisis Locke was
undergoing.
Johnson began to help Locke to live without his mother when she wrote him,
“If you should ever take sick suddenly in the night or day, just have some one in
the house phone or call me. I shall be happy to come day or night regardless of
the night work I’m doing. I mean this and want you to feel that you can count on
me at any time. I think your mother would like me to say this to you.” At the
same time, she encouraged his dark explorations of the macabre when she con-
tinued, “Please send me a copy of the poems you read to me . . . especially the one
about the worms going through skulls, etc.” Johnson was also experimenting in
her poetry, reaching toward the controversial issues of sexual frustration, spirit-
ual death, and personal renewal she would tackle effectively in An Autumn Love
Cycle (1927). Perhaps more than Locke’s other friends, Johnson sensed that an
internal struggle waged inside him between the temptation to remain a Victorian
or move forward into uncharted waters of modernism—a struggle waging in her
as well. Encouraging him to go to Europe, she recalled, “I have remembered the
expression in your eyes. I do hope that you will see many happy scenes that will
delight and draw you into forgetfulness.”11
The next time Georgia Douglas Johnson and Locke’s other friends heard from
him he was in Berlin. Locke had left New York on June 22, 1922, for Liverpool
and had gone immediately to Paris where, on walks up and down the Champs
Elysees, he recalled earlier sojourns taken there with his mother. But it was in
Berlin, where in earlier years he had studied, that Locke seized on the rewards of
living without his mother. He delved into Berlin’s pulsating nightlife, its bohe-
mian artistic community, and its perplexing double infatuation with urban mod-
ernism and rural romanticism. He emerged with a vision of a renaissance of
the modern spirit he wanted to inspire in urban America. Locke saw Europe had
changed dramatically since he and his mother had last visited in 1914. Here was
a Europe alive to African culture, as reflected in the flock of artists who daily
went to ethnological museums to study African sculpture for its lessons in
cubism and expressionism. It was in Berlin that Locke was re-exposed to mod-
ernism and began to conceive for himself a new mission—to lead a new African
American modernism that would reject the stuffy, rule-bound, repressed
Victorian culture he had grown up under and in many respects epitomized. When
he returned home that fall, Locke began to envision a new, more public role for
himself, freed from the fetters of his past and his caretaker role with his mother.
There were self-destructive temptations in this new freedom as well. For a
closeted homosexual, his mother’s departure meant that he could delve into the
nightlife of Berlin—and New York—with an abandon not possible before. Was
that the path forward, simply to immerse in the sexual pursuit of young men?
Or was there something of the older tradition of discipline, self-management,
and cultural aspiration that he needed to allow him to become something more
powerful than simply a college professor on the make? Even if he turned away
from the pursuit of sex for sex’s sake, the deeper problem remained: how was he
going to become influential in a Victorian world that was patriarchal and hetero-
sexual? Locke avoided groups, especially Black grass-roots organizations and
establishment civil rights organizations like the NAACP, because of his fear that
his sexuality would be exposed. Black middle-class politics was fundamentally
patriarchal and heterosexual, revolving around social occasions where the lead-
ers, always male, and their wives dominated the political agenda with their so-
cially conservative narratives about “respectability” and “representativeness,” and
the demand that the race “put its best foot forward” to combat White discourses
that Black people were fundamentally subhuman. Behaving heterosexual was
part of the price of admission into these organizations, and having Locke roving
around meetings with an eye out for attractive young men was an explosive situ-
ation. That Locke had published his mother’s obituary in the NAACP’s Crisis was
ironic, because Locke was not a member of that organization, or a fan. Yet, the
Crisis, edited by America’s premier intellectual, W. E. B. Du Bois, was one of the
very few journals in which art and culture was reviewed, discussed, and pro-
moted seriously.
Alienated from the community surrounding bourgeois and grass-roots move-
ments of race advancement of his time, Locke decided to create an alternative
community of straight and queer people built around queer people’s love of art
and culture. In this work, Georgia Douglas Johnson modeled what he wished to
foster as much as the Berlin gay community. His new community would be an
open secret, an art movement eventually called the Harlem Renaissance, that
could accept him and others like him who built a sense of belonging to one an-
other out of the love that aesthetes and dandies like him had privately shared.
His coming out—to the extent that that was possible—was to become a public
player in creation of the subjectivity that would come to dominate American
culture of the twentieth century. Though still closeted, still afraid of exposure
and arrest, he nevertheless became a public intellectual while remaining an active
homosexual. He could not build a public civil rights movement like Du Bois’s to
transform the material or even the political condition of the Negro, but he could
build an aesthetic movement to transform the image of the Negro as a discursive
sign in American culture. He could do that because he fostered a community
of people who shared a belief that the Black experience of America could foster
great art.
Still handicapped psychologically by his dependence on a mother figure even
after his mother’s death, Locke found that he could be a nurturing hero by edit-
ing and advancing the work of more creative people than himself. Even before
his mother’s death, he had begun to privately counsel and promote new talents
like Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Ann Spencer, and Georgia
Douglas Johnson herself. After his mother’s death, he would stake his claim to
being an influential Black intellectual on them, defying the notion that the
advancement of Black interests was mainly a political or economic undertaking.
A tempered radical, Locke took what he loved—and had shared with his mother,
a love of art—and turned it into an intervention—a means for a catharsis in the
American soul, not the basis of propaganda for the race, as Du Bois later advo-
cated. His really radical notion was that the Negroes had to transform their vision
of themselves, to become New Negroes, and see the world with a new vision of
creative possibility, if others were going to treat them differently, with more dig-
nity and respect that the race so richly desired. Justice, he believed, would follow
upon seeing, for the first time, that the Negro was beautiful. He would re-create
politics by teaching a new generation of Black artists that they had a lofty mis-
sion—to march the Negro race out of the Plato’s cave of American racism and
allow them to see themselves through art as a great people. By subjectivizing
the Negro, Locke believed the New Negro artists would change the calculus of
American life and make Negroes the initiators of progressive change, not the
recipients or dependents of it.
Here was that deeper irony Locke’s life always conveyed—here was a man who
was deeply dependent on other people who preached independence and self-
determination as his aesthetic politics. He was a deeply conflicted man, who op-
erated as a loner, who befriended but often abandoned writers, artists, and lovers
out of fear of being abandoned himself. He could be selfish, untrustworthy, vin-
dictive, and vicious, but he could also be the sweetest of persons, who devoted
himself to students, helped less fortunate, often destitute artists survive, and
created the rationale, along the way, for contemporary Black art and literature.
Culture would be his business.
Mary would live through him, but where she had worshipped culture as an
escape from the experience, he would use culture to return the artist to the Black
experience of suffering and travail that America had been for generations, and
transform that experience into something beautiful. He would take a dying, deco-
rative, bourgeois culture and transform it into a new, living aesthetic that included
the folk culture of the masses and drew on the African ancestral culture. Three
years after his mother’s death, he wrote a clarion call to the young Black writers in
Philadelphia, his hometown, trying to break free as he had just done himself.
I was taught to reverence my elders and fear God in my own village. But
I hope Philadelphia youth will realize that the past can enslave more
than the oppressor, and pride shackle stronger than prejudice. Vital cre-
ative thinking—inspired group living—must be done, and if necessary
we must turn our backs on the past to face the future. The Negro needs
background—tradition and the sense of breeding, to be sure, and it will
be singularly happy if Philadelphia can break ground for the future with-
out breaking faith with the past. But if the birth of the New Negro among
us halts in the shell of conservatism, threatens to suffocate in the close
air of self complacency and snugness, then the egg shell must be smashed
to pieces and the living thing freed. And more of them I hope will be ugly
ducklings, children too strange for the bondage of barnyard provincial-
ism, who shall some day fly in the face of the sun and seek the open seas.
For especially for the Negro, I believe in the “life to come.”12
Locke became a “mid-wife to a generation of young writers,” as he labeled him-

