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"The New Negro" (Essay by Alain Locke) (1925)

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• 1 2022-05-19T09:47:37-04:00 norns 1 Glossary entry: Alain Locke, "The New Negro" (1925) plain 2022-05-19T09:47:37-04:00

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Alain locke on the “new negro” (1925).

Alain Locke, a leading figure of the Harlem Renaissance, was a distinguished academic—the first African American Rhodes Scholar, he obtained a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard—who taught at Howard University for 35 years. In 1925, he published an essay, “Enter the New Negro,” that described an African American population busy seeing “a new vision of opportunity.”

In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life of the American Negro and the three norns [goddesses of Norse mythology] who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem have a changeling in their laps. The Sociologist, The Philanthropist, the Race-leader are not unaware of the New Negro but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their formulae. For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary Negro life.

Could such a metamorphosis have taken place as suddenly as it has appeared to? The answer is no; not because the New Negro is not here, but because the Old Negro had long become more of a myth than a man. The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of dependence. So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be “kept down,” or “in his place,” or “helped up,” to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem. His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality. Through having had to appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends and benefactors he has subscribed to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed. Little true social or self-understanding has or could come from such a situation.

We have not been watching in the right direction; set North and South on a sectional axis, we have not noticed the East till the sun has us blinking.

… The mind of the Negro seems suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem we are achieving something like a spiritual emancipation. Until recently, lacking self-understanding, we have been almost as much of a problem to ourselves as we still are to others. But the decade that found us with a problem has left us with only a task. The multitude perhaps feels as yet only a strange relief and a new vague urge, but the thinking few know that in the reaction the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken.

With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure there may be of conditions from without. The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city, hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater certainty of knowing what it is all about. From this comes the promise and warrant of a new leadership.

… The day of “aunties,” “uncles” and “mammies” is equally gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on, and even the “Colonel” and “George” play barnstorm roles from which they escape with relief when the public spotlight is off. The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts.

First we must observe some of the changes which since the traditional lines of opinion were drawn have rendered these quite obsolete. A main change has been, of course, that shifting of the Negro population which has made the Negro problem no longer exclusively or even predominantly Southern. Why should our minds remain sectionalized, when the problem itself no longer is? Then the trend of migration has not only been toward the North and the Central Midwest, but city-ward and to the great centers of industry—the problems of adjustment are new, practical, local and not peculiarly racial. Rather they are an integral part of the large industrial and social problems of our present-day democracy. And finally, with the Negro rapidly in process of class differentiation, if it ever was warrantable to regard and treat the Negro en masse it is becoming with every day less possible, more unjust and more ridiculous.

… If in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the warrant of these things, celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a spiritual Coming of Age.

Source: Alain Locke, “Enter the New Negro,” Survey Graphic 6 (March 1925), 631–34. Available via National Humanities Center ( http://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/maai3/migrations/text8/lockenewnegro.pdf ).

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Alain LeRoy Locke

Alain LeRoy Locke is heralded as the “Father of the Harlem Renaissance” for his publication in 1925 of The New Negro— an anthology of poetry, essays, plays, music and portraiture by white and black artists. Locke is best known as a theorist, critic, and interpreter of African-American literature and art. He was also a creative and systematic philosopher who developed theories of value, pluralism and cultural relativism that informed and were reinforced by his work on aesthetics. Locke saw black aesthetics quite differently than some of the leading Negro intellectuals of his day; most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, with whom he disagreed about the appropriate social function of Negro artistic pursuits. Du Bois thought it was a role and responsibility of the Negro artist to offer a representation of the Negro and black experience which might help in the quest for social uplift. Locke criticized this as “propaganda” (AOP 12) and argued that the primary responsibility and function of the artist is to express his own individuality, and in doing that to communicate something of universal human appeal.

Locke was a distinguished scholar and educator and during his lifetime an important philosopher of race and culture. Principal among his contributions in these areas was the development of the notion of “ethnic race”, Locke's conception of race as primarily a matter of social and cultural, rather than biological, heredity. Locke was in contemporary parlance a racial revisionist, and held the somewhat controversial and paradoxical view that it was often in the interests of groups to think and act as members of a “race” even while they consciously worked for the destruction or alteration of pernicious racial categories. Racial designations were for Locke incomprehensible apart from an understanding of the specific cultural and historical contexts in which they grew up. A great deal of Locke's philosophical thinking and writing in the areas of pluralism, relativism and democracy are aimed at offering a more lucid understanding of cultural or racial differences and prospects for more functional methods of navigating contacts between different races and cultures.

Locke, like Du Bois, is often affiliated with the pragmatist philosophical tradition though somewhat surprisingly—surprising because Locke's actual views are closer substantively to pragmatist thinkers Like Dewey, James, and Royce than are Du Bois's—he does not receive as much attention in the writings of contemporary pragmatist philosophers as does Du Bois. Regardless, he is most strongly identified with the pragmatist tradition, but his “critical pragmatism”, and most specifically his value theory, is also influenced by Hugo Münsterberg, F.S.C. Schiller, Alexius Meinong, Frantz Brentano, and Christian von Erhenfels. From early on in his education at Harvard University, Locke had an affinity for the pragmatist tradition in philosophy. Locked developed his mature views on axiology well in advance of many leading pragmatists—e.g., Dewey and James. Among pragmatists, Locke has arguably the most developed and systematic philosophy of value, and offers many critical insights concerning democracy.

1. Chronology

2.1 value-feelings and value-modes, 2.2 a functional view of values, 2.3 transvaluation, 2.4 taxonomy of values, 3.1 three barriers to pluralism, 3.2 pluralism as a functional base, 4.1 the principle of cultural equivalence, 4.2 the principle of cultural reciprocity, 4.3 the principle of cultural convertibility, 5.1 the new negro, 5.2 the young negro, 5.3 the negro spirituals, 5.4 who, and what, is “negro”, 6.1 theoretical and scientific conceptions of race, 6.2 political conceptions of race, 6.3 social or cultural conceptions of race, 6.4 race creeds, race practices, racial difference and prejudice, abbreviations of principal works, primary literature, secondary literature, other internet resources, related entries, 2. axiology/value theory.

Locke's seminal essay in value theory, “Values and Imperatives” is as ambitious in its aims as it is pioneering. In it Locke states what he takes to be the central problem for axiology; details the reasons for the failure of American philosophy, particularly pragmatism, to make anything more than a minimal contribution to the development of the philosophical study of values; argues that values are primarily rooted in human attitudes; and provides an elaborate theoretical account of value formation and the functional role of values. A value, according to Locke, is “an emotionally mediated form of experience.” Locke issues the following warning:

[i]n dethroning our absolutes, we must take care not to exile our imperatives, for after all, we live by them. We must realize more fully that values create these imperatives as well as the more formally super-imposed absolutes, and that norms guide our behavior as well as guide our reasoning. (VI 34)

Values are an important and necessary part of human experience. Values are an essential part of human existence as all human persons are inherently valuing beings. He writes:

[t]he common man, in both his individual and group behavior, perpetuates the problem in a very practical way. He sets up personal and private and group norms as standards and principles, and rightly or wrongly hypothesizes them as universals for all conditions, all times and all men. (VI 35)

Valuations of multiple kinds pervade nearly every aspect of our lives; our aesthetic, moral and religious evaluations and judgments.

On Locke's estimation,

the gravest problem of contemporary philosophy is how to ground some normative principle or criterion of objective validity for values without resort to dogmatism and absolutism on the intellectual plane, and without falling into their corollaries, on the plane of social behavior and action, of intolerance and mass coercion. (VI 36)

This is the central and driving question of Locke's axiology and as such it points to some of the crucial aspects of his overall philosophical view, but his theory of value specifically, and importantly his social and political philosophy. On the axiological plane the question is reformulated as whether or not the fundamental value modes automatically or dispositionally set up their end values prior to evaluative judgment. If value modes automatically or dispositionally set up their own ends, then there would exist a more direct approach to the apprehension of values. Moreover, if a connection can be discovered between certain psychological states and particular valuations then that might yield at least one avenue for an objective assessment of values and valuations. On the social and political plane—the practical plane where persons actually form valuations and act on them in myriad ways—the question is formulated in terms of how best to avoid a theory of value that is static, arbitrary and overly formulaic in ways that impede the theory's ability to provide an adequate understanding of value phenomena. To do this, a functional analysis of value norms is required, and normative principles must be the result of the immediate context of valuation. This we will see in the following sections is the major thrust of Locke's value pluralism and relativism.

Locke begins by considering what he takes to be the most basic feature of values; their emotional character. He writes

the value-mode establishes for itself, directly through feeling, a qualitative category which, as discriminated by its appropriate feeling-quality, constitutes an emotionally mediated form of experience. (VI 38)

There is a particular feeling or feeling-quality associated with each value-mode. In fact, Locke contends that value-modes differ in virtue of differences in feeling-qualities. The value-mode, or perhaps better, the mode of valuing, refers to the qualitative character of a particular way of experiencing as mediated by a given emotion or attitude which Locke terms the feeling-quality. This has several important implications for the general theory of value: predicating a value to a subject depends on the feeling-quality associated with it; values are immediately recognized through an apprehension of their emotional quality; value-predicates are determined by the affective and volitional influence of the feeling-quality; and the imperatives of a given value are given immediately once the primary feeling-quality has been established.

Locke claims that there is a necessary connection between the feeling-quality and the value-mode with the former determining the later. The value-mode is normally established as the value is being apprehended. If this were not the case, the value-mode would be indeterminate even while its immediate quality is being felt. The basic categories of value are not rational: one cannot simply reason one's way to an understanding of them. In developing and articulating his axiology, Locke looks for the categories of value in the actual valuations of human beings. Rather than predetermining the categories of valuation and attempting to cram experiences of values into them, his theory begins with our concrete valuations and determines which if any features they have in common. It is then on the basis of the commonalities observed to obtain between particular experiences of values that they are classed together as members of the same class. Locke writes,

[f]lesh and blood values may not be as universal or objective as logical truth or schematized judgments, but they are not thereby deprived of some relative objectivity and universality of their own. The basic qualities of values…pertain to psychological categories. They are not grounded in types of realms of value, but are rooted in modes or kinds of valuing. (VI 38)

Locke is aware that it is not easy to demonstrate that the fundamental identity and unity of a value-mode depends on a feeling-quality. It may be that the position thus far articulated is merely hypothetical and speculative and requires an experimental methodology to prove it. Locke notes that the main objections to the position have been addresses by developments in the Gestalt psychology insofar as it has established an empirical basis for a comprehensive perceptual scheme functioning in recognition, comparison and choice. Further circumstantial evidence is offered for the position by the phenomenon of transvaluation (see section 2.3 below).

