Locke, Alain
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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, Locke, Alain, bahai-library.com.
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224           Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Present

her mother’s with Glapion (they had at least three children         Long, Carolyn Morrow. A New Orleans Voodou Priestess: The
and were even listed together in the 1870 census), did much             Legend and Reality of Marie Laveau. Gainesville: University
Press of Florida, 2006.
to advance her mother’s legend by producing a widely cited          Ward, Martha. Voodoo Queen: The Spirited Lives of Marie Laveau.
obituary when Laveau died in 1881. All seem to have lived               Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004.
in the vicinity of Laveau’s St. Ann Street home, and some
census records list Philomene and her children as living
with Laveau late in the 19th century.
Some accounts suggest that Laveau used her power to            Locke, Alain
help the community; select recent biographers depict her
alternately as an antislavery activist (even though both she        History remembers Alain Locke (1885–1954) as the first
and Glapion owned slaves), an antipoverty crusader, and a           African American Rhodes Scholar (1907) and, more fa-
nurse in yellow fever and cholera epidemics. On the other           mously, as the “dean” of the Harlem Renaissance (1919–
hand, some claim that she used her role mainly for personal         1934). Locke edited The New Negro (1925), acclaimed as
gain and that she kept a brothel on Lake Pontchartrain that         the “first national book” of African Americans. In this way,
catered to rich whites. Little direct evidence supports these       Locke’s role is analogous to that of Martin Luther King:
assertions. Laveau never became wealthy because of her              whereas King championed the civil rights of African Amer-
role among New Orleans voodooiennes; recent evidence                icans through nonviolent civil disobedience, Locke did so
suggests that she did not even own the house on St. Ann             through a process known as “civil rights by copyright.”
Street that she made famous.                                              In the Jim Crow era, when blacks had no effective po-
Laveau’s youngest daughter Philomene died June 11,             litical recourse, Locke used the arts as a strategy to win the
1897, and essentially ended her immediate family’s large-           respect of the white majority and to call to their attention
scale public promotion of Laveau’s legend—though some               the need to fully democratize democracy and American-
women who held (and more who claimed) the Laveau name               ize America by extending full equality to all minorities.
continued to be active in New Orleans. A number of inter-           Recent scholarship has brought Locke back to life, and his
views conducted by the Louisiana Writers Project contain            philosophy of democracy, in particular, lends him renewed
stories about Laveau, but two 20th-century figures shaped           importance.
the modern sense of Laveau most heavily. Zora Neale Hur-                  Harvard, Harlem, Haifa—place names that repre-
ston spoke in depth on Voodoo culture (and sometimes                sent Locke’s special involvement in philosophy, art, and
specifically on Laveau) in an extended 1931 article in the          religion—are keys to understanding his life and thought.
Journal of American Folklore and in her 1935 Mules and              Harvard prepared Locke for distinction as the first black
Men. Hurston’s depictions—shaped by both her training as            Rhodes Scholar in 1907 and, in 1918, awarded Locke his
an anthropologist and her deep love of story—are of argu-           PhD in philosophy, thus securing his position as chair of
able credibility even though they are fascinating and lively;       the Department of Philosophy at Howard University from
late 20th-century efforts to reconsider Hurston led natu-           1927 until his retirement in 1953. Harlem was the mecca
rally to additional examination of her work on Voodoo.              of the Harlem Renaissance, whereby Locke, as a spokes-
Much less trustworthy, much more sensationalistic, and              man for his race, revitalized racial solidarity and fostered
much more popular when it was released is Robert Tallant’s          the group consciousness among African Americans that
1946 Voodoo in New Orleans, which recounts a number of              proved a necessary precondition of the Civil Rights move-
(highly sexualized) stories of Laveau.                              ment. Haifa is the world center of the Bahá’í Faith, the re-
See also: Conjure; Hoodoo; Hurston, Zora Neale                      ligion to which Locke converted in 1918, the same year he
received his doctorate from Harvard. Until recently, this
Eric Scott Gardner      has been the least understood aspect of Locke’s life. Dur-
ing the Jim Crow era, at a time when black people saw little
Bibliography                                                        possibility of interracial harmony, this new religious move-
Fandrich, Ina Johanna. The Mysterious Voodoo Queen, Marie