self, a catalyst for a revolution in thinking called the New Negro. The deeper
truth was that he, Alain Locke, was also the New Negro, for he embodied all of
its contradictions as well as its promise. Rather than lamenting his situation, his
marginality, his quiet suffering, he would take what his society and his culture
had given him and make something revolutionary out of it.
Locke did it out of his need for love. This need led him into dangerous yet ful-
filling relationships with some of the most creative men of the twentieth cen-
tury, but also drove him to something else—to try and get that love from Black
people as a whole, by doing all he could to gain their approval, win their recogni-
tion, even though he could never fully experience it for fear of rejection. As such,
he remained a lonely figure, but also a figure of reinvention, for his message was
that all peoples, especially oppressed people, had the power to remake them-
selves and refuse to be what others expected them to remain.
In his mother’s end was his beginning. Mary had mothered him. Now, he
would mother a movement.
Circular for Opening of Sarah Shorter Hawkins store in Philadelphia, 1873. Courtesy
of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.
2
A Black Victorian Childhood
Alain, christened Arthur LeRoy Locke at birth, was a sickly, tiny baby. He was
not expected to live. Born on September 13, 1885 (though he publicly gave his
birth date as 1886), Locke contracted rheumatic fever at birth, and cried and
gasped for breath during attacks.1 That entire first year the family, especially his
mother, Mary, lived with the terror that the next attack would kill him. Mary
spent every possible moment with him, leaving household and shopping duties
to his grandmothers. In her nurture of her son, Mary found fulfillment she
lacked in her roles as teacher, wife, or daughter. He needed her and seemed
strengthened by her bathing, stroking, and breastfeeding. Even after the crisis
had passed, Mary remained extremely protective of her “one and only.” She had
nursed him back from death and she kept vigilant watch lest some new, unfore-
seen illness take him away. By his third year, his health had stabilized even if the
economic situation of a relatively modest Black middle-class family had not.
Roy, as he was called as a child, had been born at home on South 19th Street,
located at the edge of Philadelphia’s Seventh Ward, a Black residential neighbor-
hood. W. E. B. Du Bois, the sociologist hired by the University of Pennsylvania in
1897 to study living conditions in Philadelphia, described the neighborhood in
which Locke was born:
Above Eighteenth, is one of the best Negro residence sections of the

city, centering about Addison street. Some undesirable elements have
crept in even here . . . but still it remains a centre of quiet, respectable
families, who own homes and live well.2
Locke’s birthplace and two successive family residences at 1574 South 6th Street,
where they moved in 1890, and 2221 South 5th Street, where they lived after
1892, represented the epitome of rental Victorian furnishings available to the
“better classes” of Negroes in Philadelphia. Mary, Pliny, and the two grandmoth-
ers lived in six rooms on 19th Street. Mary tastefully decorated the second-story
flat with furnishings from her mother’s home and with curtains and upholstery
coverings she and her mother made. A White visitor to the Locke household in
15
1885 would have been struck by how closely these accommodations resembled
those of middle-class White Philadelphians.
Charles Shorter, Alain Locke’s maternal great-grandfather, was an eighteenth-
century Black success story. A hero of the War of 1812, he won the admiration of
city fathers when he captured a British ship off Philadelphia’s harbor and turned
it over to the Americans. After the war, Shorter amassed a small fortune as a
sailmaker and used much of his money to purchase books for the Library of the
Free African Society founded by Absalom Jones and Richard Allen in 1787.
In the aftermath of the War of 1812, a core group of Black ministers, entrepre-
neurs, political aspirants, educators, and artists emerged who inhabited the same
social class and shared a collective vision of forging a Black community devoted
to self-help, classical education, and sustainable middle-class families. This elite
group comprised people like the wealthy sailmaker James Forten; ministers
Richard Allen and the self-educated Absalom Jones, who founded independent
African Methodist churches in Philadelphia; the political leader Robert Purvis;
entrepreneur Henrietta Bowers; and Locke’s paternal grandfather, Ishmael Locke,
the first teacher at one of the first schools for Black youth in the United States,
the Institute of Colored Youth. In Black Victorian Philadelphia, an array of churches,
benevolent societies, literary and historical societies, the Home for Aged and
Infirm Colored Persons, and the Frederick Douglass Memorial Hospital all at-
tested to the ability of the Black elite and middle class to found institutions that
ministered to their needs and to those of the lower class. In the process, Black
Philadelphians developed a distinctive urban style. Mirroring the Quaker ideol-
ogy that an enlightened life was possible on earth, the Philadelphia Black elite
prided itself on its command of English and Anglo-American culture and turned
that culture to its own purposes of group advancement and individual accom-
plishment. A sense that educated Negroes were at least the equals of their White
peers in their mastery of English literature, religious doctrine, and Victorian mores
and manners pervaded the Black aristocracy, as they sought to call themselves.
Ishmael Locke was a model for his grandson even though he never knew him.
Born in Salem County, New Jersey, in 1820, he was a “pioneer educator,” one of
the most respected Black teachers in the antebellum North. Ishmael carried a
letter of recommendation with him to Philadelphia in 1844 that stated, “Ishmael
Locke is of good character; served as a teacher for 2 1/2 years—taught reading,
writing, arithmetic, geography, and astronomy . . . in the school for coloured chil-
dren in this town.” Having a letter from the White elite of Salem was crucial
to Ishmael’s ability to secure employment as a teacher among the Quaker elite
of Philadelphia. The letter’s White signatories especially noted his “habits of the
strictest morality, his personal order and decorum,” and “the reputation he has
obtained for intelligence and literary attainments; [both] have secured for him
the confidence and esteem of our community.” Another recommender noted
Ishmael was “a most efficient and excellent teacher, having advanced his pupils
A Black Victorian Childhood 17
rapidly by discipline in the school, and greatly improved their conduct and
condition by the force of good example and precept.”3
Just two years after Ishmael Locke arrived in Philadelphia, working-class
Whites rioted and attacked Black churches, schools, and meetinghouses on the
very avenue, Lombard Street, where Ishmael’s new school stood. Hired as the
first principal of the Quaker-founded Institute for Colored Youth, a teacher’s
college, Ishmael was charged with inculcating in rising young Blacks the gentle-
manly values of the Yankee middle class, precisely those behaviors and attributes
that attracted the ire of the rioting Irish working class. Black elite institutions
were the prime targets of White rioters, who felt that Blacks like Ishmael were
too successful at assimilating upper-class Anglo-American values and too “uppity”
because of it.
Ishmael escaped attack, partly because he and his wife, Mathilda, resided in
New Jersey in 1846, having purchased a home in Camden. Ishmael may have
continued residing in New Jersey because of his political stature in its Black
community. Certainly it was not because New Jersey was a less racist state than
Pennsylvania. Both states took voting rights away from free Negroes who had
voted for years because it was coupled to Democratic Party demands to establish
universal suffrage for White males by eliminating property qualifications for
voting. Ishmael Locke was a member of the New Jersey “Coloured Convention”
that protested this disenfranchisement of Blacks and coauthor of the petition to
return the vote to New Jersey’s Black population. Tellingly, he argued that free
Negroes deserved political representation because of their property, education,
and cultivation—their assimilation of Anglo-American middle-class values.
The petition read:
Being endowed under the blessings of a beneficent Providence and