On Locke's view, though the value-mode is determined immediately by the affective character of the value, this is not the final determination of the value. Even after the value-mode has been ascertained, the legitimacy of the value may still be in question, its place in the overall value scheme may be unclear, and particular aspects of the context of valuation may be uncertain. This leads Locke to conclude that the primary normative character of value norms is best sought in their functional role as stereotypes of feeling attitudes and as habitual impulses toward certain choices of actions. This would make them culturally specific, as well as temporally and geographically contingent as values can only be habituated and function with any degree of reliability in specific contexts. Moreover, as in the case of apprehending value-modes, the functionality of a given value is to be discovered experientially; rather than, postulated a priori . Values, then, would only become absolutes—should they become absolute at all—because reason and judgment secondarily re-enforce them as such. In their immediate character and quality values are affective, but they are further mediated by reason and judgment. Value predication depends on reason and judgment; but the predicates themselves are determined by the modal quality of the value. So, the judgment that an object is beautiful or ugly involves reason and judgment, but that the object is experienced as aesthetic depends on its affective apprehension; its being experienced aesthetically.

Commenting on his own preference for a functional theory of value Locke writes:

I confess at the outset to a preference for a functional theory of value, but my brief for a functional analysis of value norms is not completely parti pris , but is made rather because a functional approach, even should it lead to a non-functionalist theory of value, of necessity treats the value varieties in terms of their interrelationships, guaranteeing a comparative approach and a more realistic type of value analysis. (FVVU 81)

Moreover, a functional account of value has the theoretical advantages of being able to account for parallels between values, value interchangeability, and transvaluation. It is perhaps in taking a functional view of values and their associated imperatives where Locke's theory of value is most pragmatic. A functional view of values emphasizes the fact that values are an essential feature of our lived-experiences. At its most basic level value functionality aims to provide a way of understanding how particular values operate as coordinating mechanisms for individual and collective action. Some values have a specific social role; a societal aim or goal that they have been modified and adapted over time to help achieve or maintain. Such values are often codified in the customs and traditions of a culture and can sometimes remain ritualized long after their functional role is obsolete. The importance and usefulness of a functional view of values in Locke's social and political philosophy is further explored in section 3.2 below.

Transvaluation is a central tenet of Locke's axiology. He writes:

[t]he further we investigate, the more we discover that there is no fixity of content to values, and the more we are bound, then, to infer that their identity as groups must rest on other elements. (VI 40)

The feeling-quality of a given value necessarily establishes the mode of valuation, i.e., the type of value in question (for example, aesthetic, religious, moral etc.) as well as the appropriate value-predicates. However, there is no necessary connection between a given object that serves as the content of a value and any particular emotional response to that object. One and the same object may affect the same person differently at different times, or may at the same time elicit from multiple people different emotional reactions. Transvaluation, then is most simply valuing something in a different way, which requires, at first, having an atypical emotional association with the object of value. There are multifarious potential causes of such transformations in one's affective responses to an object, and those causes can be immediate or unfold over time. “The changed feeling-attitude creates a new value” says Locke “and the type-form of the attitude brings with it its appropriate value category. These modes co-assert their own relevant norms; each sets up a categorical imperative of its own” (VI 41).

Locke treats transvaluation as inevitable; values are dependent upon social and cultural forces that are always in a state of flux and subject to myriad transformative influences at any given time, hence static values are implausible. Value transformation can take place on the individual level or on the level of widespread social or cultural values. Locke's hope is that this analysis will bring us closer to a practical understanding of value and the mechanism of valuation, which he hopes will bring us closer to understanding the grounds for both agreements among values and value conflict.

Locke offers a schematization of four traditional values—religious, moral, logical and aesthetic—to demonstrate how his theory classifies values into types according to their characteristic feeling-quality (see the table below) (VI 43). The schema also charts the value-predicates and the positive and negative poles associated with each value-type (type of value). Finally, the schema further divides each value according to its directionality; that is, whether the value is primarily introverted, functioning inwardly on the individual subject, or is extroverted, functioning externally in a social context.

Locke contends that his position has certain advantages over more logical theories of value. In particular, it is better able to explain certain value phenomena that are troubling for the latter type of theories. Phenomena such as transvaluation, value merging, and value conflict are able to be explained in terms of the basic doctrine that the mode of valuation is determined by the character of a subject's affective response in a value context. Locke claims that logical theories of value have historically had difficulty accounting for phenomena such as the aesthetic appraisal of a logical or mathematical proof; moral commitment to aesthetic production; or aesthetic appreciation of religious practice. In particular, logical theories have struggled to make sense of assigning predicates from one value-type to objects that are traditionally the content of a different value-type as when a proof in logic is deemed beautiful or ugly. Traditional theories treat such value predication as merely metaphorical or analogical.

Locke explains value conflict in terms of a more fundamental psychological incompatibility. Not only does the value-feeling determine the qualitative character of a given value, it also establishes broader categories of value by grouping values according to their common affective quality. As he puts it “[c]hange the attitude, and, irrespective of content, you change the value-type; the appropriate new predicates automatically follow” (VI 44).

Value attitudes can be psychologically incompatible, and where they are Locke contends that a hierarchical ranking of values will not resolve the incompatibility. In fact, he suggests that people resolve the incommensurability of their various value attitudes by shifting from one mode of valuation to another. This is why a functional account of values that determines the various value-modes on the basis of underlying psychological states is desirable. Such a theory is better able to achieve a reflective equilibrium with our actual value practices. All values have associated with them a set of imperatives. Locke does not have a great deal to say about how imperatives are formed. Presumably, imperatives are determined, at least in part, by the qualitative character of the value in question. People begin by forming a value-attitude based on one's initial affective response to the object of valuation. As a mediating form of experience a value supplies motivational drives toward acting and refraining from acting in certain ways. Values provide normative direction not only for cognition and psychological drives, but also for action. Imperatives are partially in place as soon as the affective quality of the value is apprehended.

3. Pluralism

Locke's philosophical worldview is pervaded by a concern for diversity. Locke takes pluralism in all its form—religious, cultural, value etc.—as a basic feature of the world. His primary focus then becomes one of understanding the multiplicity of ways in which peoples meet, and providing some normative guidance concerning how best to act when they do. Values organize, coordinate, mediate and direct experience. In so doing, they serve both a valuable epistemic as well as existential function. Values direct and guide our activity, but more than that they color the nature of our encounters with other persons, and frequently function as a source of conflict between individual persons and groups of human beings. The common mistake among valuers that leads to a “totalizing” of values as “absolutes” or “ultimates” is to forget that any given value encompasses only an aspect of reality and ought not to be treated as transcendent or reducible to that reality. This is a fundamental insight of Locke's philosophy of value as it is applied to social theory. And Locke believes that if he is correct in asserting that “[a]s derivative aspects of the same basic reality, value orders cannot reasonably become competitive and rival realities” that he will have provided the necessary theoretical foundation for a more latitudinarian exchange between diverse human collectives (VI 47). Locke's presentation of his pluralist position proceeds as a response to three obstacles or barriers to pluralism: absolutism, (counter) uniformitarianism, and arbitrary dogmatism. If individual valuers or value groups are able to avoid these three pitfalls, then either may possibly develop a pluralistic value orientation.

The first barrier to pluralism is absolutism. Values and their associated imperatives are absolute when they are thought to apply to all human beings, at all times irrespective of social or historical conditions. This is because absolutist conceptions of values are derived from, and ultimately justified by something other than the lived-experiences of human beings, be it God, or human rationality. Whereas pluralism is intended to accommodate a wide array of contending values, absolutism countenances one, and only one set of values universally applicable to all human beings. Locke claims that “absolutism has come forward again in new and formidable guise,” and he warns us to be on guard for “social and political forms of it, with their associated intellectual tyrannies of authoritarian dogmatism and uniformitarian universality” (PID 53). These newer forms of absolutism, Locke claimed, are the products of older ones. When values are held to be absolute there often results a tendency to discount the legitimacy of rival values. Pluralism avoids conceiving of values in absolutist terms. Setting various value conceptions on equal footing is the aim of Locke's pluralism.

Uniformitarianism, the second obstacle to pluralism, is the view that values ought to be uniform within a given community or group. The experiences of members of a given group are filtered through the same forms of mediation to produce value uniformity. Values are ascribed a single form for all members of a group; rather than allowing for a multiplicity of mediated experiences. Value uniformity can be achieved violently, coercively or peacefully, but in all instances it is an attempt to replace diversity with homogeneity. Locke suspects that it is the desire to defend one's own culture and to create consensus among competing value claims that is at the root of the quest for uniformity. Unfortunately, that motivation can easily lapse into an attempt to force one's own value system onto others without justification. Uniformitarianism is a refusal to accommodate the myriad value forms that are essential to pluralism.

Finally, Locke warns us to avoid the pitfalls of arbitrariness and dogmatism. Value commitments are arbitrary when one forms them—thereby rejecting viable alternatives—in the absence of any justification for choosing them over other available options. One holds her values dogmatically when she takes them to be indisputable and is closed-off to the possibility of taking a critical view of her value commitments that could possibly result in her altering or rejecting them.

Locke describes pluralism as a functional base, one that can function as a foundation from which to achieve a rapprochement of conflicting values. Pluralism, as Locke envisions it, has the potential to create agreement among competing and conflicting values, through the recognition of common features of various values and value systems. A closer look at Locke's analysis of values; in particular, the three concepts of basic human values, basic equivalence, and functional constancy will illuminate what it means for pluralism to function in this way.

First, is the concept of basic human values, by which Locke means those values that are common to many, or all value systems; values such as belief in god, commitment to one's cultural community, respect for human life, etc. which though they may have multifarious manifestations, are in a more general way common to most, if not all groups. Of course, value communities differ, and no two value communities will be exactly alike, but there does exist substantial overlap of a subset of values across values communities. Basic human values then, are basic and human in virtue of their common expression in a plurality of value contexts and their pertaining to the lives of human beings, and not as a matter of their universal applicability across all of humanity.

