# Alain Locke

*Exported from [Holy-Writings.com](https://www.holy-writings.com/) on 2026-06-19 — 1 clipping.*

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> Source: Bahá'í Library Online (bahai-library.com), curated by Jonah Winters. Used by permission of the curator. Original citation: Christopher Buck, Alain Locke, bahai-library.com.
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> Pop Culture Universe: Icons, Idols, Ideas - Alain Locke                                                                                                 3/31/13 1:59 PM
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> History remembers Alain Locke as the first African American Rhodes Scholar and, more famously, as the "dean" of the
> Harlem Renaissance. Locke edited The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), acclaimed as the "first national book" of
> African Americans. In this way, Locke's role is analogous to that of Martin Luther King Jr.: whereas King championed the
> civil rights of African Americans through nonviolent civil disobedience, Locke did so through a process known as "civil
> rights by copyright."
> 
> In the Jim Crow era, when blacks had no effective political recourse, Locke used the arts as a strategy to win the respect
> of the white majority and to call to their attention the need to fully democratize democracy and Americanize America by
> extending full equality to all minorities. Recent scholarship has brought Locke back to life, and his philosophy of
> democracy, in particular, lends him renewed importance.
> 
> Alain LeRoy Locke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on September 13, 1886. He was sent by his mother to one of
> the Ethical Culture schools—a pioneering, experimental program of Froebelian pedagogy (named after Friedrich Froebel,
> who opened the first kindergarten). By the time he enrolled in Philadelphia's Central High School in 1898, Locke was
> already an accomplished pianist and violinist. In 1902, Locke attended the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, graduating
> second in his class in 1904. That year, Locke entered Harvard with honors at entrance, where he was among only a
> precious few African American undergraduates.
> 
> Harvard, Harlem, Haifa—place names that represent Locke's special involvement in philosophy, art, and religion—are
> keys to understanding his life and thought. Harvard University prepared Locke for distinction as the first black Rhodes
> Scholar in 1907 and, in 1918, awarded Locke his PhD in philosophy, thus securing his position as chair of the Department
> of Philosophy at Howard University from 1927 until his retirement in 1953. New York City's Harlem was the mecca of the
> Harlem Renaissance, whereby Locke, as a spokesman for his race, revitalized racial solidarity and fostered group
> consciousness among African Americans that proved a necessary precondition of the civil rights movement. Haifa, Israel
> is the world center of the Bahá'í faith, the religion to which Locke converted in 1918, the same year he received his
> doctorate from Harvard. Until recently, this has been the least understood aspect of Locke's life. During the Jim Crow era,
> at a time when black people saw little possibility of interracial harmony, this new religious movement offered hope through
> its "race amity" efforts, which Locke was instrumental in organizing. These three spheres of activity—the academy, the art
> world, and spiritual society—converge to create a composite picture of Locke as an integrationist whose model was not
> assimilation, but rather "unity through diversity" (the title of one of his Bahá'í World essays).
> 
> During the "golden age of philosophy at Harvard," Locke studied at a time when Josiah Royce, William James, George
> Herbert Palmer, Hugo Münsterberg, and Ralph Barton Perry were member of the faculty. Elected to Phi Beta Kappa, in
> 1907 Locke won the Bowdoin Prize—Harvard's most prestigious academic award—for an essay he wrote, "The Literary
> Heritage of Tennyson." Remarkably, Locke completed his four-year undergraduate program at Harvard in only three
> years, graduating magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in philosophy. Then, Locke made history and headlines in
> May 1907 as America's first African American Rhodes Scholar. Although his Rhodes scholarship provided for study
> abroad at England's Oxford Univerity, it was no guarantee of admission. Rejected by five Oxford colleges because of his
> race, Locke was finally admitted to Hertford College, where he studied from 1907 to 1910.
> 
> Jewish philosopher Horace Kallen—one of Locke's lifelong friends—describes a racial incident over a Thanksgiving Day
> dinner hosted at the American Club at Oxford. Locke was not invited because Southern men refused to dine with him,
> deeply upsetting Locke. Over the course of Kallen's conversations with Locke, the phrase "cultural pluralism" was born.
> Although the term itself was thus coined by Kallen in this historic conversation with Locke, it was really Locke who
> developed the concept into a full-blown philosophical framework for the amelioration of African Americans. Distancing
> 
> http://popculture.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1764354?terms=%22Christopher+Buck%22                                                                             Page 1 of 4
> Pop Culture Universe: Icons, Idols, Ideas - Alain Locke                                                                                                   3/31/13 1:59 PM
> 
> himself from Kallen's purist and separatist conception of it, Locke was part of the cultural pluralist movement that
> flourished between the 1920s and the 1940s. Indeed, Locke has been called the "father of multiculturalism."