favourable circumstances, with the same rationality, knowledge, and
feelings, in common with the better and more favoured portions of
civilized mankind, we would no longer deride you and ourselves by
exhibiting the gross inconsistency, and by so far belying the universal
law and the great promptings of our nature; cultivated as we claim
to be, as to have you no longer suppose that we are ignorant of the
important and undeniable fact that we are indeed men like yourselves.4
Ishmael’s faith that culture and accomplishment could triumph over racism lay
in the Black Victorian ideology of educated African Americans that held sway for
over a century. “Victorianism” came to be the term used for a set of rules for
public and private life that characterized middle-class status. On the one hand,
sexual prudishness, verbal and literary censorship, and personal self-discipline
signified that one was “civilized.” On the other, Victorians allowed the most
conspicuous display of wealth through dress and public parade. By the time
of the Great Exhibition of 1851 in London, a Victorian style had crystallized into
a public pedagogy of how the lower and working classes, and minorities and
colonials, ought to act if they wanted to be considered middle class and civilized.
As Locke observed in his study of imperialism, Victorianism abroad created
desire in the subject populations to emulate British culture to gain admission to
civilization. Something like that psychology operated among Black Victorians,
who inhabited London, Boston, Washington, D.C., and especially Philadelphia,
where increasingly, educated free Negroes grew up imbibing the nineteenth cen-
tury’s Anglo-American love of class, home, and strict public behavior. Ishmael’s
Black Victorianism boiled down to three things: culture, education, and a com-
mitment to the race. Black Victorianism thus had an affirmative twist, to use
civilized ways to defend the race from attack and improve the lifestyle of barely
free Negroes in the antebellum North.
Black Victorianism barely hid its deeper tragedy. Racism was not restrained
by proof of cultural equality or performance of middle-class rituals. The vote was
not restored to New Jersey’s Blacks, and the citizenship rights of northern free
Negroes continued to decline in the 1850s, despite numerous manifestations of
self-improvement and successful social integration. Economic conditions for the
tiny Black middle class worsened, due in part to increasing economic competi-
tion between Blacks and working-class Whites. Ishmael Locke experienced diffi
culties, forcing him to leave the job in Philadelphia in 1850, the year his first son,
Pliny, was born. In 1851, another son, Phaeton, was born, but before that year
was over, Ishmael had died of tuberculosis, leaving his widow to rent out the
home in Camden and live with relatives in Philadelphia.
Like his grandfather, Locke would have close ties with the Yankee elite
throughout his education and career, while lacking their financial security. Like
his grandfather, Locke would base his appeal for freedom and justice in American
life on the culture of African Americans, in part because both the masses and
most of the Black elite lacked the economic resources of other middle-class
Americans. But Locke would subtly resent his paternal grandfather and father
because of their economic situation, while subtly favoring his maternal grand-
mother and mother, because they were from the entrepreneurial side of Black
Victorianism. A tension resonated in Locke throughout his life between the
political progression of his paternal grandfather’s side of the family that was
committed to race service and ignored the financial consequences and the eco-
nomically relentless middle-class side of his maternal grandmother’s family that
was always seeking money. As an adult he often stated that he had to make Black
advocacy pay. The Black Victorians had all the ingredients of an elite Anglo-
American lifestyle except the most important, money, and it caused Locke a
great deal of pain throughout his life.
When Locke remarked with pride years later that he came from a family that
was “fanatically middle class,” he alluded to the price Black Victorians like him
paid for striving to be equal to Whites culturally while barely making a living as
educators. Constantly scrutinizing one’s dress, one’s speech, and one’s deport-
ment in public meant that self-scrutiny dominated their innermost thoughts.
After his mother’s death, Locke recognized this internal policing as crippling to
his and other Black artists’ aspiration to create a distinctive voice in American
culture. For most of his life, he remained a Black Philadelphian—a brilliant son
of a middle-class culture with no future, who admitted his life of the mind had
been shackled by an upbringing that made him “paralyzingly discrete.”5
The one person in Roy’s family seemingly not “paralyzed” was his father,
Pliny Ishmael Locke, a man “of small stature and slight build,” according to
Christopher J. Perry, the editor of the Philadelphia Tribune, who called the senior
Locke a born leader of men. Perry published his account of Pliny Locke’s life in
his column “Pencil Pusher’s Points,” one of the more popular items in this local
Black newspaper. Told for the benefit of younger readers, the story unfolds that
Pliny, after first excelling in and then teaching at his father’s school, the Institute
of Colored Youth, “joined the army of educators to the Southland,” only to return
to Philadelphia and become the first Black civil service employee in the Post
Office in 1883. Subsequently he was appointed a clerk in the customs house and
an inspector in the gas department. Pliny was president of local political organi-
zations such as the Quaker City Beneficial Association and was very active in city
politics, receiving a commission at the customs house.6
According to Perry, Pliny “was born to command, in whatever field he worked
men seemed to feel a confidence in him and were content to be guided by his
judgment. All of his teachers conceded to him a wonderful mind and felt that
had he been at Harvard, Yale or any of the great institutions of learning, he
would have been in the forefront of the strongest.” But Pliny’s most striking
characteristic was his courage:
To illustrate the phase of the grit and resourcefulness of the man is to

tell the story of his first morning in his new charge [as a teacher at the
South Chester Bourory School for Blacks]. He was as quick at percep-
tion as of action, and saw a recalcitrant spirit, who was likewise domi-
nant. He rang the bell for order, and as quick as a flash jumped from the
platform, grasped the big lad by the throat, threw him down; and then
called the rest of the startled scholars to order. There was a complete
hush and he let go of the refractory spirit, only to throw him out of the
door a minute later. After that order was supreme in his school.7
As Perry observed, Pliny was “brave, even to the point of indiscretion at

times.” For example, while working as a bellman in a hotel one summer, Pliny
wrote: “how I chafe under the regime of ignorant negroes and domineering
Whites, who seem to think that every negro is a boy and a dog—Hoyt, one of
the room clerks and myself have had it several times and last night the man
who has the newsstand and myself had a warm time of it.”8 While a government
employee in Washington, Pliny wrote to Mary that he had let a White con-
gressman have a piece of his mind when the latter claimed Blacks ought to be
grateful and acquiescent to the Republican Party after what Lincoln’s party
had done for them. “You can imagine how well such talk accorded with my
ideas—I spoke as I felt and he seemed utterly surprised that I should do so.”9
Pliny exuded the attitude of self-assertive Black manhood characteristic of the
Reconstruction Era, when Blacks fought for the right to vote and demanded
equality with Whites.
The immediate problem that had faced Pliny and other graduates of his fa-
ther’s school in the Reconstruction period was not the right to vote but the right
to work. Graduating at the top of his class in 1867, he stayed on two additional
years to teach, and then, at nineteen years of age, left Philadelphia bent on carv-
ing out his own reputation as an educator. Pliny and Mary probably met at the
Institute during his two-year teaching stint; he may have been Mary’s teacher.
When an offer came from the Freedmen’s Bureau in Washington to start a school
for Blacks in rural East Tennessee, he jumped at the chance. At least working in
the South would be better than joining the ranks of other unemployed graduates
of the Institute for Colored Youth. Although the Institute was producing excel-
lent teachers, the school boards of Philadelphia, Camden, and other New Jersey
municipalities had established very few schools for Blacks.
Pliny arrived in Tennessee at a time when the Freedmen’s Bureau, created by
Congress in 1865, had become a shadow of its former self. By January 1869, the
combined opposition of White landowners, poor Whites, Conservatives, and the
Ku Klux Klan had forced severe cutbacks in the amount of food, education, and
medical attention the freedmen received. Fortunately for Pliny, his commission
directed him to start his school in East Tennessee, which had escaped the Klan’s
reign of terror that had devastated Blacks in the plantation counties of West
Tennessee.
Nevertheless, East Tennessee was not free of White hostility. As he wrote to
Mary, “There are plenty of outspoken and bitter rebels and negro haters here.
They hate the sight of a northern man.” Pliny was appalled at the conditions
under which Blacks lived where he started his school. “I am now writing in a
house that people north would scarcely keep their horses in.”10 A month later he
confided that his school had managed a “daily attendance of about 30 of the
most uncouth, ugliest and greasiest mortals you ever beheld. I am indeed en-
gaged in the arduous duty of instilling knowledge in the minds of true represen-
tatives of Ham or of blackness. But whether they will ever achieve renown or not
I can not say.”11
Pliny was not alone among Reconstruction-Era northern African Americans
in his distaste for the Black masses, because their middle-class backgrounds
made it difficult for them to identify with the aspirations, usually for literacy
and for land, of the rural freedmen. The Reconstruction-era congressmen paid a
price for their bias—most lost political power, because they could not hold onto
their lower-class Black constituency and could not gain White loyalty. Whenever
Pliny took positions of public leadership, he would either be thrown into racial
conflict with Whites, who resented him because he was Black, or into class con-
flict with lower-class Blacks whose values, habits, and attitudes were repulsive to
him. In his letters to Mary, Pliny derisively termed poor Blacks in Tennessee
“kids” and seemed to resent rural Blacks as much as the “Negro hating” poor
White rebels. Like most Black Victorians of his day, Pliny also disliked poor
Whites. Yet the consequence of his class bias against poor Blacks was more seri-
ous since it meant he would never be able to build an enduring political base as
a Black leader.
Added to race and class conflict was the regional problem of living in the
South, something Pliny found especially disagreeable. He soon became ill, and in
April 1869 fell from a horse, severely injuring his arm. Although he resolved to
stay for two years, that May Washington notified him that his position would be
terminated. After a brief return to Philadelphia, in October 1871, Pliny accepted
a clerk position in the Washington office of the Freedmen’s Bureau. He arrived
in Washington, D.C., to find that John W. Cromwell, a classmate at the Institute
for Colored Youth, had recommended him to John Langston, the noted Afro-
American lawyer and dean of the Howard University Law School. Shortly after a
personal interview with Dean Langston, Pliny enrolled in law school, obtained
housing at the university, and settled down to work in the Bureau and as
Langston’s personal secretary.
Pliny’s move to Washington strained relations with Mary. She felt rejected
when he left Philadelphia a second time. Although she knew that law school and
a government clerkship were excellent opportunities for him, she had secretly
hoped he would find employment in or near Philadelphia. Moreover, his infre-
quent letters showed that Pliny was becoming a rogue about town, who sported
a cane and kid gloves and flirted with Washington ladies. Mary began to believe
that their courtship would never result in marriage.
Ironically, in September 1872, just after his letters began to open with
“my dearest love,” Pliny stopped writing to Mary. Mary stopped corresponding
as well, which elicited from Pliny the following note:
I see from your account that in the case of Love vs. Pride, the defendant
won but owing to some mischance he failed to get damages and thus
I lost the pleasure of receiving a letter. I do not blame you but I am
certainly sorry that you were prevented from mailing it. Am I such an
enigma and so little understood, that when flushed with joy at long-
deferred success, that I am thought to be inapproachable? I have more
cause to ASK forgiveness than to grant it, for after all am I not the cause
of that seeming lack of confidence? . . . Did brute and beast and villain
again become synonyms with Locke?12
Pliny had stopped writing after he lost his job at the Freedman’s Bureau. When
he did write he said that “pride would not let me open my heart to any, not even
to you, my loved—yes, dearly loved one.” Although Pliny secured another clerk-
ship in the Treasury Department, his economic situation and their courtship
remained rocky for the next three years until Mary wrote him in February 1875
that he was forgiven and that she wanted to share his sorrow as well as his suc-
cess. This proud man struggled with a melancholy streak. With Mary, especially,
who was not only of a higher social class but also a fault-finding lover, Pliny felt
that he had to be a “tough-minded” success story to be accepted by her and
her mother.
Class and gender tensions dominated Pliny’s long-distance courtship of Mary
Hawkins. To Pliny, Sarah Shorter Hawkins (Mary’s mother) was everything he
resented about Philadelphia upper-class society. Sarah embodied the sense of
superior status through connections with wealthy Whites that characterized the
Philadelphia Black Brahmins. In fact, she did not even consider herself Negro,
preferring to term herself a free person of color. She continued her father’s early
nineteenth-century strategy of entrepreneurship by opening dressmaking shops
in Philadelphia and Cape May, New Jersey, with her daughter, Mary. Sarah was
also something of an early feminist, who insisted on her daughter attending
the Institute of Colored Youth so that she could support herself and never be
dependent on a man. She taught her daughter to speak her mind forcefully even
in the presence of men, and stand up for women’s rights. For example, when
Pliny wrote from Tennessee that Governor Brownlee’s daughter talked too much,
she chastised him for his biased comments about women. But most important,
Sarah taught her daughter that she was a member of “society,” and as such, had
a responsibility to cultivate her mind, to restrict her social contacts to people
of her “class,” and to act at all times as a model of proper conduct. Pliny picked
up that Sarah was not only in a different class from his but also may have been
dismissive of him and his courtship of Mary. As he wrote Mary in 1875: “She
[Sarah] is one of the few persons in whose sight I wish to appear well yet without
a hypocritical pretense of being what I am not—without hiding all my faults
and failures. To this feeling I ascribe my utter inability to be perfectly at ease in
her society.”13
Washington was a welcome escape from the tensions of his courtship and a
politically vibrant city at the center of Reconstruction politics. As John Mercer
Langston’s secretary, Pliny attended political meetings, wrote speeches for the
future congressional representative from Virginia, and helped Langston lobby
for passage of the 1875 Supplementary Civil Rights Bill. Pliny argued strongly
for integrated schools in a letter he wrote to Mary in 1872: “I am an earnest ad-