The next two concepts—basic equivalence and functional constancy—are perhaps best understood as two sides of a distinction between formal and functional equivalence. Basic equivalence refers to a similarity of form and functional constancy refers to a similarity in function. Basic equivalence is a formal resemblance owing to a corresponding value-mode. It is a similarity in the type of value, or better, being particular values of the same type. This notion rests on drawing a distinction between the object of valuation and the way the object is valued. The object may differ where the value mode does not. As a consequence a single object can be valued multiple ways, and many different objects can be valued in the same way. Take for example the institution of marriage as the object of valuation. Marriage is valuable in least two senses, first, it may be valued as the religious union of a man and a woman, and secondly, the marriage ceremony itself could be valued as a ritualized aesthetic experience. In both cases one and the same phenomenon is the content of two different value modes. In the first instance, marriage is valued religiously; the characteristic quality of the value, its form, is spiritual. In the second instance, marriage could be valued because of the elegant décor, grandiose ceremony, and beautiful arrangements that characterize the event. The example goes to illustrate the fact that different ways of valuing can be applied to the same object by the same person or by different people. Valuation works the other way as well, that is, different objects can be valued the same way. As for example, a marriage, a baptism, or a christening can all be valued religiously or aesthetically. One can recognize a similarity in the form of competing values even though their objects may differ, or a difference in form where the object stays the same. Basic equivalence then speaks to an identity of form not of content. It is a conceptual tool that enables persons to recognize that their respective value expressions are species of the same genus. Locke speaks of the objective comparison of basic human values which leads one to think that his claim is that different groups may regard different sets of values as basic to human beings though these may not be identical, but rather, formally equivalent values.

The other side of the formal/functional equivalence distinction is the notion of functional constancy. By functional constancy is meant the ability of basic equivalent values to operate as stable features of value processes and activity within various value communities. Locke envisions that what will be found beneath potentially vast differences in content, and beyond a similarity of form, is a comparable utility of various values across contexts. Every value has an attendant function; a role that it plays within a given value community. Values that differ either in form or in content may still be equivalent as regards their function. These functional constants are discovered through comparison of fundamental values found across value groups.

Thus functional equivalence provides a constancy of two sorts: first, the function is constant within a given value community insofar as it plays the same role for different members of the same value group, and second, the function can be a common feature across value groups. Think here again of the example of marriage. Admittedly, there is a wide variety of particular manifestations of such a value, and there can be differences in the form as well as the content of such values. But it is still the case that such variation results in a similar function within a value community. Children are reared, networks of support are maintained, property is held in common and bequeathed to successive generations etc. and these social roles are served by a myriad of expressions of familial ties in the community. Moreover, family values function in this way across cultures. To be sure, there may not be an exact equivalence of function across value communities, or even within them for that matter, but to a large extent this equivalence of function is there to be observed. It may be the case that there exist social functions for a given value in one context that are absent in another: if so, there is no equivalence to be made. All values have a function, but as there is no necessary connection between a given value and a particular function, it does not follow from this that every value function can be found in every culture.

4. Relativism

Relativism, for Locke, begins as a systematic approach to the recognition of the sorts of value equivalence discussed earlier, and is then able to militate against the pernicious forms of valuing that often turn cultural exchanges into intractable problems. The view is termed relativist because it makes a comprehensive and accurate understanding of the values of a given culture dependent—at least in part—on that culture being viewed in relation to other cultures. Moreover, Locke claims that cultural relativism can serve as “a scientifically impartial interpreter of human values, and sometimes even as a referee and mediator among conflicting values” (CRIP 70).

Relativism, on Locke's view, is not a negative skeptical position that is predicated upon the belief that one is unable to make a satisfactory determination about the relative worth of value communities. Instead, it is a positive and affirmative position concerning the relative worth of distinct value traditions and cultures. Locke formulates his relativism in terms of the three principles of cultural equivalence, cultural reciprocity, and cultural convertibility. He claims that the three principles are derivable from this larger relativist outlook and will enable “a more objective and scientific understanding of human cultures and…more reasonable control of their interrelationships” (CRIP 73).

The first of the three principles is:

The principle of cultural equivalence , under which we would more wisely press the search for functional similarity in our analyses and comparisons of human cultures; thus offsetting our traditional and excessive emphasis upon cultural differences. Such functional equivalences, which we might term ‘culture-cognates’ or ‘culture-correlates,’ discovered underneath deceptive but superficial institutional divergence, would provide objective but soundly neutral common denominators for intercultural understanding and cooperation. (CRIP 73)

The effect of the first principle is to lay bare the fact that the seemingly vast differences between cultures is more a matter of our selective preferences; that is, the habits of mind we have cultivated for being more keenly attuned to difference rather than similarity. The first stage of relativism, then, is to reorient our focus in favor of the similarity to be found across value communities. Cultural cognates and correlates are objective because they are discovered to be real features of multiple value systems. They are in an important sense “there” to be discovered both by internal and external observers of the value group. The reason that these value cognates count as neutral is that they do not, in virtue of their being objective, privilege any value-type or value-content over any other. At this stage they are taken as mere facts of the matter about the values that exist within communities.

The second principle of cultural relativism is:

The principle of cultural reciprocity, which, by a general recognition of the reciprocal character of all contacts between cultures and of the fact that all modern cultures are highly composite ones, would invalidate the lump estimating of cultures in terms of generalized, en bloc assumptions of superiority and inferiority, substituting scientific, point-by-point comparisons with their correspondingly limited, specific, and objectively verifiable superiorities or inferiorities. (CRIP 73)

This aspect of Locke's relativism requires a “beneficent neutrality between divergent positions” (CRIP 70–71). It begins by fostering a disposition toward cultural toleration in the hope that such toleration will lead to mutual respect, which would in turn serve as a foundation upon which to base reciprocal exchanges between cultures. In the most likely case, these initial exchanges will be centered around specific values that form narrowly defined communities of agreement. In the end, if cultural relativism is able to foster reciprocity between value communities to a sufficient degree, then cultural relativism may well establish a foundation of mutual understanding and appreciation to support active cooperation between value groups. The principle of cultural reciprocity restrains the inferences that we are able to make as a result of the principal of cultural equivalence in at least two ways: first, its emphasis on point-by-point comparisons limits the scope of the value cognates that are discovered, and second, it issues an injunction against identifying or connecting specific values with specific cultures or value communities. Relativism is to borrow from an idealized model of scientific practice; a point of view that does not prejudge the results of a given observation before it is carried out. Moreover, it points out that the discovery of cognates and correlates is not likely to be wholesale, but instead, specific and contextualized.

Finally, we have the principle of cultural convertibility:

The principle of limited cultural convertibility, that, since culture elements, though widely interchangeable, are so separable, the institutional forms from their values and the values from their institutional forms, the organic selectivity and assimilative capacity of a borrowing culture becomes a limiting criterion for cultural exchange. Conversely, pressure acculturation and the mass transplanting of culture, the stock procedure of groups with traditions of culture ‘superiority’ and dominance, are counterindicated as against both the interests of cultural efficiency and the natural trends of culture selectivity. (CRIP 73)

All value-types are independent of any given value-content; any given value-type can be joined with any value-content. This fact of valuation is what grounds cross-cultural transformation. The extent to which cultures are modified by their interactions with other cultures, is in part a function of how stringently the cultures in question associate their own value-forms with specific value-content. At a higher level, Locke indicates that associations might even be made between a value and its institutional form, by which he seems to mean the manner in which the value is organized into the social structure of a value community. If specific values are correlated with particular institutional forms, a necessary connection may be assumed to exist between them where it does not.

5. Aesthetics

Locke is perhaps best known for his work in aesthetics, in particular, his role as both an intellectual purveyor of Negro art and literary critic. Locke managed to position himself at the forefront of one of the most significant and important artistic rebirths in American history. His seminal work, The New Negro , was ground-breaking in its presentation of Negro art as thoroughly self-expressive of the individual artist, and not as merely representative of aesthetic, cultural and social possibilities. Locke's publication of The New Negro was in many ways in direct defiance and contradiction of the black intellectual elite of his day, most notably W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as being the advance guard of the aesthetic sentiments of the average Negro of his day. There is evidence of his philosophical views, especially in the areas of axiology, culture, race and ethnicity throughout his writings on aesthetics. Major themes in Locke's aesthetics include: universal human appeal and the relationship of universal and particular; the transition from folk art to high art; the centrality of individual expressivity; and cross-cultural communicability through the aesthetic.

Prior to the period of individual expression characteristic of the Harlem Renaissance, Negro art in Locke's estimation had as its primary function representation of a Negro type that was socially acceptable and laudably ideal. The aim of much Negro art was to advance presentations of the Negro as civilized, cultured, and capable of making a worthwhile contribution to American society, or to portray blacks in America as a progressive people, needing only to be liberated from slavery or Jim Crow segregation to realize their true potential. In discharging this representative function, Negro art was consumed with the promulgation of stereotypes and counter-stereotypes. It had constantly to react against negative portrayals and stifling social pressures; to attempt to make out of Negro life and experience something worthy of respect, a fitting object of honor and emulation. As Locke put it,

for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a human being—a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be ‘kept down,’ or ‘in his place,’ or ‘helped up,’ to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a social burden. (NN 3–4)

The primary consequence of this social environment on black aesthetics in the United States according to Locke was its Ghettoization. In dealing with this specialized subject matter of social uplift Negro aesthetics segregates itself from the broader American social context and fails to achieve universal human appeal. “The thinking Negro,” by whom Locke seems to have Du Bois primarily in mind, “has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem” (NN 3–4).

Art at its best on Locke's view is not propaganda, and though there may be some initial phase in which art is forced to perform such a function that is not the ultimate goal. “Until recently,” Locke comments “lacking self-understanding, we have been almost as much of a problem to ourselves as we still are to others.” Yet as “the thinking few know” as that self-understanding is achieved and worked into artistic expression the result is “that in the reaction the vital inner grip of prejudice has been broken” (NN 4). This is the first significant change in the social environment that produces the “New Negro”; namely, the attitude of young Negro artist to racial segregation.