Laveaux: A Study in Powerful Female Leadership in Nineteenth-   ment offered hope through its “race amity” efforts, which
Century New Orleans. New York: Routledge, 2005.                 Locke was instrumental in organizing. These three spheres
Locke, Alain           225

of activity—the academy, the art world, and spiritual soci-          Barton Perry were on the faculty. Elected to Phi Beta
ety—converge to create a composite picture of Locke as an            Kappa, in 1907 Locke won the Bowdoin Prize—Harvard’s
integrationist whose model was not assimilation, but rather          most prestigious academic award—for an essay he wrote,
“unity through diversity” (the title of one of his Bahá’í            “The Literary Heritage of Tennyson.” Remarkably, Locke
World essays).                                                       completed his four-year undergraduate program at Har-
Born in 1885, Locke was sent by his mother to one of            vard in only three years, graduating magna cum laude with
the Ethical Culture schools—a pioneer, experimental pro-             his bachelor’s degree in philosophy. Then, Locke made his-
gram of Froebelian pedagogy (after Friedrich Froebel [d.             tory and headlines in May 1907 as America’s first African
1852], who opened the first kindergarten). By the time he            American Rhodes Scholar. Although his Rhodes scholar-
enrolled in Central High School (1898–1902), Locke was al-           ship provided for study abroad at Oxford, it was no guaran-
ready an accomplished pianist and violinist. In 1902, Locke          tee of admission. Rejected by five Oxford colleges because
attended the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, graduating             of his race, Locke was finally admitted to Hertford College,
second in his class in 1904. That year, Locke entered Har-           where studied from 1907 to 1910.
vard College with honors at entrance, where he was among                  Jewish philosopher Horace Kallen describes a racial
only a precious few African American undergraduates.                 incident over a Thanksgiving Day dinner hosted at the Amer-
During the “golden age of philosophy at Harvard,”               ican Club at Oxford. Locke was not invited because South-
Locke studied at a time when Josiah Royce, William James,            ern men refused to dine with him. Kallen and Locke
George Herbert Palmer, Hugo Münsterberg, and Ralph                   became lifelong friends. In the course of their conversa-
tions, 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 devel-
oped the concept into a full-blown philosophical frame-
work for the melioration of African Americans. Distancing
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 de-
gree and spent the 1910–1911 academic year studying Kant
at the University of Berlin and touring Eastern Europe as
well. During his stay in Berlin, where he earned a B.Litt,
Locke became conversant with the “Austrian school” of an-
thropology, 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 Howard University itself, although
he did not have an opportunity to teach a course on phi-
Alain Locke was a writer, philosopher, educator, and patron of the
arts. He is best known for his writings on and about the Harlem      losophy until 1915. In 1915–1916, the Howard chapter of
Renaissance. (National Archives)                                     the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
226          Culture, Identity, and Community: From Slavery to the Present

People (NAACP) and the Social Science Club sponsored a           asked by the editor of the Survey Graphic to produce demo-
two-year extension course of public lectures, which Locke        graphics on Harlem, which is in the district of Manhattan
called, “Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations: A Study       in New York. That special issue, Harlem, Mecca of the New
in the Theory and Practice of Race.”                             Negro, Locke subsequently recast as an anthology, The New
In the 1916–1917 academic year, Locke took a sabbati-      Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life, published in Decem-
cal from Howard University to become Austin Teaching             ber 1925. A landmark in black literature, it was an instant
Fellow at Harvard, where he wrote his 263-page disserta-         success. Locke contributed five essays: the foreword, “The
tion, The Problem of Classification in [the] Theory of Values,   New Negro,” “Negro Youth Speaks,” “The Negro Spiritu-
evidently an extension of an earlier essay he had written        als,” and “The Legacy of Ancestral Arts.” The New Negro
at Oxford. It was Harvard professor of philosophy Josiah         featured five white contributors as well, making this artis-
Royce who originally inspired Locke’s interest in the phi-       tic tour de force a genuinely interracial collaboration, with
losophy of value. Of all the major American pragmatists to       much support from white patronage (not without some
date, only Royce had published a book dealing with rac-          strings attached, however). The last essay was contributed
ism: Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American           by W. E. B. Du Bois.