vocate of Mixed Schools and also of Social Equality. I feel that the colored people
will never be able to rival the whites till, accustomed to mingle with them, they
lose that inborn feeling of inferiority and that humbling servility, which so
plainly exhibit themselves whenever they come in contact with whites.” He criti
cized as shortsighted Black schoolteacher opposition to integrated schools on
the grounds that integration would mean the loss of their jobs. While Black
teachers deserved “great praise,” Pliny responded to Langston’s criticism of
segregated schools by noting, “I should not like to be called in to disprove it by
citing examples of WELL CONDUCTED negro schools.”14 Pliny disliked Black
schools on scientific grounds: they were inefficient, dirty, and poorly disciplined,
and as a Black Brahmin, he saw himself as a leader bringing rationality and order
to a largely inefficient, and often religiously oriented, educational system.
Integrated schools were needed to expose Black teachers and students to
modernizing tendencies in education.
Moreover, as a man in an increasingly female profession, Pliny believed Black
women were not pushing the kind of manly rights he felt Blacks needed to be
equal to Whites. Education, for Pliny, was not simply reading, writing, and arith-
metic, but the cutting away of that “inborn feeling of inferiority . . . in contact
with whites” from Black children. Masculinity, patriarchy, and a class-conscious
lower-middle-class anger fueled his belief in a pedagogy that would liberate
Blacks from the White supremacist notion that they were powerless and worth-
less. Unfortunately for Pliny and his generation of Black leaders, neither school
integration nor Black social and cultural equality would become a reality. The
wheedling down of the Civil Rights Bill of 1875 and its nullification by the
Supreme Court in 1883 spelled the demise of social equality for the Black elite.
Pliny’s generation suffered a collective sense of bitterness and frustration
captured in his statement, “Negroes seem to be born to become the footballs of
the whites.”15
Inside this nineteenth-century rationalist was a bitter man, who, after gradu-
ating at the top of his class at Howard University Law School in 1874, never
practiced law because Black lawyers were little called for as Black civil rights were
systematically eroded in the 1870s and 1880s. Yet except in moments when his
anger boiled out from inside, these obstacles did not shake Pliny’s faith that if an
educated Black man competed with the White man on his own level, he would be
successful. Indeed, his anger at the “recalcitrant youth” expressed both Pliny’s
lack of authority and his conservative middle-class belief in self-help.
After graduation from law school, Pliny could obtain only clerking jobs in
Washington. When he lost his job at the Treasury Department in 1876, he strug-
gled on shoestring jobs until he returned to his mother’s house in 1879. He
spent a summer looking for work and then on August 20, 1879, Pliny and Mary
were secretly married. Upon being reappointed to the Treasury in 1879, Pliny
returned to Washington without his new bride. After another firing and a short
stint at the Freedmen’s Savings Bank in 1880, Pliny returned to Philadelphia for
good to take a teaching position at a Black school in South Chester. Only then,
when Pliny had obtained steady employment, did the couple inform their
parents of their marriage.
Perry’s account of Pliny’s stewardship of the South Chester School is mis-
taken in one particular: discipline did not reign supreme after Pliny ejected a
surly student from his class. In fact, Pliny was appointed principal of the school
a month later because the previous one had resigned and no one else seemed
to be able to maintain discipline and authority. Over the next three years, a
constant struggle ensued at the school, at which Mary began teaching in 1881.
Dissatisfied with the low pay and difficult working conditions at the South
Chester School, Pliny applied for a Post Office clerkship. The Civil Service Law of
1883 required all applicants to take a written exam and undergo a rigorous per-
sonal interview, which inquired into their employment background and per-
sonal character. Pliny achieved one of the highest scores on the examination,
and after the interview he was chosen over several White applicants. His selec-
tion was heralded by local and regional Black newspapers as an important
achievement for a Black man and a signal that the new Civil Service laws were
“democratic” in appointing Pliny to an office no other Black man had served in
for more than twenty years.
The Civil Service Law was part of a national reaction by the largely Republican,
Anglo-American middle class against the dominance of government jobs by
Democratic Party machines, often run by the Irish working class. The Black
middle class and the Irish working class had remained enemies after the riots of
the 1830s and 1840s, and the Black educated elite had continued to tie its bid for
upward mobility to assimilation of upper-class Yankee values. While the Civil
Service Law did not help lower-class Blacks get jobs in the city, it did reward
those like Pliny, who had excelled at education.
In Washington, Pliny had described the predicament of the educated Black
middle class. “How well I can now realize the truth and force of the assertion
that ‘cursed is that man who hangs on Princes (Congressmen’s) favors.’ ”16 By
rejecting segregation, Pliny and his free-born middle class forfeited the option
of developing autonomous Black economic and political power. By alienating
themselves from the Black masses, Pliny and his class failed to develop a strong
constituency among the lower classes of their race. Pliny remained as “cursed” in
Philadelphia as he had been in Washington: when the political climate changed
in 1886, he lost his Post Office job and eventually returned to teaching.
Despite its limitations, the Post Office appointment was personally signifi-
cant for Pliny. He had finally obtained a position of prestige and stable employ-
ment in his own community of Philadelphia. Alain Locke was born two years
after the Post Office appointment, a sign that the young couple felt they could
now provide for a family. Yet even before the Post Office appointment, Pliny was
resolute in his belief that the ideology of achievement, which fueled his own
education and career, would be successful. As he stated as principal speaker on
the January 1, 1883, celebration of the Emancipation Proclamation:
Our present, though possibly not all it should be, still is such to give us
cause for rejoicing and making indeed a jubilee of this, our grand na-
tional holiday. [For men like Frederick Douglass and John Langston]
are writing on the pages of history stern facts and not delusive fancies,
refuting in their public and private lives the base and unwarranted
assertions that the negro cannot rise.
Vested with rights making us theoretically equal to all other men, we
owe it to ourselves to see that we shall become practically so. The wide
domains of laws, medicine, commerce, agriculture and all the sciences,
present pleasing and inviting fields for energy, perseverance and pluck.
To these let us turn our earnest endeavors, making the race which
patient under suffering, great in deeds and acts. For years we have