Another change in American society that had a profound impact on the aesthetic advancement of African-Americans at the time of Locke's publication of The New Negro was the Great Migration. One major consequence of “that shifting of the Negro population” was that it “made the Negro problem no longer exclusively or even predominantly Southern” (NN 5). Locke did not however regard the cause of the great migration as chiefly racial; that is, escape from the segregation of the South was not the major motivation behind the mass African-American exodus from the South to the North and Mid-West. Instead,

The tide of Negro migration, northward and city-ward, is not to be fully explained as a blind flood started by the demands of war industry coupled with the shutting off of foreign migration, or by the pressure of poor crops coupled with increased social terrorism in certain sections of the South and Southwest…The wash and rush of this human tide on the beach line of the northern city centers is to be explained primarily in terms of a new vision of opportunity, of social and economic freedom, of a spirit to seize, even in the face of an extortionate and heavy toll, a chance for the improvement of conditions. (NN 6)

The Great Migration brought with it a need for a plurality of social adjustments as the droves of African-Americans flooded into Northern cities. Principal among this was the realization that the Negro was

rapidly in process of class differentiation, [and] if it ever was warrantable to regard and treat the Negro en masse it is becoming with every day less possible, more unjust and more ridiculous. (NN 5–6)

Negro life in America according to Locke is comprised of many diverse elements. The plurality of groups that congregated in places like Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia and Harlem all with varying motivations and group specific aims constituted some of the largest concentrations of diverse segments of the Negro population. These circumstances coupled with the oppressive effects of prejudice forced myriad sectors of the African-American population to discover and interact with one another. Prior to that Locke claims that

it must be admitted that the American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between them has been that of a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common. (NN 6–7)

Locke explains that in part the artistic endeavors of the Negro have failed to achieve universal resonance because the Negro himself has been so poorly understood. He readily admits that “[i]t does not follow that if the Negro were better known, he would be better liked or better treated[,]” and goes on to note that despite this fact “mutual understanding is basic for any subsequent cooperation and adjustment” predicated upon, or in pursuit of an understanding of the universality of Negro experiences as expressed in art. Moreover,

effort towards this will at least have the effect of remedying in large part what has been the most unsatisfactory feature of our present stage of race relations in America, namely the fact that the more intelligent and representative elements of the two race groups have at so many points got quite out of vital touch with one another (NN 8–9)

And in addressing that crucial fact, such efforts may go a long way towards facilitating an appreciation of Negro art as expressive both of the peculiar racial, ethnic, and cultural experiences of African-Americans, and as expressive of ubiquitous aspects of human experience. It is a mere “fiction…that the life of the races is separate,” and a dangerously divisive one at that, “[t]he fact is that they have touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels” (NN 9). Hence, it is not simply a failure of contact, but a failure of the right sort of contact that accounts for the under appreciation of the aesthetic life of black peoples.

For his part, Locke argues, the “New Negro” in recognizing “the necessity for fuller, truer self-expression,…[and] the realization of the unwisdom of allowing discrimination to segregate him mentally, and a counter attitude to cramp and fetter his own living” has played a vital role in demolishing “the ‘spite-wall’ that the intellectuals built over the ‘color-line[.]’” (NN, 9–10). Life for the Negro in the early 1920's was steadily progressing toward the ideals of American democracy. The Negro of the time was also characterized by a new vein; one around which there was a growing consensus primarily of feeling and attitude; rather than opinion or program. As Locke has it:

Up to the present one may adequately describe the Negro's ‘inner objectives’ as an attempt to repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social perspective. Their realization has acquired a new mentality for the American Negro. And as it matures we begin to see its effects; at first, negative, iconoclastic, and then positive and constructive. In this new group psychology we note the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and ‘touchy’ nerves, the repudiation of the double standard of judgment with its special philanthropic allowances and in the sturdier desire for objective and scientific appraisal; and finally the rise from social disillusionment to race pride, from the sense of social debt to the responsibilities of social contribution, and offsetting the necessary working commonsense acceptance of restricted conditions, the belief in ultimate esteem and recognition. Therefore, the Negro today wishes to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not (NN 11).

Locke ends his exposition of what is characteristic of the New Negro with the observation that the reception of black aesthetic products is an experiment in democracy. As African-American art resists ghettoization and increasingly makes its presence felt in the American artistic mainstream it seeks to establish itself as a subset of American art; rather than, the totality of Negro American art. And since, according to Locke,

[d]emocracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent that any of its channels are closed…the choice is not between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other. (NN 12)

The North American Negro artist in being ‘new’ is a living instantiation of the fact that no culture, people, race, or society is a static one. Such entities are always in process of transformation, and always a composite of myriad cultural, ethnic, racial, and social influences. The emergence of the new is at once a presentation of what has been and an indication of what the future may hold. This is a deeply pragmatic current running through Locke's aesthetic philosophy. Locke is later critical of the Harlem Renaissance because it failed to sustain a cyclical process of rebirth. In the years following the height of the Harlem Renaissance he remarked later that that a new Negro must be born every decade or two.

Locke explains that the aesthetic renaissance that took place in Harlem and elsewhere was primarily a movement of young artists. The youth, Locke claims, speak in distinctive overtones, and “out of a unique experience and with particular representativeness” (NN 47). The experiences of young American Negroes is uniquely representative because

[a]ll classes of people under social pressure are permeated with a common experience; they are emotionally welded as others cannot be. With them, even ordinary living has epic depth and lyric intensity, and this, their material handicap, is their spiritual advantage. (NN 47)

Here we find an interesting problem in Lockean exegesis: How is it that the aesthetic contribution is at once characterized by a disavowal of representativeness, while at the same time being uniquely representative? Locke goes on to note that

[r]acial expression as a conscious motive, it is true, is fading out of our latest art, but just as surely the age of truer, finer group expression is coming in—for race expression does not need to be deliberate to be vital. Indeed, at its best it never is. (NN 47)

Locke's resolution of the seeming paradox comes by way of recognizing that “[o]ur poets have now stopped speaking for the Negro[;]” the sort of representativeness characteristic of past aesthetic pursuits and instead now “speak as Negroes” (NN 48). The main difference being that “[w]here formally they spoke to others and tried to interpret,” the experiences of African-Americans for white or other nonblack audiences “they now speak to their own and try to express.” “They have” he notes “stopped posing, being nearer the attainment of poise” (NN 48). With this change in the mind of the Negro artist the aim of art is no longer the presentation of an ideal type, or an effective counter-stereotype; instead, it is the expression of the universal truth contained in the particularity of Negro experiences.

This is a major theme that runs throughout all of Locke's aesthetic philosophy; the idea that within a particular manifestation of human experience can be found something of universal human significance. Indeed, this is the quintessential marker of “high art” or “classical art”. In the case of the young Negro artist Locke claims “[r]ace for them is but an idiom of experience, a sort of added enriching adventure and discipline, giving subtler overtones to life, making it more beautiful and interesting, even if more poignantly so. When viewed from this more objective attitude and “so experienced, it affords a deepening rather than narrowing of social vision” (NN 48).

The youth “constitute a new generation, not because of years only, but because of the new aesthetic and a new philosophy of life” (NN 49). Locke explicates this new aesthetic philosophy by way of comparison to “[t]he elder generation of Negro writers” who were resigned to expressing themselves in “cautious moralism and guarded idealizations” (NN 49). This generation of artists, with

the repercussions of prejudice…heavy on its heart…felt art must fight social battles and compensate social wrongs; “Be representative”: put the better foot foremost, was the underlying mood. (NN 50)

This hampered both the individual expressivity of the older generation of artists as well as their ability to communicate cross culturally the truth of black experiences. The artist was not free to speak his heart or mind, but had to remain cognizant of the way he presented the Negro yet again. With the youth of the Harlem Renaissance there came a “newer motive,” for the younger generation of American Negro artists the aim “in being racial is to be so purely for the sake of art.” (NN 51) The new artist does not take folksy racial types to be emblematic of anything but the individual artist. Locke sees this manifested in the artist's ability to make of “the racial substance something technically distinctive,” a method of giving expression to a specific type of experience that allows for full expression of that experience across cultural, racial, or ethnic boundaries. In this way techniques that exist as “an idiom of style may become a contribution to general resources of art”; (NN 51) available in the end, not only to those who created, cultivated and refined them, but to any artist who wished to deal with that particular idiom.

In Locke's estimation, the spirituals are the quintessential Negro contribution to American art and culture; manifesting as they do so much, not only about the North American Negro and his aesthetic and cultural heritage and evolution, but also in standing as a paragon of processes of aesthetic transition and development.

The spirituals are really the most characteristic product of the race genius as yet in America. But the very elements which make them uniquely expressive of the Negro make them at the same time deeply representative of the soil that produced them. Thus, as unique spiritual products of American life, they become nationally as well as racially characteristic. It may not be readily conceded now that the song of the Negro is America's folksong; but if the spirituals are what we think them to be, a classical folk expression, then this is their ultimate destiny. Already they give evidence of this classic quality. Through their immediate and compelling universality of appeal, through their untarnishable beauty, they seem assured of the immortality of those great folk expressions that survive not so much through being typical of a group or representative of a period as by virtue of being fundamentally and everlastingly human. (NN 199)

The best evidence, Locke seems to think, in support of the spirituals' claim to universality is that they have withstood the test of time. As an art form they have outlived not only the generations that produced them but the peculiar social environment that enlivened them. Beyond this the spirituals have survived

the contempt of the slave owners, the conventionalizations of formal religion, the repressions of Puritanism, the corruptions of sentimental balladry, and the neglect and disdain of second-generation respectability. (NN 199)

In short, they have successfully made the transition from folk art to formal music.

The spirituals at once exemplify all of the three major themes of Locke's aesthetic philosophy: they are expressive of the individuality of a given artist—think of the distinctiveness of Paul Robeson's baritone renderings of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”; they have universal human appeal; and they epitomize the process of transition from a folk art to high or classical art. “In its disingenuous simplicity, folk art is always despised and rejected at first; but generations after, it flowers again and transcends the level of its origin” (NN 199).