> 
> So acutely did the Thanksgiving Day dinner incident traumatize Locke that he left Oxford without taking a degree and
> spent the 1910–1911 academic year studying German philosopher Immanuel Kant at the University of Berlin and touring
> Eastern Europe as well. During his stay in Berlin, where he earned a Bachelor of Literature degree, Locke became
> conversant with the "Austrian school" of anthropology, known as philosophical anthropology, under the tutelage of Franz
> Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, Christian Freiherr von Ehrenfels, Paul Natorp, and others. Locke much preferred Europe
> to America. Indeed, there were moments when Locke resolved never to return to the United States. Reluctantly, he did so
> in 1911.
> 
> As an assistant professor of the teaching of English and an instructor in philosophy and education, Locke taught
> literature, English, education, and ethics—and later, ethics and logic—at Washington, D.C.'s Howard University, although
> he did not have an opportunity to teach a course on philosophy until 1915. In 1915–1916, the Howard chapter of the
> National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Social Science Club sponsored a two-
> year extension course of public lectures, which Locke called, "Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations: A Study in the
> Theory and Practice of Race."
> 
> In the 1916–1917 academic year, Locke took a sabbatical from Howard University to become Austin Teaching Fellow at
> Harvard, where he wrote his 263-page dissertation, The Problem of Classification in [the] Theory of Values, evidently an
> extension of an earlier essay he had written at Oxford. It was Harvard philosophy professor Josiah Royce who originally
> inspired Locke's interest in the philosophy of value. Of all the major American pragmatists to date, only Royce had
> published a book dealing with racism: Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (1908). In
> formulating his own theory of value, Locke synthesized the Austrian school of value theory (Franz Brentano, Alexius von
> Meinong, and later on, Rudolf Maria Holzapfel) with American pragmatism (George Santayana, William James, and
> Josiah Royce), along with the anthropology of Franz Boas and Kant's theories of aesthetic judgment.
> 
> When awarded his PhD in philosophy from Harvard in 1918, Locke emerged as perhaps the most exquisitely educated
> and erudite African American of his generation. The year 1918 was another milestone in Locke's life, when he found a
> "spiritual home" in the Bahá'í faith, a new world religion whose gospel was the unity of the human race. The recent
> discovery of Locke's signed "Bahá'í Historical Record" card (1935), in which Locke fixes the date of his conversion in
> 1918, restores a missing dimension of Locke's life. Locke was actively involved in the early "race amity" initiatives
> sponsored by the Bahá'ís. "Race amity" was the Bahá'í term for ideal race relations (interracial unity). The Bahá'í "race
> amity" era lasted from 1921 to 1936, followed by the "race unity" period of 1939–1947, with other socially significant
> experiments in interracial harmony (such as "Race Unity Day") continuing to the present day. Although he studiously
> avoided references to the faith in his professional life, Locke's four Bahá'í World essays served as his public testimony of
> faith. But it was not until an article, "Bahá'í Faith: Only Church in World That Does Not Discriminate," appeared in the
> October 1952 issue of Ebony magazine that Locke's Bahá'í identity was ever publicized in the popular media.
> 
> In 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was publicly launched. It was conceived a year earlier, when Locke was asked by the
> editor of the Survey Graphic to produce demographics on Harlem, located in northern Manhattan. That special issue,
> Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro, Locke subsequently recast as an anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation of
> Negro Life, published in December 1925. A landmark in black literature, it was an instant success. Locke contributed five
> essays: the foreword, "The New Negro," "Negro Youth Speaks," "The Negro Spirituals," and "The Legacy of Ancestral
> Arts." The New Negro featured five white contributors as well, making this artistic tour de force a genuinely interracial
> collaboration, with much support from white patronage (not without some strings attached, however). The last essay was
> contributed by the legendary W. E .B. Du Bois.
> 
> Locke hoped the Harlem Renaissance would provide "an emancipating vision to America" and would advance "a new
> democracy in American culture." He spoke of a "race pride," "race genius," and the "race-gift." This "race pride" was to be
> cultivated through developing a distinctive culture, a hybrid of African and African American elements. For Locke, art
> ought to contribute to the improvement of life—a pragmatist aesthetic principle sometimes called "meliorism." But the
> Harlem Renaissance was more of an aristocratic than democratic approach to culture. Criticized by some African
> American contemporaries, Locke himself came to regret the Harlem Renaissance's excesses of exhibitionism as well as
> its elitism. Its dazzling success was short-lived.