furnished the muscle; let us now add to it brains.17
We can only wonder what made this proud, brave, and skeptical Black thinker
speak such homilies and portents of progress after witnessing so many examples
of continued racism. Perhaps it was part of the Black Victorian ideology that the
dire circumstances of survival had to be disguised in order that those following
would not give up the struggle.
Mary Hawkins Locke, a proper Victorian lady, realized all the virtues of nine-
teenth-century true womanhood. Metz T. P. Lochard recalled that her gracious-
ness, intelligence, and charm embellished her poised and reserved demeanor.
As a Black woman, Mary Locke inherited a matriarchal tradition that valued
both work and financial independence for women. But nineteenth-century mid-
dle-class Black women could not escape the pressure to live up to the Victorian
ideal to be a lady, refined and cultured with a knowledge of art and literature,
and respectable—which meant to marry, to have a beautiful home, and to give
birth to a son. Mary delayed getting married until she was twenty-nine and set-
tling down to a two-career marriage with Pliny until 1884, when he began to
earn a salary from his Post Office appointment. She left her teaching position at
the end of the school year in 1884 to become a full-time housewife. Little more
than a year later she gave birth to her first son, Alain LeRoy Locke.
The marriage and family life Mary led was far different from what she ex-
pected when Roy was born. After Pliny was dismissed from his Post Office job,
Mary, who had spent the first year at home nursing her sickly son, had to return
to teaching. She was able to secure reappointment at her old school in Camden.
During a family discussion, Pliny made a remarkable suggestion: he would take
a janitorial job so he could work nights and care for their son during the day
while she worked. The adult Alain Locke recalled this as an important factor in
his childhood.
Although I was idolized by both parents, early childhood life was un-
usually close with my father, who changed his position from day to
night shift in the post-office to be able to take care of me. This included
bathing and all intimate care since father was distrustful of the old-
fashioned ways of both grandmothers. He became my constant com-
panion and playmate, though forced to resume daytime work when
I was four.18
Locke wanted to hide that his father was a janitor, but he liked the devotion
expressed by an ambitious father willing to change his work to care for his son.
Mary resented having to give up her close relationship with Roy in order to
work. She was angry that she could not depend on Pliny for regular employment
and that he did not take respectable work, such as a teaching job. She also
resented his implicit criticism of her mother’s child-rearing. Most important,
she resented his displacing her as the most important person in Roy’s life.
As Locke recalled:
Relations with mother were also close in spite of this unusual interest
on the part of the father. This was not only due to their common fixa-
tion on their “one and only,” but on the fact that our physician pro-
longed lactation by special diet so that I nursed at the breast until the
age of three, and after weaning had to be fed milk by the spoonful.
I would take it in no other way and it had to be whipped into bubbles;
presumably because of being used to the aeration in breat [sic] feeding.19
While working, Mary returned from school twice a day to feed her son. Mary
did not need much encouragement to continue breast feeding. Both parents
fought for the attention of their child, which increased his initial feeling of
being “adored by both parents,” but also sowed tension. This young but already
sensitive child felt the building conflict between the parents. “Both parents
were extremely strong-willed personalities and knew not to cross one another.”20
Locke would only be weaned after his mother gave birth to another son in
1889. After Pliny took over Roy’s childcare, he potty-trained his son at the age of
two. He taught him to organize his clothes, to wash, to take care of some of his
own needs, and to take responsibility for informing his father when he needed
attention.
Pliny did not want to give over his son’s nurture to women, not even his wife.
He did not want a spoiled son, a quality he already saw developing when he took
over home care from Mary in 1886. He instructed Roy in self-sufficiency, ex-
plaining to the boy that his mother could not be with him because she had to
work. Pliny taught Roy to read by reading aloud to him such classics as Virgil’s
Aeneid and Homer’s Ulysses in the afternoons after the boy’s early morning math
exercises were concluded. Young Locke learned early that intellectual brilliance
pleased both parents, but especially his father. By age four, he was already seri-
ous, so unconcerned with humor and frivolity that he later recalled that, when
given the task of going downstairs on Sunday mornings to retrieve the paper,
he first cut out the comics section before bringing it upstairs.21
Locke gives us the flavor of this boyhood:
I was indulgently but intelligently treated. As an example, bed time rou-

tine was a ritual, my father first, this included an inspection of my
clothes which had to be arranged orderly on a chair by the bedside:
father intended a military school for my early boyhood training, and
then my mother. No special indulgence as to sentiment; very little kiss-
ing, little or no fairy stories, no frightening talk or games. The house-
keeper was dismissed by my father for frightening me by tales og [sic]
the “Boogy-man.”22
Pliny was a rationalist who believed that superstition, and indeed religion, had
no place in the instruction of children. As Locke recalled, “I was unusually obedi-
ent, but never had any unreasonable conditions to put up with, since most
things were explained to me beforehand.”23 Son and father took walks in the
park near their home, his father explaining to him the various trees and foliage
and the rudiments of botany. His father wanted him to become a doctor, but
after discussion with his mother about the boy’s weak health, it was agreed that
he would be a teacher.
The effect of this upbringing was that Locke developed his ability for logical
analysis, but generally lacked feeling. In his own recollection: “I was a self-
centered, rather selfish and extremely poised child, mature enough even before
my father’s death to be indifferent to others and what they did or thought.
I would not accept money or gifts from other people, no matter how tempting.
Was trained to be extremely polite but standoffish with others.” Of course,
this social distance was not simply the father’s doing. His mother, father, and
grandmothers reinforced this atmosphere of severe restraint:
I must have at one time, but I have no memory of having slept in any-
thing but my own room, and scarcely have any memory of seeing any of
the household undressed. Though a relatively poor family, household
etiquette was extreme. Except while being bathed I have also no
memory of ever being in the bathroom with anyone in the family. It was
a household where we washed interminably, and except to keep from

open offense to others, I was taught to avoid kissing or being kissed
by outsiders. If it happened, I would as soon as possible without being
observed, find an excuse for using my handkerchief, often spitting
surreptitiously into it if kissed too openly.24
The Locke family’s phobia of contact with undesirables crystallized within the
family into racial self-hate. Locke recalled that his maternal grandmother, Sarah
Shorter, would rise early in the morning to wash the family clothes and then
hang them to dry before the neighbors were up. In addition, when he was in-
structed to help her with the laundry, she chastised him from under her large
floppy hat and gloves to “Stay out of the sun! You’re black enough already!”
Through the education of his family, Locke learned that he must do everything
possible not to act Black, to deny who and what he was. Pliny’s attempt to limit
the influence of the grandmothers becomes understandable as an attempt to
shield his son from their negative social conditioning. Pliny obsessed over clean-
liness as well. Constant cleaning, bathing, and avoidance of the sun were c ompulsive
if unsuccessful strategies to wash off the stain of Blackness and deny that being
Black meant the family could never live the life of White “Proper Philadelphians,”
whose manners, homes, and aspirations the Lockes emulated so closely.
Denial also characterized Alain’s response to the birth of his brother in April
1889. He never publicly acknowledged the birth of Arthur Locke (apparently his
parents changed our Alain’s name to Alan or Allen prior to this Arthur’s birth;
later Locke himself changed it back to Alain). In only one autobiographical refer-
ence did he admit to having a brother; in others he claimed to be his parents’
“one and only,” arguing that because of “the necessity of a double salary to main-
tain a decent standard of living, they had agreed on only one child, if the child
was male.”25 Clearly the existence of a rival to his mother and father’s affections
was too much for Locke to bear. When Mary had to nurse this second sickly child
and could no longer nurse her firstborn, Alain refused to eat for days until his
frantic father discovered that whipping the milk persuaded his son to drink it.
Even in a household with two grandmothers, a precocious, jealous three-year-old
was too much to handle. Arthur Locke died six months after his birth.
Shortly after Arthur’s death, Pliny was able to resume his full-time nurture of
Alain. But around the age of four, Alain began to resist the father’s overtures.
Pliny sought to mold his son in his own image, and being a lieutenant in the
National Guard, he wished his son to attend military school. Pliny was a skilled
baseball player on one of the local Colored Baseball League teams, and one after-
noon in the backyard of their new residence at 1574 South 6th Street, Pliny tried
to teach his son to play catch. After several refusals by the younger Locke to co-
operate, the frustrated father wound up his arm and threw the baseball at Alain,
who protectively wrapped his arms around his body. Locke later recalled that
even at this early age, he possessed a clear sense of those activities that suited
him and those that did not; masculine sports such as baseball were not his idea
of recreation, and this strong-willed son would have nothing to do with it.
Pliny began to realize that he was losing the battle for his son’s gender iden-
tity. He noticed that when Mary was home over the summer, Alain spent most
of his time clinging constantly to his mother’s skirts and legs and, even if rather
unhelpfully, joined in his mother’s “feminine” activities such as sewing, making
hats, and creating the decorative lace things with which she and her mother
beautified their relatively modest home. Locke was not going to grow into the
aggressively masculine “ladies’ man” that Pliny had styled himself in Washington,
and the father, obsessed with creating his child in his own image, was unable to
allow the child his own identity.
The increasing tension between father and son culminated in Pliny whipping
Roy for some unrecalled infraction.
When during one of mother’s absences he chastised me with the only

