Alain Locke

Alain LeRoy Locke was born in Philadelphia on the thirteenth of September 1885, the son of two schoolteachers. He took his undergraduate degree at Harvard (Phi Beta Kappa, 1907), and in 1907 became the first African American Rhodes Scholar — the only one for the next fifty-six years (Henry Hutchings followed in 1963).

At Hertford College, Oxford, he completed his second undergraduate degree in 1910. Subsequent racial-academic discrimination at Hertford led him to take his doctorate at Harvard in philosophy, conferred in 1918 — making him also among the earliest African Americans to earn a Harvard philosophy PhD.

He chaired the Department of Philosophy at Howard University from 1912 (with one interruption) until his retirement in 1953 — forty-one years. His philosophical work in value theory, aesthetics, and the philosophy of race anticipated the analytic-philosophy turn that American philosophy took in the 1940s and 1950s.

His most consequential cultural intervention was the March 1925 special issue of Survey Graphic magazine, "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro," which Locke edited. The expanded book version, The New Negro: An Interpretation, published in November 1925 with contributions from Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, Claude McKay, Aaron Douglas, and other figures of the Harlem Renaissance, is the founding document of that movement. Locke's introductory essay framed the political and aesthetic stakes of what came to be called the New Negro Movement, and the volume served as the canonical anthology that introduced its writers to a national readership.

He died in New York on the ninth of June 1954, age sixty-eight.

He is honored here as the philosopher-editor who curated the Harlem Renaissance.