Problems (1908). In formulating his own theory of value,               Locke hoped the Harlem Renaissance would provide
Locke synthesized the Austrian school of value theory            “an emancipating vision to America” and would advance “a
(Franz Brentano, Alexius von Meinong, and later on, Ru-          new democracy in American culture.” He spoke of a “race
dolf Maria Holzapfel) with American pragmatism (George           pride,” “race genius,” and the “race-gift.” This “race pride”
Santayana, William James, and Josiah Royce), along with          was to be cultivated through developing a distinctive cul-
the anthropology of Franz Boas and Kant’s theories of aes-       ture, a hybrid of African and African American elements.
thetic judgment.                                                 For Locke, art ought to contribute to the improvement of
When awarded his PhD in philosophy from Harvard            life—a pragmatist aesthetic principle sometimes called
in 1918, Locke emerged as perhaps the most exquisitely           “meliorism.” But the Harlem Renaissance was more of an
educated and erudite African American of his generation.         aristocratic than democratic approach to culture. Criti-
The year 1918 was another milestone in Locke’s life, when        cized by some African American contemporaries, Locke
he found a “spiritual home” in the Bahá’í Faith, a new world     himself came to regret the Harlem Renaissance’s excesses
religion whose gospel was the unity of the human race. The       of exhibitionism as well as its elitism. Its dazzling success
recent discovery of Locke’s signed “Bahá’í Historical Rec-       was short-lived.
ord” card (1935), in which Locke fixes the date of his con-            Strange to say, Locke did not publish a formal philo-
version in 1918, restores a “missing dimension” of Locke’s       sophical essay until he was 50. “Values and Imperatives”
life. Locke was actively involved in the early “race amity”      appeared in 1935. In fact, this was Locke’s only formal
initiatives sponsored by the Bahá’ís. “Race amity” was the       philosophical work between 1925 and 1939. Apart from his
Bahá’í term for ideal race relations (interracial unity). The    dissertation, Locke published only four major articles in a
Bahá’í “race amity” era lasted from 1921 to 1936, followed       philosophy journal or anthology: “Values and Imperatives”
by the “race unity” period of 1939–1947, with other socially     (1935), “Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy” (1942),
significant experiments in interracial harmony (such as          “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace” (1944), and
“Race Unity Day”) down to the present. Although he stu-          “Pluralism and Ideological Peace” (1947).
diously avoided references to the faith in his professional            In 1943, Locke was on leave as Inter-American Ex-
life, Locke’s four Bahá’í World essays served as his public      change Professor to Haiti under the joint auspices of the
testimony of faith. But it was not until an article, “Bahá’í     American Committee for Inter-American Artistic and
Faith: Only Church in World That Does Not Discrimi-              Intellectual Relations and the Haitian Ministry of Educa-
nate,” appeared in the October 1952 issue of Ebony maga-         tion. Toward the end of his stay there, Haitian president
zine that Locke’s Bahá’í identity was ever publicized in the     Élie Lescot personally decorated Locke with the National
popular media.                                                   Order of Honor and Merit, grade of Commandeur. There
In 1925, the Harlem Renaissance was publicly               Locke wrote Le rôle du Négre dans la culture Américaine,
launched. It was conceived a year earlier, when Locke was        the nucleus of a grand project that Locke believed would
Locke, Alain              227

be his magnum opus. That project, The Negro in American          See also: Du Bois, W. E. B; Harlem Renaissance; New Negro
Culture, was completed in 1956 by Margaret Just Butcher,         Movement; Woodson, Carter Godwin
daughter of Howard colleague and close friend Ernest E.
Just. It is not, however, considered to be an authentic work                                                     Christopher Buck
of Locke.
In 1944, Locke became a charter member of the              Bibliography
Buck, Christopher. “Alain Locke.” In American Writers: A Collec-
Conference on Science, Philosophy and Religion, which                 tion of Literary Biographies, ed. Jay Parini. Farmington Hills,
published its annual proceedings. During the 1945–1946                MI: Scribner’s Reference/Gale Group, 2004.
academic year, Locke was a visiting professor at the Univer-     Buck, Christopher. “Alain Locke: Baha’i Philosopher.” Baha’i Stud-
ies Review 10 (2001/2002):7–49.
sity of Wisconsin, and in 1947, he was a visiting professor      Buck, Christopher. Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy. Los Ange-
at the New School for Social Research. For the 1946–1947              les: Kalimát Press, 2005.
term, Locke was elected president of the American Associ-        Buck, Christopher. “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism.” In Search
for Values: Ethics in Baha’i Thought, ed. Seena Fazel and John
ation for Adult Education (AAAE), as the first black presi-
Danesh. Los Angeles: Kalimát Press, 2004.
dent of a predominantly white institution. His reputation        Harris, Leonard, ed. The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renais-
as a leader in adult education had already been established           sance and Beyond. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.