whipping I remember ever having had; my grandmothers were strictly
forbidden to discipline me (and I knew that, much to their chagrin) it was
then decided (when I was somewhere between four and five) that mother
was to have final authority in discipline. I either remember or was told
that this was one of the few serious quarrels of their married life, and
that it had been settled that way on mother’s ultimatum. Both were
extremely strong-willed personalities and knew not to cross one a nother.
Both were bread[-]winners and therefore relatively independent.26
At the time of this incident, Mary’s teaching job paid considerably more than
Pliny’s janitorial job. She possessed both the economic and psychological lever-
age to leave the relationship if Pliny did not sacrifice his authority with the child.
Pliny’s beating of Alain was a continuation of his attempt to control his increas-
ingly independent son. The father vented his mounting rage at the boy for his
emerging effeminacy and his bent toward the aesthetic pursuits of the mother.
Alain was already a spoiled child who let his grandmothers know, through his
disrespect of their commands, that he realized they could not spank him and
therefore had no real authority over him. Now Pliny lacked that authority as well.
Pliny could now only propose, suggest, entreat his son; he could no longer com-
mand. As laudable as was his mother’s desire to protect her son, Locke recalled
his mother protectively placing her arms around him to shield him from his angry
father—her act also served the selfish motive of reestablishing her primacy in
her son’s life.27 Her love was greater because she would not punish him, would
not limit his indulgence, and would continue to spoil him rather than rein him in.
The mother’s victory made Alain identify with his mother as the power center
of the family. Even more than before, he copied what she did, how she walked,
how she talked, and how she viewed the world in order to acquire by imitation
the power she had. He would take her side and saw the negative aspects of the
family’s economic situation as his father’s fault. “If only he had . . .” complained
the mother, and he picked up the tune: “If my daddy had done what he was sup-
posed to do.”28 He sided with her because she was his protector, and even as a
mature man, Alain would be drawn to and mimic the ideas of older women who
served as protectors and patrons in his adult struggles against patriarchal au-
thority. This dialogue between mother and son took place behind closed doors.
An adult Locke simply refrained from mentioning his father. Locke did resent
his father for not being a recognized leader, serving as a secretary to a celebrity
like John Mercer Langston, rather than being an outstanding lawyer and states-
man himself. Like his mother, Alain Locke wanted to be respectable, and that
required superlative ancestors.
But the real source of Locke’s reticence about his father before outsiders may
have been rooted in the white-hot rage he felt for his father after the beating.
Did not his father claim to rule by reason and not force? Had Roy not been an
obedient child who, once things were explained to him, did what he was asked?
How could his father, whom he idolized and loved for his strength of character
and moral rationality, commit this immoral act? Afterward the son felt the arbi-
trariness of all moralism, that there was no just God, just simply the rule of force
and power. The incident also planted deep within him a hatred of patriarchy and
the kind of power Black fathers wielded over their families.
Locke sensed, but was too young to really know, that he was spanked for
being different. He learned early not to reveal himself to others, to cloak his
vulnerable identity so that others would not be able to punish him similarly.
Locke would be teased and tormented by both Black and White schoolboys of
Philadelphia. From the Whites, the harassment would leave him confused as to
whether his race, his size, or his effeminacy were the cause of his being singled
out for abuse. With the Black boys it would always be clearer: in him even small
Black boys found someone against whom they could prove their marginal man-
hood with little fear of retaliation. The effeminacy, moreover, in a Black male
context legitimated the violence: why not torture the little Black faggot who
dared not to be masculine?
After the beating and his mother’s ultimatum, Alain avoided contact with his
father, especially in situations where the two were alone. That distance was made
easier by Pliny’s decision to return to daytime work: Pliny obtained a teaching
position when a school for Blacks opened in Thurlow, Pennsylvania, in July
1890. Then, in 1891, Pliny competed for and won the post of meter inspector in
the gas department, the first Black man to secure such a Custom House appoint-
ment in Philadelphia, the Black press crowed. During the first year, he did not
draw a salary, but by 1892 he was appointed inspector in the gas department.
Unfortunately, just at the point when Pliny was regaining his prestige in the
family through professional accomplishment, he developed heart trouble and

died on August 23, 1892.
Pliny’s death came less than three weeks before Alain’s seventh birthday, at a
time when the child saw it as a victory in his rivalry for the mother. She had al-
ready shown that her loyalty was to her son and not to her husband. From the
child’s standpoint the spanking symbolized the father’s desire to kill him; now
the father had died from the blow he delivered in return.
The death freed Alain from an oppressive father but saddled him with a new
burden: defining an identity separate from his mother. That task would prove
more difficult for Locke:
Of course, my father’s death at six, threw me into the closest compan-

ionship with my mother, which remained, except for the separation of
three years at college and four years abroad, close until her death at 71,
when I was thirty six. I returned home during every vacation and when
abroad my mother visited me every vacation. As a child I stopped play
promptly and waited for her return every school day, and the only
childhood terror I vividly remember, was about [an] accident that
might have happened to her, if by chance she was late.29
He could live without his father, but not his mother for the next thirty-seven years.
His father’s death also left Locke free to pursue his mother’s interest in the
aesthetic realm. Had his father lived, Alain Locke might have been pressured to
pursue the scientific and rationalistic careers of medicine, law, or mathematics,
but now he could immerse himself without restriction into the decorative arts,
religious mysticism, and sentimental literature. As a young adolescent intellec-
tual, he would extol the values of the Victorian society his mother lived in and
represent himself as a custodian of that culture. But underneath his appearance
of “respectability” was an aesthete and a dandy who rebelled against “responsi-
ble” society as a literary decadent, bohemian, and homosexual. Here were the
beginnings of his rebellion against his mother’s authority in his subversion
of the bourgeois sentimental values she extolled. The rebellious rogue of the
father lived on, inverted into the outrageous dandy barely hidden in the figure
of the son.
Most important, the father lived on in Locke’s later approach to race politics.
The father’s death removed the political temper from the family, and for the next
sixteen years, not only was Locke’s primary interest in aesthetics but he also ac-
tively avoided involvement in racial politics. Aesthetics would become an escape
from the Black experience and the responsibility of race leadership. Only after
returning from Oxford would Locke begin a career as a lecturer on race topics.
Pliny Locke’s funeral took place on an oppressively humid day in August, and
while reported in the Black press, it was a small affair attended by thirty of
Philadelphia’s Black elite and a smattering of Whites. William Armstead, an early

suitor of Mary’s before her marriage to Pliny, may have helped the widow as she
walked from the burial site. Back home, Mary probably closed off the upstairs
bedroom where her husband had died, as was the custom of the time, and
returned downstairs to prepare her son’s special diet of eggs and celery.
Alain was all she had left to live for and, while her mother still lived with
them, Mary’s attention was focused on providing him with the support and en-
couragement needed to make it without a father. The next morning, she arose
earlier than usual to paste up in the kitchen a phrase she had written down at
the last Philadelphia Negro Improvement Association meeting: “Aim at the sky
if you want to hit a tree.” Fifteen years later, on the evening of his Rhodes Scholar
appointment, Locke would recall this injunction to high achievement as being
an instigator of his early ambition to be a success. It was a sign to this young boy
that he was now the hero in this female-dominated family and that he must live
up to his mother’s cultural expectations.
His father was gone.
Pliny Locke, September 10, 1875. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research

Center, Howard University.
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Dying, his lord he own’d; view’d him all o’er
With eager eyes, then closed those eyes, well pleased.
Of lesser ills the Muse declines to sing,
Nor stoops so low; of these, each groom can tell
The proper remedy. But oh! what care,
What prudence, can prevent madness, the worst
Of maladies? Terrifick pest! that blasts
The huntsman’s hopes, and desolation spreads
Through all the unpeopled kennel, unrestrain’d;
More fatal than the envenom’d viper’s bite,
Or that Apulian spider’s poisonous sting,
Heal’d by the pleasing antidote of sounds.
When Sirius reigns, and the sun’s parching beams
Bake the dry gaping surface, visit thou
Each even and morn, with quick observant eye,
Thy panting pack. If, in dark sullen mood,
The glouting hound refuse his wonted meal,
Retiring to some close obscure retreat,
Gloomy, disconsolate; with speed remove
The poor infectious wretch, and in strong chains
Bind him, suspected. Thus that dire disease,
Which art can’t cure, wise caution may prevent.
But, this neglected, soon expect a change,
A dismal change, confusion, frenzy, death!
Or, in some dark recess, the senseless brute
BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 210-234.

