Alain Locke

Alain LeRoy Locke was born in Philadelphia on the thirteenth of September, 1885, the only child of Pliny Ishmael Locke and Mary Hawkins Locke, both descended from established free Black families and both devoted to teaching. Raised in a home that prized learning and moral seriousness, he carried those inheritances into a life of the mind that would reshape American culture.

He took his undergraduate degrees at Harvard in 1907, elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and that same year became the first African American selected as a Rhodes Scholar. Turned away by several Oxford colleges on account of his race, he was admitted to Hertford College, where he read philosophy and the classics from 1907 to 1910 and helped found an African Union Society. He studied further at the University of Berlin before returning home, and in 1918 completed his doctorate in philosophy at Harvard with a dissertation on the theory of value.

From 1912 he taught at Howard University, where — save for a dismissal over his stand for equal faculty pay and his reinstatement in 1928 — he led the department of philosophy until his retirement in 1953. As guest editor of the 1925 Survey Graphic issue on Harlem and then of the landmark anthology The New Negro, he became the acknowledged interpreter and philosophical architect of the Harlem Renaissance, lifting up voices such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston.

Locke died in New York City on the ninth of June, 1954. His vision of cultural pluralism and a proud, self-defining Black artistry endures. We honor Alain Locke, who opened doors sealed against him and held them open for generations to follow.