Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher »

Leonard Harris is professor of philosophy at Purdue University. Charles Molesworth is professor of English at Queens College in New York.

           

Alain L. Locke (1886-1954), in his famous 1925 anthology The New Negro, declared that “the pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.” Often called the father of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke had his finger directly on that pulse, promoting, influencing, and sparring with such figures as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jacob Lawrence, Richmond Barthé, William Grant Still, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Bunche, and John Dewey. The long-awaited first biography of this extraordinarily gifted philosopher and writer, Alain L. Locke narrates the untold story of his profound impact on twentieth-century America’s cultural and intellectual life.

 

Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth trace this story through Locke’s Philadelphia upbringing, his undergraduate years at Harvard—where William James helped spark his influential engagement with pragmatism—and his tenure as the first African American Rhodes Scholar. The heart of their narrative illuminates Locke’s heady years in 1920s New York City and his forty-year career at Howard University, where he helped spearhead the adult education movement of the 1930s and wrote on topics ranging from the philosophy of value to the theory of democracy. Harris and Molesworth show that throughout this illustrious career—despite a formal manner that many observers interpreted as elitist or distant—Locke remained a warm and effective teacher and mentor, as well as a fierce champion of literature and art as means of breaking down barriers between communities.

 

The multifaceted portrait that emerges from this engaging account effectively reclaims Locke’s rightful place in the pantheon of America’s most important minds.

Publishers Weekly

Philosophy professor Harris and English professor Molesworth fuse disciplines in this groundbreaking study of Locke (1885-1954), the preeminent African-American aesthetician and philosopher in the years between WWI and WWII, most familiar as the editor of the New Negro, "the chief group presentation of the values and interests of the Harlem Renaissance." The authors are painstakingly detailed along the usual biographical path-childhood, education (Harvard; Oxford, where Locke was the first African-American Rhodes scholar), work (Howard University professor, editor, writer). The authors' separate perspectives bring uncommon depth and detail to the analysis of their subject's multiple interests: "philosophy, cultural criticism, race theory, adult education, and esthetics, among others." Locke the thinker holds the center in this biography, but all around are glimpses of Locke the social being-a who's who of turn-of-the-century Harvard and of decades of African-American writers, scholars and political figures. Harris and Molesworth are as exhausting as they are exhaustive, and in delineating Locke's life with dense archival richness, the authors have given historians of the Harlem Renaissance, in particular, welcome material to mine for years to come. (Dec.)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Abbreviations xv

Introduction 1

1 The Lockes of Philadelphia 5

2 Harvard 28

3 Oxford and Berlin 59

4 Howard: The Early Years 107

5 Howard and Beyond 142

6 The Renaissance and the New Negro 179

7 After The New Negro 218

8 New Horizons: Sahdji to the Bronze Booklets 251

9 The Educator at Work and at Large 285

10 Theorizing Democracy 328

11 The Final Years 358

12 Locke's Legacy 381

Notes 391

Index 419