Sits, sadly pining; deep melancholy,
And black despair, upon his clouded brow
Hang lowering; from his half-opening jaws,
The clammy venom, and infectious froth,
Distilling fall; and from his lungs, inflamed,
Malignant vapours taint the ambient air,
Breathing perdition; his dim eyes are glazed,
He droops his pensive head; his trembling limbs
No more support his weight; abject he lies,
Dumb, spiritless, benumb’d; till death, at last,
Gracious attends, and kindly brings relief.
Or, if outrageous grown, behold, alas!
A yet more dreadful scene; his glaring eyes
Redden with fury; like some angry boar,
Churning, he foams, and, on his back, erect
His pointed bristles rise; his tail incurved
He drops; and, with harsh broken howlings, rends
The poison-tainted air; with rough hoarse voice
Incessant bays, and snuffs the infectious breeze;
This way and that he stares, aghast, and starts
At his own shade; jealous, as if he deem’d
The world his foes. If haply toward the stream
He cast his roving eye, cold horrour chills
His soul; averse, he flies, trembling, appall’d:
Now frantick, to the kennel’s utmost verge,

Raving, he runs, and deals destruction round.
The pack fly diverse; for whate’er he meets,
Vengeful, he bites, and every bite is death.
If now, perchance, through the weak fence escaped,
Far up the wind he roves, with open mouth
Inhales the cooling breeze, nor man, nor beast,
He spares, implacable. The hunter-horse,
Once kind associate of his sylvan toils,
Who haply, now, without the kennel’s mound,
Crops the rank mead, and, listening, hears with joy
The cheering cry, that morn and eve salutes
His raptured sense, a wretched victim falls.
Unhappy quadruped! no more, alas!
Shall thy fond master with his voice applaud
Thy gentleness, thy speed; or with his hand
Stroke thy soft dappled sides, as he each day
Visits thy stall, well pleased: no more shalt thou
With sprightly neighings, to the winding horn
And the loud-opening pack, in concert join’d,
Glad his proud heart; for, oh! the secret wound,
Rankling, inflames; he bites the ground, and dies.
Hence to the village, with pernicious haste,
Baleful, he bends his course: the village flies,
Alarm’d; the tender mother, in her arms,
Hugs close the trembling babe; the doors are barr’d;

And flying curs, by native instinct taught,
Shun the contagious bane; the rustick bands
Hurry to arms, the rude militia seize
Whate’er at hand they find; clubs, forks, or guns,
From every quarter charge the furious foe,
In wild disorder and uncouth array;
Till now, with wounds on wounds, oppress’d and gored,
At one short poisonous gasp he breathes his last.
Hence, to the kennel, Muse, return, and view,
With heavy heart, that hospital of woe,
Where horrour stalks at large! insatiate death
Sits growling o’er his prey; each hour presents
A different scene of ruin and distress.
How busy art thou, fate! and how severe
Thy pointed wrath! the dying and the dead
Promiscuous lie; o’er these, the living fight
In one eternal broil; not conscious why,
Nor yet with whom. So drunkards, in their cups,
Spare not their friends, while senseless squabble reigns.
Huntsman! it much behoves thee to avoid
The perilous debate. Ah! rouse up all
Thy vigilance, and tread the treacherous ground
With careful step. Thy fires unquench’d preserve,

As erst the vestal flame; the pointed steel
In the hot embers hide; and if, surprised,
Thou feel’st the deadly bite, quick urge it home
Into the recent sore, and cauterize
The wound: spare not thy flesh, nor dread the event;
Vulcan shall save, when Æsculapius fails.
Here, should the knowing Muse recount the means
To stop this growing plague. And here, alas!
Each hand presents a sovereign cure, and boasts
Infallibility, but boasts in vain.
On this depend; each to his separate seat
Confine, in fetters bound; give each his mess
Apart, his range in open air; and then,
If deadly symptoms, to thy grief, appear,
Devote the wretch; and let him greatly fall,
A generous victim for the public weal.
Sing, philosophick Muse, the dire effects
Of this contagious bite on hapless man!
The rustick swains, by long tradition taught,
Of leeches old, as soon as they perceive
The bite impress’d, to the sea-coasts repair.
Plunged in the briny flood, the unhappy youth
Now journeys home, secure; but soon shall wish
The seas, as yet, had cover’d him beneath
The foaming surge, full many a fathom deep.

A fate more dismal, and superiour ills,
Hang o’er his head devoted. When the moon,
Closing her monthly round, returns again
To glad the night, or when, full-orb’d, she shines
High in the vault of heaven, the lurking pest
Begins the dire assault. The poisonous foam,
Through the deep wound instill’d, with hostile rage,
And all its fiery particles, saline,
Invades the arterial fluid; whose red waves
Tempestuous heave, and, their cohesion broke,
Fermenting boil; intestine war ensues,
And order to confusion turns, embroil’d.
Now the distended vessels scarce contain
The wild uproar, but press each weaker part,
Unable to resist: the tender brain
And stomach suffer most; convulsions shake
His trembling nerves, and wandering pungent pains
Pinch sore the sleepless wretch; his fluttering pulse
Oft intermits; pensive and sad, he mourns
His cruel fate, and to his weeping friends
Laments in vain: to hasty anger prone,
Resents each slight offence, walks with quick step,
And wildly stares: at last, with boundless sway,
The tyrant frenzy reigns; for, as the dog,
Whose fatal bite convey’d the infectious bane,

Raving, he foams, and howls, and barks, and bites!
Like agitations in his boiling blood,
Present like species to his troubled mind;
His nature, and his actions, all canine.
So, as old Homer sung, the associates wild
Of wandering Ithacus, by Circe’s charms
To swine transformed, ran gruntling through the groves,
Dreadful example to a wicked world!
See, there distress’d he lies! parch’d up with thirst,
But dares not drink; till now, at last, his soul
Trembling escapes, her noisome dungeon leaves,
And to some purer region wings away.
One labour yet remains, celestial Maid!
Another element demands thy song.
No more o’er craggy steeps, through coverts thick
With pointed thorn, and briers intricate,
Urge on, with horn and voice, the painful pack;
But skim, with wanton wing, the irriguous vale,
Where winding streams, amid the flowery meads,
Perpetual glide along, and undermine
The cavern’d banks, by the tenacious roots
Of hoary willows arch’d; gloomy retreat
Of the bright scaly kind; where they, at will,
On the green watery reed, their pasture, graze,

Suck the moist soil, or slumber at their ease,
Rock’d by the restless brook, that draws aslope
Its humid train, and laves their dark abodes.
Where rages not oppression? where, alas,
Is innocence secure? Rapine and spoil
Haunt even the lowest deeps; seas have their sharks;
Rivers and ponds inclose the ravenous pike;
He, in his turn, becomes a prey; on him
The amphibious otter feasts. Just is his fate,
Deserved; but tyrants know no bounds: nor spears
That bristle on his back, defend the perch
From his wide greedy jaws; nor burnish’d mail
The yellow carp; nor all his arts can save
The insinuating eel, that hides his head
Beneath the slimy mud; nor yet escapes
The crimson-spotted trout, the river’s pride,
And beauty of the stream. Without remorse,
This midnight pillager, ranging around,
Insatiate, swallows all. The owner mourns
The unpeopled rivulet, and gladly hears
The huntsman’s early call, and sees with joy
The jovial crew, that march upon its banks
In gay parade, with bearded lances arm’d.
This subtle spoiler of the beaver kind,
Far off perhaps, where ancient alders shade