Negro folk music or spirituals contain the raw material for myriad new musical developments. That material was at the time of the publication of The New Negro to Locke's mind underdeveloped, but as Negro artists grew in sophistication and craft Locke saw the potential for them to complete the conversion of so fundamentally American and pedestrian an art form into an avenue for insight into some of the most deeply emotional aspects of humanity.

Locke credits Du Bois with being among the first to give the spirituals “a serious and proper social interpretation,” with his chapter in The Souls of Black Folks on the Sorrow Songs. “But underneath the broken words, childish imagery, peasant simplicity, lies” Locke notes

as Dr. Du Bois pointed out, and epic intensity and a tragic profundity of emotional experience, for which the only historical analogy is the spiritual experience of the Jews and the only analogue, the Psalms. (NN 200)

But whatever they may lack in terms of poetic form, they more than compensate for in their ability to embody the religious mood. This North American Negro folk form is replete with the spirit of exaltation. The spirituals are remarkable for their ability to transcend the profound tragedy that gives birth to them and offer up a model of enduring hopefulness in this world or the next. “Their words are colloquial,” Locke notes, being the products of unlettered folk “but their mood is epic” giving emotive expression to experiences that exemplify the possibilities of humanity at its best (NN 201). The spirituals “are primitive, but their emotional artistry is perfect” (NN 201).

Historically, Negro colleges were the mechanism through which the spirituals were popularized. The travelling choirs of Negro institutions such as Hampton University, Wilberforce University, Fisk University and Tuskegee University performed the spirituals across the country as a means of raising funds for their respective institutions, all the while bringing to black and white audiences in the United States knowledge and appreciation of this indigenous musical form. Many of these university choirs also recorded compilations of Negro spirituals and published them. It was thus, as Locke has it, that the spirituals were able to avoid simply falling out of fashion and failing to survive “that critical period of disfavor in which any folk product is likely to be snuffed out by the false pride of the second-generation” (NN 202). This, by Locke's lights, is not an uncommon situation for folk arts to face, finding it necessary as they often do to resist being disavowed by subsequent generations wishing to distance themselves from the supposedly deficient quality of the folk expression.

Emotions and attitudes form the very foundation of Locke's philosophy of value: undoubtedly, one reason that Locke was so enamored with the spirituals was that as he understood them their primary artistic virtue was their deeply emotive character. “Emotionally,” he points out, “these songs are far from simple” (NN 205). There is to be found in the spiritual folk music of the American Negro the entire range of human moods and emotions, and within a given spiritual there can be a drastic change in mood from the deepest sorrow to glorious praise, as each and every song is infused with religious sentiment. Surprisingly, when it comes to the problem of classification of the spirituals, Locke does not insist upon the primary mode of classification being the feeling-quality of the song as his value theory might suggest. In fact, Locke argues that

[i]nteresting and intriguing as was Dr. Du Bois's analysis of their emotional themes, modern interpretation must break with that mode of analysis, and relate these songs to the folk activity that they motivated, classifying them by their respective song-types. (NN 205)

In the case of the spirituals Locke is in favor of a different method of classification because contemporary interpreters of the Negro's music tend to mischaracterize, or characterize in a way that is not true to the folk that produced it, the music of the Negro. Locke laments the fact that “at present many a half secularized ballad is mistaken for a ‘spiritual,’ and many a camp-meeting shout for a folk hymn” (NN 205). He believed the folk music of the Negro is best categorized according to the sort of activity they inspired. “From this point of view” Locke claims

we have essentially four classes, the almost ritualistic prayer songs for pure spirituals, the freer and more unrestrained evangelical shouts or Meeting songs, the folk ballad so overlaid with the tradition of the spirituals proper that the distinctive type quality has almost been unnoticed until late, and the work and labor songs of strictly secular character. (NN 205)

However, discriminating Negro folk music into types on the basis of the folk activity that underlies them is not necessarily to exclude the emotive content of the song. In fact, it seems that what is really being discriminated is the active expression of the underlying emotional content, i.e., the activity that is most commonly associated with a particular emotion or mood. And here we see perhaps the most direct effect that Locke's axiology has on his assessment of spirituals discriminating them as he does into types in terms of their feeling-quality, but also linking each form with a set of imperatives in this case, a practical imperative understood by the type of activity that each song is used to motivate.

Locke sees as a major problem with the scholarship on Negro folk music in his day the tendency to overemphasize one of the various distinctive elements of the music over the others. The result was a jaundiced view of Negro music. “Strain out and emphasize the melodic element” Locke informs

and you get only the sentimental ballad; emphasize the harmonic idiom, and you get a cloying sentimental glee; overemphasize the rhythmic idiom and instantly you secularize the product into syncopated dance elements. (NN 206)

Lurking in the background of all of this talk of the “New Negro” is the assumption that there is something distinctively Negro about at least some American art. As to what that is, or could be, answers are sometimes extremely hard to come by. But, Locke warns

[s]ooner or later the critic must face the basic issues involved in his use of risky and perhaps untenable terms like ‘Negro art’ and ‘Negro literature’ and answer the much-evaded question unequivocally,—who and what is Negro? (WWN 209)

Beyond this Locke thinks it a meaningful query to ask whether the racial concept has any place in art at all. Perhaps it would be better to understand art as a cultural or social mode of production that cuts across racial and ethnic divisions.

5.4.1 Who is Negro?

In answering the question “Who is Negro?” Locke begins by exposing a common misguided assumption in such queries:

[t]he fallacy of the ‘new’ as of the ‘older’ thinking is that there is a type Negro who, either qualitatively or quantitatively, is the type symbol of the entire group. (WWN 210)

Locke sees this as the unfortunate consequence of the past need to proffer counter-stereotypes to combat demeaning stereotypes of Negro persons. Counter-stereotypes may well contain some element of truth, but they fail to convey the whole truth about as diverse a population of human beings as Negroes in the United States, let alone the Americas or Negroes the World over. There is no distinctive singular Negro type. The answer then to the question posed “who is Negro?” is no Negro in particular. The Negro is a dynamic and multifaceted population admitting of myriad cultural and social forms characterized as those are by variegated linguistic, religious and artistic elements. This is important for Locke to note as the Negro of his day was thought to be classless, undifferentiated, and ethnically homogeneous. In fact, Locke himself thought it possible (and actual) for human beings biologically similar in the way that American race thinking presupposes to be members of different races. A full and accurate artistic portrayal of who is Negro would, Locke argued, have to picture the many diverse Negro strands in their own right, weaving together from these diverse threads a multifaceted presentation of Negro experiences.

5.4.2 What is Negro?

“Turning to the other basic question,—what is Negro,” Locke begins by narrowing the question to “what makes a work of art Negro, if indeed any such nomenclature is proper,—its authorship, its theme or its idiom?” (WWN 211). In other words, what gives a particular work of art its distinctive, if any, racial character: the racial identity of its author, its treatment of themes characteristic of a particular racial experience in a particular place, or its use of styles and modes of expression peculiar to a given people? Of these three candidates for the foundation of Negro art Locke claims each has had its day depending on the social environment that was prevalent at the time. Locke dismisses nearly out of hand the first option remarking that many a Negro artist has produced the most amateurish works of art due primarily to their poor mastery of Negro idioms, and inadequate treatment of Negro themes. What is more, some white (or at least non-Negro) artist have been quite adept in either their use of characteristically Negro styles, or their dealings with Negro motifs. Of course, it stands to reason that artist steeped in the cultural, ethnic and racial environments that give rise to these idioms and themes are most likely to master their use and expression, and that persons who do so are most likely to be members of these communities, having the same racial, ethnic or cultural identities as other members. However, such communal membership is not a necessary condition for the work of a particular artist to count amongst the works that comprise a racially distinctive body of art such as might be called “Negro art.”

6. Philosophy of Race

Locke understood race as primarily a product of social culture. Locke denies as do nearly all contemporary race theorists that races are biologically distinct categories of human beings. Locke maintained that culture and race were distinct, but often overlapping categories. There is no tight causal or otherwise necessary connection between race and culture. The two are mutually exclusive even though they do sometimes vary together or otherwise correspond. Race, for Locke, is not determinative of culture or civilization. Locke's position on race does not deny, as some of his contemporaries concerned with the notion of race and culture did, that there ever is a significant connection between racial and cultural factors, nor does it deny that “race stands for significant social characters and culture-traits or represents in given historical contexts characteristic differentiations of culture-type” (CRASC 188). This is primarily a cautionary observation on Locke's part seeing as how

[i]t is too early to assume that there is no significant relationship between race and culture because of the manifestly false and arbitrary linkage which has previously been asserted. (CRASC 189)

Locke has some hesitation about the prudence and possibility of completely eradicating racial categories. He states,

[i]n some revised and reconstructed form, we may anticipate the continued even if restricted use of these terms as more or less necessary and basic concepts that cannot be eliminated altogether, but that must nevertheless be so safe-guarded in this continued use as not to give further currency to the invalidated assumption concerning them. (CRASC 189)

Locke attributes the original idea that race is a primary determining factor in culture to the work of Arthur de Gobineau, though he thinks the main scientific justification for the view has been offered by those who seek to interpret culture in evolutionary terms such as the social evolutionism of Herbert Spencer. Positing a fixed link between race and culture was useful for such theorists in developing a step-by-step account of the development of cultures. But even in Locke's day, the supposed scientific foundations of such theoretical positions faced challenges. In light of that Locke thinks it understandable for some to want to correct this misinterpretation of the facts by insisting that there is no connection at all between race and culture. We see here again perhaps some of the influence that pragmatist thinkers, in this case Dewey, may have had on Locke, as Dewey was apt to point out on numerous occasions the shortcomings of Spencer's social Darwinism, and chiefly its attempt to offer a universal account of all aspects of human development. Locke worried that extreme cultural relativism

leaves an open question as to the association of certain ethnic groups with definite culture traits and culture types under circumstances where there is evidently a greater persistence of certain strains and characteristics in their culture than of other factors.

