In Locke’s view, publicly lauded black leadership was inhibited by its obsession with politics, protest and propaganda. Upon attaining his degree, he stepped confidently into the black intellectual vanguard, although he never gained the celebrity of the hetero-patriarchal “race men” of his time, like W. After a stint at Oxford as the first African-American Rhodes scholar, Locke returned to Harvard and earned a Ph.D.
He was discreet about his queerness, but it was a public secret among those who knew him. These contradictory commitments - to respectable, elitist and homophobic black Victorianism on the one hand, and to his gay lifestyle on the other - produced a friction that sparked Locke’s intellectual fire. Locke never completely untied that knot for himself, but he grappled with it until his death.Įven before college, Locke knew he was gay and that he would live his life as a gay man. Stewart, a historian and professor of black studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, also renders the tangled knot of art, sexuality and yearning for liberation that propelled Locke’s work. Stewart’s majestic biography, also titled “The New Negro,” gives Locke the attention his life deserves, but the book is more than a catalog of this now largely overlooked philosopher and critic’s achievements. As Locke wrote in a draft of “The New Negro,” his seminal 1925 essay, “The question is no longer what whites think of the Negro but of what the Negro wants to do and what price he is willing to pay to do it.”
Psychological devotion to self-determination would transcend white racism and render stereotypes of black people obsolete. Black Americans would only forge a new and authentic sense of themselves, he argued, by pursuing artistic excellence and insisting on physical mobility. “When a man has something to be conceited over,” he wrote, “I call it self-respect.” Unlike many of his colleagues and rivals in the black freedom struggle of the early 20th century, Locke, a trailblazer of the Harlem Renaissance, believed that art and the Great Migration, not political protest, were the keys to black progress. $39.95.Īlain LeRoy Locke’s drive to revolutionize black culture was fueled in no small part by his sense of self-importance. THE NEW NEGRO The Life of Alain Locke By Jeffrey C.
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