> 
> Oddly, Locke did not publish a formal philosophical essay until he was 50. "Values and Imperatives" appeared in 1935. In
> fact, this was Locke's only formal philosophical work between 1925 and 1939. Apart from his dissertation, Locke
> published only four major articles in a philosophy journal or anthology: "Values and Imperatives" (1935), "Pluralism and
> Intellectual Democracy" (1942), "Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace" (1944), and "Pluralism and Ideological
> 
> http://popculture.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1764354?terms=%22Christopher+Buck%22                                                                                  Page 2 of 4
> Pop Culture Universe: Icons, Idols, Ideas - Alain Locke                                                                                                   3/31/13 1:59 PM
> 
> Peace" (1947).
> 
> In 1943, Locke was on leave as Inter-American Exchange Professor to Haiti under the joint auspices of the American
> Committee for Inter-American Artistic and Intellectual Relations and the Haitian Ministry of Education. Toward the end of
> his stay there, Haitian president Élie Lescot personally decorated Locke with the National Order of Honor and Merit,
> grade of Commandeur. There Locke wrote Le rôle du Négre dans la culture Américaine, the nucleus of a grand project
> that Locke believed would be his magnum opus. That project, The Negro in American Culture, was completed in 1956 by
> Margaret Just Butcher, daughter of Howard colleague and close friend Ernest E. Just. It is not, however, considered to be
> an authentic work of Locke.
> 
> In 1944, Locke became a charter member of the Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, which published its
> annual proceedings. During the 1945–1946 academic year, Locke was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin,
> and in 1947, he was a visiting professor at the New School for Social Research in New York City. For the 1946–1947
> term, Locke was elected president of the American Association for Adult Education (AAAE), as the first black president of
> a predominantly white institution. His reputation as a leader in adult education had already been established by the nine-
> volume Bronze Booklet series that he had edited, two volumes of which he had personally authored as well.
> 
> He moved back to New York in July 1953. For practically his entire life, Locke had sought treatment for his rheumatic
> heart. Locke died of heart failure on June 9, 1954, in Mount Sinai Hospital.
> 
> As a cultural pluralist, Locke may have a renewed importance as a social philosopher, particularly as a philosopher of
> democracy. Because Locke was not a systematic philosopher, however, it is necessary to systematize his philosophy in
> order to bring its deep structure into bold relief. Democracy is a process of progressive equalizing, a matter of degree. For
> blacks, American democracy was largely a source of oppression, not liberation. America's racial crisis was not just
> national—it was a problem of world-historical proportions. As a cultural pluralist, Alain Locke sought to further
> Americanize Americanism and further democratize democracy. In so doing, he proposed a multidimensional model of
> democracy that ranged from concepts of "local democracy" all the way up to "world democracy." This multidimensional
> typology is developed further in the penultimate chapter of Christopher Buck's Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy (2005).
> We know that Alain Locke was important. If his philosophy of democracy has any merit, we know now that is Locke is
> important, especially if it is time to transform democratic values into democratic imperatives.
> 
> Christopher Buck
> 
> Further Reading
> 
> Buck, Christopher. “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism.” In Search for Values: Ethics in Bahaʼi Thought, ed. Seena Fazel
> and John Danesh. Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 2004.; Harris, Leonard, ed. The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem
> Renaissance and Beyond. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.; Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An
> Interpretation. New York: A. & C. Boni, 1925. Reprint, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1927; New York: Touchstone, 1999.;
> Locke, Alain. The Negro and His Music. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936. (Bronze Booklet
> No. 2).; Washington, Johnny. Alain Locke and Philosophy: A Quest for Cultural Pluralism. New York: Greenwood Press,
> 1986.
> 
> MLA Citation
> 
> Buck, Christopher. "Alain Locke." Pop Culture Universe: Icons, Idols, Ideas. ABC-CLIO, 2013. Web. 31 Mar. 2013.
> 
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> http://popculture.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1764354?terms=%22Christopher+Buck%22                                                                              Page 3 of 4
> Pop Culture Universe: Icons, Idols, Ideas - Alain Locke                                                                                3/31/13 1:59 PM
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> http://popculture.abc-clio.com/Search/Display/1764354?terms=%22Christopher+Buck%22                                                            Page 4 of 4
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> — *Alain Locke (Used by permission of the curator)*