It is “[t]he stability of such factors and their resistance to direct historical modification” Locke thought, which

marks out the province of that aspect of the problem of race which is distinctly ethnological and which the revised notion of ethnic race must cover. (CRASC 190)

Locke postulates three conceptions of race: theoretical or scientific, political, and social or cultural. Scientific conceptions posit race as natural biological kinds. The existence of race and racial differentiation are explained in terms of biological or ethnological features of human populations. Scientific theories frequently assert a natural biological hierarchy between races and aim to explain divergent cultural characteristics of groups though biological factors. Locke argues that genetic inheritance varies both within and between human populations and cannot be the basis for the sociological concept of race. The factors that create genetic subdivisions of the human species such as physical and social reproductive isolation produce various consequences (Locke, 1989, 190 – 92 see also Locke, 1992, 4–6) that may not vary conterminously with the group’s social history. Genetic subdivisions produce population variances that may not track the social distinctions that a given society deems salient in terms of group identity.

Locke argues that biological race is an ethnic fiction. (Locke, 1992, 11 – 12). Putative biological races do not necessarily correspond with the racialized social identities operative in a given society. One way race can be an ethnic fiction is when non-biologically determined ethnic or cultural groups are presumed to be real biological populations, when in fact they are not. Locke does not seem to think that this fictitious conception of race undermines the social reality of the phenomenon. On Locke’s view race amounts to something significant even if many common conceptions of it are mistaken. Racialized populations can be comprised from various genetic, cultural and ethnic intermixtures throughout its history. Isolating any one of the plurality of factors around which a population is racialized as the single factor constituting the race can cause a significant divergence between one’s conception of racial groups and any underlying reality. Such divergence can inform a whole host of mistaken beliefs and misguided racial practices. Locke writes: “[a]s I pointed out, these groups, from the point of view of anthropology, are ethnic fictions. This does not mean that they do not exist, but it can be shown [that these groups do] not have as [permanent] designations those very factors upon which they pride themselves. (Locke, 1992, 11)

Locke’s understanding of race is influenced by the ethnology of his time. The notion that racial types are not permanent he derives from Frantz Boas. (Locke, 1992, 75–76) Locke’s belief that race and culture vary independently of each and are thus not causally linked stems from the work of R. H. Lowie. (Locke, 1989, 189–90) Locke agreed with Sapir that unique cultural or ethnic traits are best explained historically; rather than, biologically or psychologically. (Locke, 1989, 190) His reading of Flinders-Petrie’s account of assimilative processes initially informed his view of social race, and racial differentiation, though these are latter most influenced by his concept of cultural pluralism. (Locke, 1989, 191–92) Finally, he derives the view that race practices are deeply rooted in imperialism from Lord Cromer. (Locke, 1992, 64)

Political conceptions of race reject two basic assumptions of scientific theories, they reject that races are distinct biologically determined populations, and secondarily reject that biological differences of race account for cultural variation, or establish the relative inferiority or superiority of putative race groups. Political conceptions of race contend that racism is constitutive of races. Racial groups result from political, economic, and social mechanisms that create relative group advantage or disadvantage. Racial differentiation and hierarchy are the consequences of group exercise of political power.

Political race, for Locke, is merely favorable or unfavorable social inheritance masquerading as genetic ethnic inheritance. Racial differences and inequalities are caused by these factors, and so, will not account for the duration or amelioration of inequalities and differentiations. The permanence of racial groups, if it is to be promoted, must be based on something other than metaphysical realist notions of race. Conversely, if racial inequalities are to be eradicated, that too will likely require attention to, and control of, factors and elements of putatively racial groups other than their supposed biological or anthropological similarity.

Characteristically racial modes of living are wrongly regarded as biologically, rather than, socially inherited. This social inheritance can be either favorable or unfavorable. Locke observes that cultures are often racially diverse. Multiple races may share some larger cultural elements. (Locke, 1989, 193–94) Races are regarded as “concrete culture-types,” according to Locke, which are “composite racially speaking, and have only an artificial ethnic unity, of historical derivation and manufacture.” (Locke, 1989, 194) Race is a learned epistemic mode of being. A sense of race membership is enculturated and socialized, and once acquired, the race sense partly conditions how one perceives and understands the world.

Locke’s social conception of race is a proto-social constructionist account of race. Race, for him, is a cultural-historical phenomenon and not a natural kind distinction. Race, for Locke, is culture; or conversely, culture is race. The cultural conception views race as a learned socially inherited phenomenon. Culturally conceived, a race is a transactionally constituted, and inherently transformational, subcultural variant, not fixed by biological determinants. Race for Locke is the characteristic differentiation of culture-type perpetuated through social heredity. Locke states that “[r]ace in the vital and basic sense is simply and primarily the culture-heredity, and that in its blendings and differentiations is properly analyzed on the basis of conformity to or variance from culture-type.” (Locke, 1989, 192) Locke’s view of social race implies that there are further distinctions to make within current racial categories. Many groups commonly regarded as one race constitute several different races.

Locke held that race was in point of fact a social and cultural category rather than a biological one. For this reason he developed the notion of ethnic race or culture group. By ethnic race, I take Locke to mean a peculiar set of psychological and affective responsive dispositions, expressed or manifested as cultural traits, socially inherited and able to be attributed through historical contextualization to a specifiable group of people. The concept of ethnic race is a way of preserving the demonstrated distinctiveness of various groupings of human beings in terms of characteristic traits, lifestyles, forms of expression; without resulting to the scientifically invalidated notion of biological race. “Race,” Locke argues “would have been regarded as primarily a matter of social [as opposed to biological] heredity,” if only the science of his day had reached a more tenable understanding of the relationship of race to culture which would likely have resulted from focusing more on the ethnic; rather than, anthropological factors. The distinctiveness of a given race would be understood as the result of “the selective psychological “set” of established cultural reactions” (CRASC 191).

The notion of ethnic race is better able to capture the myriad differences between culture groups in terms of the actual social, cultural and historical conditions that give rise to such variation, and without the scientifically indefensible reliance on biological factors. On this view, race is no longer thought to be the progenitor of culture; instead race is understood to be a cultural product. Locke held that the more objective analysis of culture he advocated would likely result in the development over time of distinctive culture-types for which it may prove possible to work out some principle of development or evolution. This he thought might eventually make it possible to develop “a standard of value for relative culture grading” (CRASC 194).

Nearly every culture is highly composite; consisting as most due in the union of various social and historical influences; moreover, every ethnic group in the unique outcome of a specific social history. A more scientific understanding of man replaces the abstract artifice of biological race, and requires that we deal with concrete culture-types which are frequently complex amalgamations of supposed races united principally by entrenchment of customary reactions, standardized practices, traditional forms of expression and interaction, in sum, the specific history of a given people in a particular place. It is noteworthy and perhaps illuminating of Locke's conception of ethnic or social race that the groupings of human persons formerly thought to constitute “races” in the biological sense such as “Negro,” “Caucasian,” or “Asian” are in fact each composed of several different social or ethnic races. On Locke's view there are many so-called “Negro,” “Caucasian,” or “Asian” races. This revised understanding of culture constitutes in Locke's estimation a fundamental paradigm shift in the study of human cultures ”[s]o considerable…[in] emphasis and meaning that at times it does seem that the best procedure would be to substitute the term race the term culture group “ (CRASC 194).

Locke quickly notes while the notion of race has been invalidated as an explanation of culture groups understood as totalities, race does help to explain various cultural components within a given culture. “Race operates as tradition,” Locke noted, “as preferred traits and values,” changes in these aspects of culture in a distinctive way by a subset of a culture group constitutes “ethnic remoulding” (CRASC 195). Race becomes a term that designates the specific outcome of the “peculiar selective preferences” in favor of some, and against other, culture-traits of a given group. “Such facts” Locke observed

nullify two of the most prevalent popular and scientific fallacies, the ascription of a total culture to any one ethnic strain, and the interpretation of culture in terms of the intrinsic rather than the fusion of its various constituent elements. (CRASC 195)

To illustrate Locke’s view consider African Americans, they share a common culture with white Americans in terms of language, religion, aesthetic sense, and many other cultural elements. Even with these cultural elements in common there are characteristic, qualitatively distinct, and phenomenologically unique forms that common language, religion, and aesthetic sense have among African Americans that are not characteristic of white Americans. Characteristic differences such as have produced the musical styles, literary techniques, humor, oratorical idioms, mannerisms, forms of worship and religious expression, hair styles etc. and many other elements of culture that are the frequent objects of appropriation.

A sense of kinship among members of a subcultural group which yields an understanding that “different practices [operate in] their society from those which [operate in other societies and therefore] determine their treatment of other groups,” Locke argues is a key element in racial differentiation. (Locke, 1992, 20) Racial consciousness is not itself pernicious, but a group’s sense of itself and its difference from other social races can be based on the domination and oppression of other groups. (Locke, 1992, 20)

A social group’s sense of itself as a distinctive subculture yields the formation of peculiar values and beliefs, alongside specific practices and forms of living. These produce over time distinguishing qualities of the subculture in terms of elements that are noticeably present in one, or lacking from other groups. (Locke, 1989, 194–96) Culture-traits—ways of acting, speaking, interrelating, worshipping, eating, expressing etc.—establishes a dominant and characteristic pattern in a population. This pattern consists of social norms toward which members of the group conform. With sufficient conformity around those norms a culture-type is eventually established. (Locke, 1989, 194–95) Some people self-identify in racial terms, but the core elements with which they identify may be illusory. Such identification can benefit a racialized group. Observing that some racial conceptions are ethnic fictions does not lead Locke to deny the practical utility of racial identification.

Political and social conceptions of race are more useful in explaining racial domination and cultural assimilation and pluralism than scientific theories of race, which have been thoroughly undermined as the cause of cultural variation. Moreover, the distinctions made, the very populations designated by, anthropological race, rarely if ever coincide with those of ethnic race. The three conceptions carve up the world differently, and of them, Locke finds the political analysis and social or ethnic conception of race more accurate historically and sociologically. This is a matter of some debate in recent work in the philosophy of race. Also, advances in recent decades have raised important questions about the viability and usefulness of treating genetically discernable populations of human beings as races. Locke provides us further reason to doubt the viability of such projects. Moreover, he was adept enough to envision that even in the light of such advances it is a separate question whether the genetic populations of evolutionary biologists track closely the social populations putatively taken to be races.