Kallen, Horace Meyer. “Alain Locke and Cultural Pluralism.” Jour-
by the nine-volume Bronze Booklet series that he had ed-
nal of Philosophy 54, no. 5 (1957):119–27. Reprinted in Kal-
ited, two volumes of which he had personally authored as              len, What I Believe and Why—Maybe: Essays for the Modern
well.                                                                 World. New York: Horizon Press, 1971.
Locke, Alain. The Negro and His Music. Washington, D.C.: Associ-
He moved to New York in July 1953. For practically
ates in Negro Folk Education, 1936. (Bronze Booklet No. 2).
his entire life, Locke had sought treatment for his rheu-        Locke, Alain. The Negro Art: Past and Present. Washington, D.C.:
matic heart. Locke died of heart failure on June 9, 1954, in          Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936. (Bronze Booklet
Mount Sinai Hospital. On June 11 at Benta’s Chapel, Brook-            No. 3).
Locke, Alain. “Negro Spirituals.” Freedom: A Concert in Celebra-
lyn, Locke’s memorial was presided over by Dr. Channing               tion of the 75th Anniversary of the Thirteenth Amendment to
Tobias, with cremation following at Fresh Pond Crematory              the Constitution of the United States (1940). Compact disc.
in Little Village, Long Island.                                       New York: Bridge, 2002. Audio (1:14).
Locke, Alain, ed. The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: A.
As a cultural pluralist, Locke may have a renewed im-           & C. Boni, 1925. Reprint, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1927;
portance as a social philosopher, particularly as a philos-           New York: Touchstone, 1999.
opher of democracy. Because Locke was not a systematic           Locke, Alain. Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures of
the Theory and Practice of Race. Ed. Jeffery C. Stewart. Re-
philosopher, however, it is necessary to systematize his phi-         print. Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1992.
losophy in order to bring its deep structure into bold relief.   Locke, Alain. “The Unfinished Business of Democracy.” Survey
Democracy is a process of progressive equalizing.               Graphic 31 (November 1942):455–61.
Locke, Alain. “Values and Imperatives.” In American Philosophy,
It is a matter of degree. For blacks, American democracy              Today and Tomorrow, ed. Sidney Hook and Horace M. Kal-
was largely a source of oppression, not liberation. America’s         len. New York: Lee Furman, 1935. Reprint, Freeport, NY:
racial crisis was not just national—it was a problem of               Books for Libraries Press, 1968.
Locke, Alain. Le rôle du Négre dans la culture Américaine. Port-au-
world-historical proportions. As a cultural pluralist, Alain
Prince: Haiti Imprimerie de l’état, 1943.
Locke sought to further Americanize Americanism and              Locke, Alain, and Montgomery Davis, eds. Plays of Negro Life: A
further democratize democracy. In so doing, he proposed               Source-Book of Native American Drama. New York: Harper
and Row, 1927.
a multidimensional model of democracy that ranged from
Locke, Alain, Mordecai Johnson, Doxey Wilkerson, and Leon
concepts of “local democracy” all the way up to “world                Ransom. “Is There a Basis for Spiritual Unity in the World
democracy.” This multidimensional typology is developed               Today?” Town Meeting: Bulletin of America’s Town Meeting
on the Air 8, no. 5 (1942):3–12.
further in the penultimate chapter of Christopher Buck’s
Locke, Alain, and Bernhard J. Stern, eds. When Peoples Meet: A
Alain Locke: Faith and Philosophy (2005). We know that                Study of Race and Culture Contacts. New York: Committee
Alain Locke was important. If his philosophy of democracy             on Workshops, Progressive Education Association, 1942.
has any merit, we know now that is Locke is important,           Mason, Ernest. “Alain Locke’s Social Philosophy.” World Order 13,
no. 2 (Winter 1979):25–34.
especially if it is time to transform democratic values into     Washington, Johnny. Alain Locke and Philosophy: A Quest for Cul-
democratic imperatives.                                               tural Pluralism. New York: Greenwood Press, 1986.
-- Locke, Alain (Used by permission of the curator)