The deep still pool, within some hollow trunk
Contrives his wicker couch; whence he surveys
His long purlieu, lord of the stream, and all
The finny shoals his own. But you, brave youths,
Dispute the felon’s claim; try every root,
And every reedy bank; encourage all
The busy spreading pack, that fearless plunge
Into the flood, and cross the rapid stream.
Bid rocks and caves, and each resounding shore,
Proclaim your bold defiance; loudly raise
Each cheering voice, till distant hills repeat
The triumphs of the vale. On the soft sand,
See there, his seal impress’d; and, on that bank,
Behold the glittering spoils, half-eaten fish,
Scales, fins, and bones, the leavings of his feast.
Ah! on that yielding sag-bed, see, once more
His seal I view. O’er yon dank rushy marsh
The sly goose-footed prowler bends his course,
And seeks the distant shallows. Huntsman! bring
Thy eager pack, and trail him to his couch.
Hark! the loud peal begins; the clamorous joy,
The gallant chiding, loads the trembling air.
Ye Naiads fair, who o’er these floods preside,
Raise up your dripping heads above the wave,
And hear our melody. The harmonious notes

Float with the stream; and every winding creek,
And hollow rock, that o’er the dimpling flood
Nods pendent, still improve, from shore to shore,
Our sweet reiterated joys. What shouts!
What clamour loud! What gay, heart-cheering sounds
Urge, through the breathing brass their mazy way!
Not choirs of Tritons glad, with sprightlier strains,
The dancing billows, when proud Neptune rides
In triumph o’er the deep. How greedily
They snuff the fishy steam, that to each blade,
Rank-scenting, clings! See! how the morning dews
They sweep, that from their feet, besprinkling, drop,
Dispersed, and leave a track oblique behind.
Now on firm land they range; then in the flood
They plunge tumultuous; or through reedy pools,
Rustling, they work their way: no holt escapes
Their curious search. With quick sensation now
The fuming vapour stings, flutters their hearts,
And joy, redoubled, bursts from every mouth,
In louder symphonies. Yon hollow trunk,
That, with its hoary head incurved, salutes
The passing wave, must be the tyrant’s fort,
And dread abode. How these impatient climb,
While others, at the root, incessant bay:
They put him down. See, there he dives along!

The ascending bubbles mark his gloomy way.
Quick fix the nets, and cut off his retreat
Into the sheltering deeps. Ah, there he vents!
The pack plunge headlong, and protended spears
Menace destruction: while the troubled surge
Indignant foams, and all the scaly kind,
Affrighted, hide their heads. Wild tumult reigns,
And loud uproar. Ah, there once more he vents!
See, that bold hound has seized him; down they sink
Together, lost: but soon shall he repent
His rash assault. See, there escaped, he flies,
Half-drown’d, and clambers up the slippery bank,
With ooze and blood distain’d. Of all the brutes,
Whether by nature formed, or by long use,
This artful diver best can bear the want
Of vital air. Unequal is the fight,
Beneath the whelming element. Yet there
He lives not long; but respiration needs,
At proper intervals: again he vents;
Again the crowd attack. That spear has pierced
His neck; the crimson waves confess the wound.
Fix’d is the bearded lance, unwelcome guest,
Where’er he flies; with him it sinks beneath,
With him it mounts; sure guide to every foe.
Inly he groans; nor can his tender wound

Bear the cold stream. Lo! to yon sedgy bank
He creeps, disconsolate: his numerous foes
Surround him, hounds, and men. Pierced through and through,
On pointed spears they lift him high in air;
Wriggling, he hangs, and grins, and bites in vain.
Bid the loud horns, in gaily-warbling strains,
Proclaim the felon’s fate; he dies, he dies!
Rejoice, ye scaly tribes; and, leaping, dance
Above the wave, in sign of liberty
Restored: the cruel tyrant is no more.
Rejoice, secure and bless’d; did not as yet
Remain, some of your own rapacious kind;
And man, fierce man, with all his various wiles.
O happy, if ye knew your happy state,
Ye rangers of the fields! whom nature boon
Cheers with her smiles, and every element
Conspires to bless. What, if no heroes frown
From marble pedestals; nor Raphael’s works,
Nor Titian’s lively tints, adorn our walls?
Yet these the meanest of us may behold;
And, at another’s cost, may feast at will
Our wondering eyes; what can the owner more?
But vain, alas! is wealth, not graced with power.
The flowery landscape, and the gilded dome,

And vistas opening to the wearied eye,
Through all his wide domain; the planted grove,
The shrubby wilderness, with its gay choir
Of warbling birds, can’t lull to soft repose
The ambitious wretch, whose discontented soul
Is harrow’d day and night; he mourns, he pines,
Until his prince’s favour makes him great.
See there he comes, the exalted idol comes!
The circle’s form’d, and all his fawning slaves
Devoutly bow to earth; from every mouth
The nauseous flattery flows, which he returns
With promises, that die as soon as born.
Vile intercourse! where virtue has no place.
Frown but the monarch, all his glories fade;
He mingles with the throng, outcast, undone,
The pageant of a day; without one friend
To sooth his tortured mind; all, all are fled.
For though they bask’d in his meridian ray,
The insects vanish, as his beams decline.
Not such our friends; for here no dark design,
No wicked interest, bribes the venal heart;
But inclination to our bosom leads,
And weds them there for life; our social cups
Smile, as we smile; open, and unreserved.
We speak our inmost souls; good humour, mirth,

Soft complaisance, and wit from malice free,
Smooth every brow, and glow on every cheek.
O happiness sincere! what wretch would groan
Beneath the galling load of power, or walk
Upon the slippery pavements of the great,
Who thus could reign, unenvied and secure?
Ye guardian powers, who make mankind your care,
Give me to know wise nature’s hidden depths,
Trace each mysterious cause, with judgment read
The expanded volume, and, submiss, adore
That great creative will, who, at a word,
Spoke forth the wonderous scene. But if my soul
To this gross clay confined, flutters on earth
With less ambitious wing; unskill’d to range
From orb to orb, where Newton leads the way;
And, view with piercing eyes, the grand machine;
Worlds above worlds, subservient to his voice;
Who, veil’d in clouded majesty, alone
Gives light to all; bids the great system move,
And changeful seasons, in their turns, advance,
Unmoved, unchanged himself: yet this, at least,
Grant me propitious, an inglorious life,
Calm and serene, nor lost in false pursuits
Of wealth or honours; but enough to raise
My drooping friends, preventing modest want
That dares not ask. And if, to crown my joys,

Ye grant me health, that, ruddy in my cheeks,
Blooms in my life’s decline; fields, woods, and streams,
Each towering hill, each humble vale below,
Shall hear my cheering voice; my hounds shall wake
The lazy morn, and glad the horizon round.
Printed by W. Bulmer and Co.
Cleveland-row, St. James’s.
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The New Negro The Life of Alain Locke Jeffrey C Stewart Full Chapter

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The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

PART I T HE EDUC AT ION OF A L A IN LOCK E

1. A Death and a Birth 5

PART II EN T ER T HE NEW NEGRO

17. Rebirth 311

19. Europe Before Egypt 354

PART III META MOR PHOSIS

33. The Naked and the Nude 629

43. Wisdom de Profundis 837

44. The New Negro Lives 864

This biography of Alain Locke exists because of the inspiration of a community

THE EDUCATION OF ALAIN LOCKE

A Death and a Birth

Locke became a “mid-wife to a generation of young writers,” as he labeled him-

A Black Victorian Childhood

Above Eighteenth, is one of the best Negro residence sections of the

Being endowed under the blessings of a beneficent Providence and

To illustrate the phase of the grit and resourcefulness of the man is to

As Perry observed, Pliny was “brave, even to the point of indiscretion at

for integrated schools in a letter he wrote to Mary in 1872: “I am an earnest ad-

­furnished the muscle; let us now add to it brains.17

I was indulgently but intelligently treated. As an example, bed time rou-

a household where we washed interminably, and except to keep from

When during one of mother’s absences he chastised me with the only

family through professional accomplishment, he developed heart trouble and

Of course, my father’s death at six, threw me into the closest compan-

Philadelphia’s Black elite and a smattering of Whites. William Armstead, an early

Pliny Locke, September 10, 1875. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 210-234.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 235-259.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 260-282.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 283-307.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 308-332.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 333-356.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 357-381.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 382-406.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 407-431.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 432-456.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 457-480.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 481-505.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 506-530.

BOOK IV THE CHASE v. 531-536.

That dares not ask. And if, to crown my joys,

Creating the works from print editions not protected by U.S.

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furnished the muscle; let us now add to it brains.17