Putatively biological conceptions of race, Locke argues, are social fictions. This aligns his thinking with fictionalist, or antirealist accounts of race, and inclines him in the direction of racial eliminativism. He argues that theoretical and scientific conceptions of race are misguided and ought to be eliminated for metaphysical, epistemological and normative reasons. Despite this he regards race as a fundamental category for understanding human social interactions. This informs his view that political conceptions of race are useful for understanding the way a society’s race creeds can rest on false beliefs, race practices are misguided and effectuate oppression, and understanding of the role of race in advancing imperialism and colonialism. In good pragmatist fashion, Locke is careful not to interpret political conceptions of race as postulating race as a metaphysical reality. His political conception of race offers a model for interpreting and analyzing a society’s racial creeds and race practices, it does not establish that race is a real biological or cultural factor of human populations or of individual persons. Locke argues that the only viable meaning of race is social. The conception of social race is for Locke the only plausible meaning of race. This aligns him with contemporary social constructionist. Locke endorses a form of substitutionism by contending that metaphysically realist conceptions of race should be abandoned in favor of ethnic or social race. His view is reconstructionist in that it aims to correct classical racialist views as well as the prevailing metaphysically realist views of his day.

Locke distinguishes between racial conceptions and a society’s race practices. The social differentiations that produce various social groupings including races, result on his analysis from social, political, and economic causes. Locke does not deny that racial differences or racial prejudices exist. Racial differences, he thought, often parallel racial inequalities. (Locke, 1992, 1–14) Locke claims that “[w]e should expect naturally that race theory should be a philosophy of the dominant group.” (Locke, 1992, 3) As it was in the United States and other European colonial powers whose members proffered racial theories that privileged dominant groups. This leads Locke to argue that much of what has passed for race theory in Western civilizations is “bad science.” Specious justifications of exploitive and oppressive race practices abound, and such theories, Locke observes are resistant to correction by more accurate scientific investigation, or social scientific or historical facts.

Locke is doubtful of the prospects of a thorough-going racial eliminativism. He writes: “I believe that a word and an idea covering so indispensable, useful, and necessary a grouping in human society will never vanish, never be eradicated, and that the only possible way in which a change will come about will be through a substitution of better meanings for the meanings which are now so current under the term.” (Locke, 1992, 84–85) This is a clear articulation of Locke’s racial substitutionism. He rejects eliminativism as the appropriate response to problematic conceptions of race or pernicious race practices and creeds. But Locke, unlike Du Bois, is not clearly a racial conservationist. He argues that prevailing conceptions of race are illegitimate, present race practices are pernicious, and contemporary race creeds unjust.

Locke is arguably a qualified or partial eliminativist as he advocates a radical redefinition of race in terms of culture, the elimination of certain race practices, race creeds, and race prejudices. Race prejudices, Locke claims, are ultimately based on cultural differences and differences in the type of civilization. Racial difference is at base a difference in the social consciousness of groups. Race prejudice erroneously assigns that variation to biological and anthropological factors that are unrelated to racial groups. This leaves racial prejudice in the paradoxical situation of being “an almost instinctive aberration in favor of anthropological factors erected into social distinctions” without any scientific warrant for so doing. (Locke, 1992, 10)

Race prejudices, Locke claims, result from aberrant psychological predispositions and tendencies. These habits often function unconsciously, but are not exempt from control and amelioration. Moreover, race creeds are for Locke distorted conceptual schemes and at the root of our notions of racial superiority and inferiority. Race prejudice and race creeds can and should be eliminated as features of race practice. His racial eliminativism is partial or qualified because he advocates jettisoning the more pernicious forms of our race practice, and is adamant about substituting current racial conceptions for the view of race as social culture.

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• –––, “Who and What Is “Negro”?” in The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond , L. Harris (ed.), Philadelphia: Temple University Press, pp. 209–228.
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Perspectives Black History

Harlem is everywhere : episode 1, the new negro.

What was the Harlem Renaissance?

Jessica Lynne , Denise Murrell , Richard J. Powell , Monica L. Miller , Bridget R. Cooks and Mary Schmidt Campbell

February 20

What was the Harlem Renaissance? More than a specific time or place, it was a mindset. During the Great Migration, major cities across America proved fertile ground for artists and intellectuals fleeing the Jim Crow South. In this episode we hear about Alain Locke’s famous anthology The New Negro: An Interpretation , which gathered some of the best of fiction, poetry, and essays on the art and culture emerging from these communities. Locke’s volume demonstrated the diverse approaches to portraying modern Black life that came to characterize the “New Negro” and embody some of the era’s highest ideals.

View the objects discussed in the episode and read the complete transcript below . 

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JESSICA LYNNE: Welcome to Harlem Is Everywhere brought to you by The Metropolitan Museum of Art, a celebration of the exhibition The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism .

I’m your host Jessica Lynne. I’m a writer and art critic. This is episode one, The New Negro.

I write about Black visual artists throughout the diaspora and I’m especially interested in Black Southern life and culture. I grew up along the Virginia coast but I’ve been in New York now for practically all my adult life.

And even though I’m “up south,” as they say, I see so many aspects of my childhood in the city, especially in Harlem. From the soul-food restaurants to the hair salons, and the storytelling on stoops that reminded me of what would happen on the porches back home. Even when I first got to Harlem, I felt like I’d always been in Harlem.

To bring this time period to life beyond the walls of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, we have a podcast for you. This podcast is a resource for curious ears, a conversation about a time and place, and a look at the first Black American–led movement of international modern art.

In this episode, we’ll hear from guests featured throughout the series. We’ll explore the significance of the Great Migration and the publication of Alain Locke’s groundbreaking anthology The New Negro . We’ll learn how Historically Black Colleges and Universities have acted as shepherds of this artwork. And we’ll recognize this time and these artists with the respect they deserve.

MONICA L. MILLER: I think there was a hunger for African American culture to be recognized as art…

RICHARD J. POWELL: Whether it’s Chicago or Washington, D.C. or New York City. There’s this conflation of African Americans or people from the Caribbean kind of living, again, these new lives…

MARY SCHMIDT CAMPBELL: I was really struck by the extent to which the artists had a very fierce sense of self-determination…

MILLER: And also a conversation that was initiated between Harlem Renaissance artists and ordinary Black people, no matter where they were.

POWELL: This is such a pivotal moment in Black America. So many African Americans have moved from the rural South to the urban North…

CAMPBELL: And were able to articulate on their own terms what they believed and how they believed African American artists should express themselves.

BRIDGET R. COOKS: What’s interesting about the afterlife of the Harlem Renaissance and its art is that there hasn’t been very much sustained attention on the art of the Harlem Renaissance and the artists that produced it.

DENISE MURRELL: If you were to take a survey of twentieth-century art or modern art when I was taking classes, they would go through the school of Paris, German Expressionism, if they’re talking about the American side—Stieglitz, Hopper, etc.—no mention really of the Harlem Renaissance. The only way to get to study the Harlem Renaissance was to take one of the vertical courses, one hundred years or, you know, two centuries of African American art. You have to seek the period out.

LYNNE: Harlem exists simultaneously as a constantly evolving community and as a living archive of a people’s beauty. The Harlem Renaissance was a time when Black folks were using the things they had made—their contributions to culture—in order to add their stories to a larger American one.

After the Great Migration, many folks fled Jim Crow in the South for cities like Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York hoping for a fresh start, imagining a new future.

The Harlem Renaissance was a movement that turned thinkers and writers such as Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and W. E. B. Du Bois into household names.

It was bold, exciting, and world changing. A time when Black people were able to express themselves in their own way to themselves. Not just in Harlem but throughout communities across America and overseas. The Harlem Renaissance was a mindset.

LYNNE : Denise is the curator of The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism .

MURRELL : Well hello, I’m Denise Murrell.

LYNNE : Her connection to Harlem is not only professional, it’s personal.

MURRELL: I was born in Harlem Hospital. My parents are both from North Carolina. The decades immediately following the Harlem Renaissance, the fifties and the sixties, are when my parents came to New York. I later came to understand them to be part of the later years or the middle years of the Great Migration.

LYNNE: At the beginning of the twentieth century, Black people living in the South began to migrate north. Southerners spread across the country to settle in various communities. They traveled as far as Los Angeles, Oakland, and Seattle. But the majority moved north to cities like Chicago, Detroit, and Philadelphia. New York had always had a Black population, with folks from all over the global Black diaspora.

MURRELL: But the migration from the South expanded those numbers exponentially. And Harlem—which was not built to be an African American neighborhood for a number of economic and other reasons—became the destination and very quickly became predominantly Black.

LYNNE: Among these people leaving home and family behind were artists. They traveled north with the hope of finding a way forward. In search of peers and community, seeking new audiences and opportunities.

POWELL : Moving to urban centers gave people a chance to kind of reimagine themselves. But that can be a little scary, too.

LYNNE: Here’s Richard J. Powell…

POWELL: I’m an art historian. I teach at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. And this fall, I’m in residence at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Lauder Center for Research on Modern Art.

LYNNE: Even though many were leaving behind dangerous circumstances in the South, taking a chance on yourself and leaving what you know behind can be frightening.

POWELL: There’s a great line from Richard Wright’s  Black Boy  where he talks about, “I flung myself into the unknown,” when he makes it from Mississippi to Chicago. And it is kind of like a trajectory. It is like kind of flinging yourself into this kind of concrete and urban and asphalt place. And you’re hoping that your dreams are going to come true, but you’re just not really sure.

LYNNE : The risks these folks were taking speaks to the willingness for change. Many of their parents would’ve been born into slavery. It’s hard to imagine coming from communities in Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, North Carolina….

POWELL : … South Carolina, or Georgia and hitting 125th and Lenox Avenue, coming out of the subway and on one hand being mesmerized, but on the other hand being a little scared.

LYNNE : It makes sense that when these artists found community and connected with other like-minded individuals it must’ve been all the more meaningful. The risk had been worth it. They were thriving, they were inspired, they were creating work that would come to define the Harlem Renaissance.

Many people are responsible for helping shape and mold the ideals of this period. But there are two names central to this story: the activist, historian, and sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois and the writer, philosopher, and educator Alain Locke. Here’s Denise…

Left: Winold Reiss (American, born Germany, 1886–1953), W. E. B. Du Bois , 1925. Pastel on illustration paper, 30 x 21 5/8 in. (76 x 55 cm). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.; Purchase funded by Lawrence A. Fleischman and Howard Garfinkle with a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (72.79); Right: Winold Reiss (American, born Germany, 1886–1953), Alain Leroy Locke , 1925. Pastel on illustration board, 29 7/8 x 21 5/8 in. (75.9 x 54.9 cm). National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D. C.; Purchase funded by Lawrence A. Fleischman and Howard Garfinkle with a matching grant from the National Endowment for the Arts (72.84)

MURRELL: Alain Locke was more rooted in the art world and avant-garde aesthetics. And encouraging artists to evolve a modernist visual vocabulary that was specifically African American.

LYNNE: Du Bois took a different approach.

MURRELL: W. E. B. Du Bois supported that, but he came at it from an activist point of view. He was the editor of The Crisis magazine, which was the monthly publication of the NAACP. And he said, “I don’t give a damn about any art that is not propaganda.” We’ve had propaganda thrown at us all of our lives, and we’re going to put our own propaganda out there.

So, you have these two: one is aesthetic and one is activist.

LYNNE: There’s a painting Denise included in the exhibition by Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr. It’s a self-portrait in watercolor and it speaks to Du Bois’s idea about the value of art and what it can communicate.

Samuel Joseph Brown, Jr. (American, 1907–1994), Self-Portrait , ca. 1941. Watercolor, charcoal, and graphite on paper, 20 1/4 x 15 3/8 in. (51.4 x 39.1 cm). The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Gift of Pennsylvania W. P. A., 1943 (43.46.4)

LYNNE : There’s a sense of melancholy in this painting. In tones of blue and gray, a man is looking at his reflection in a mirror. You can find a link to the painting in the episode description.

MURRELL: Samuel Joseph Brown’s Self-Portrait is an example of a work that really represents some of the core ideas of the New Negro Movement, but that was kind of lost to art history. And I specifically remember coming across this… I’ve never seen it before! It’s been in The Met’s collection since the 1940s. I look at this and I immediately think about W. E. B. Du Bois, the double consciousness.

LYNNE: Du Bois first introduced this idea of double consciousness in his foundational work, The Souls of Black Folk , in 1903.

MURRELL: Always conscious of, on the one hand, looking at oneself, attempting to develop one’s own authentic mode of self-expression, self-representation. But always conscious of being defined by the external gaze of the majority White population. And that is a racialized gaze.

LYNNE: And that’s a gaze that exists alongside segregation in the South and institutional racism in the North.

MURRELL: And when you look at this, you see that it is a representation of the artist looking at himself, but it’s not an exact representation. The perspective is off, it’s asymmetrical. And I think that captures and invokes some of the non-naturalistic aesthetics that define modern art of the period. It also captures the psyche of always feeling just slightly off-balance. Not being fully not able to fully articulate one’s existence in the way that one would choose.

LYNNE: He was a strong proponent of respectability politics: putting your best foot forward in society and becoming a leader in your community, even if it means pandering to the taste and values of a White elite.

Locke studied philosophy at Harvard and was the first Black person to receive a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford. He graduated well aware of how to navigate within White institutions. But Locke’s aesthetic moved away from propaganda and towards an embracing of the Black artists of the Harlem Renaissances’ relevance in the larger art world.

Regardless of the means to achieve it, they both strived towards a shared goal.

MURRELL: They both were absolutely committed to the idea of authentic Black self-expression, autonomous of White oversight and regulation, both in the written word and in works of art, period: literature, music, painting, sculpture, photography.

So, I think it was a shared commitment to modernizing the Black image, even though they had sometimes divergent styles, approaches to aesthetics, and modes of expression.

LYNNE: This idea of modernizing Black artists in America started to gain traction in Harlem. Like a lot of great stories, it starts at a dinner party.

MONICA L. MILLER: So, this dinner party took place on March 21, 1924, at the Civic Club.

LYNNE: This is Monica L. Miller, she’s a professor of English and Africana studies at Barnard College, Columbia University.

MILLER: What was important about that dinner party is that it brought together this sort of emerging sort of Negro intelligentsia with publishers and also philanthropists. So, this was a party that was designed in some ways to start the Harlem Renaissance.

At that party, Alain Locke and Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson and a couple of other sort of old guard sort of African American activists and “race men,” as they were called at the time. They were there interacting with a sort of younger group of of African American Negro artists.

And the evening was such a success that by the end of the evening, Alain Locke was charged with putting together an anthology of the work of the people who were in the room.

LYNNE: This was a special edition of the Survey Graphic magazine titled “Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro.” It was an instant success. 

Winold Reiss (American, born Germany, 1886–1953), Roland Hayes, cover of Survey Graphic (March 1925), edited by Alain Locke (“Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro”). Thomas J. Watson Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

MILLER: As soon as it came out, people were just buying it in droves. It was incredibly popular both within the African American community, as well as sort of more educated, and to a certain extent, sympathetic White readers.

LYNNE: The cover of this edition of the Survey Graphic is by the White German-born artist Winold Reiss.

Contributions to the publication came from both Du Bois and Locke themselves, and provided a platform for the movement’s other major thinkers, like Arturo Schomburg, James Weldon Johnson, and Langston Hughes.

MILLER: On the success of that, Alain Locke was encouraged to expand the Survey Graphic into The New Negro anthology. And that volume includes, I’m going to say, nearly all of the of the most prominent writers of the Renaissance, as well as essays from some philanthropists and also other academics who were really concerned with the sort of Negro cause at the time.

Alain Locke (American, 1885–1954). The New Negro , 1925. Collection of Walter O. And Linda Evans.

MILLER : It includes essays, poetry, drama, artwork. The essays are both about African American life in addition to being about Afro-diasporic community. So, the volume really includes many of the writers, many of the perspectives, and really is designed to sort of be the actuality and a metaphor for the ambition of the African American community at that time.

It is an announcement that African Americans were on the American cultural scene and that they were cosmopolitan and connected. It was an announcement both to other people, as well as to the community internally.

LYNNE: Winold Reiss was a skilled illustrator and painted some of the most iconic portraits of the movement’s most famous faces. The Survey Graphic was so popular it had to be bound as an anthology. Reiss, alongside his mentee Aaron Douglas, illustrated The New Negro for wider distribution, solidifying its place in history.

POWELL: Aaron Douglas was a really important artist working in Harlem in the 1920s and part of the 1930s. He was kind of the go-to artist for all of the great writers during this time period. He illustrated books for Carl Van Vechten, for Langston Hughes, for James Weldon Johnson. And his imagery, I would say, in that way, is in response to the poetry, to the prose, to the narratives that these writers are exploring. And there’s also a kind of interactivity when we see his images

Aaron Douglas (American, 1899– 1979), cover of Opportunity 4, no. 38 (February 1926) (“Industrial Issue”). Collection of Walter O. and Linda Evans

POWELL : They are very abstract. They’re very stylized figures that almost remind you of zigzags and patterns. The legs are bent, the arms are akimbo, the necks are turned.

LYNNE: Aaron Douglas was born in Topeka, Kansas, but moved to Harlem in the 1920s. After illustrating the anthology The New Negro , his graphic work, paintings, and murals became a study of a people and their history. Here’s scholar and curator Bridget R. Cooks.

COOKS: His focus really was on the journey from the African homeland to the 1930s as a modern Black community in the United States. There was the story that he wanted to tell that showed both struggle and triumph. It focuses on labor, it focuses on possibility, and it focuses on tragedy and this kind of fullness of a story, right? The story that all communities have of struggles, strife, and then opportunities and successes, you know. To move onto a kind of progressive narrative to think about what’s next.

Those are things that I believe Aaron Douglas really wanted people to understand in order to appreciate the Black people that existed at that time that they needed to re-understand, or relearn, or maybe learn for the first time the complexity of the history of African American people.

MILLER: He’s really well known for his mural that is at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, which traces the history of African Americans from slavery through freedom to the modern era. And his work has become a kind of visual signature of the Harlem Renaissance.

Aaron Douglas (American, 1899–1979), Aspects of Negro Life: From Slavery to Reconstruction , 1934. Oil on canvas, 60 in. x 11 ft. 11 in. (152.4 x 363.2 cm). Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Art and Artifacts Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations (PA.34.001.3)

LYNNE: Douglas’s mural has four panels and is titled Aspects of Negro Life . This panel— From Slavery to Reconstruction —can be seen in The Met’s exhibition.

MILLER: One of the things that’s incredible about Aaron Douglas’s work is the way that it layers history and culture in the paintings. The main figure is a man who is surrounded by dancing folks and musicians. And there’s this incredible energy in the middle of the painting. But we also see behind this man like a series of concentric circles, which are both the sun, right, but that also are sort of bringing out other, it seems like, layers of history, right, behind this group of people who look a little African. They look a little modern, right?

So, there’s a way in which like time and space here are really the time and space of African American history and culture are all being depicted in this one painting. It’s just such a summary, and a joyous summary. Like, there’s energy and joy in this painting that when I look into it, I feel like I’m looking into the past, but I’m also also seeing the future. 

LYNNE: Keep in mind this idea of the New Negro was not confined to Harlem. Even now, more than a hundred years later, it’s crucial to not reduce the impact of these incredible Black artists to their race. The work being made during this period had the same amount of import and insight to a larger conversation in modernity as any other work being made at the time.

POWELL: When I think of the Harlem Renaissance, it’s always important to remember that term is a term that is both specific and it is metaphorical. It’s specific in terms of the Black community in New York, but it’s metaphorical in the sense that this desire for a kind of a Black modernism is happening in Chicago, it’s happening in Washington, it’s happening in Paris, it’s happening in Havana, it’s happening in Port au Prince.

LYNNE: During this time major art institutions were either unwilling or unaware of the significance of this work to establish serious permanent collections. So, the collections of Historically Black Colleges and Universities would become safe havens for the Black art of the Harlem Renaissance.

MARY SCHMIDT CAMPBELL: The role of HBCUs is absolutely critical to the Harlem Renaissance.

LYNNE: That’s Mary Schmidt Campbell.

CAMPBELL: I am the president emerita of Spelman College. Before that, I was the director and chief curator at the Studio Museum in Harlem.

From the time that Alain Locke published his essay on the New Negro to up to, let’s say, World War II, overwhelmingly, most American museums simply were not collecting the work of African American artists.

LYNNE: Of course, there were places you could see Black art such as the Baltimore Museum and the Newark Museum.

CAMPBELL: And of course the Jacob Lawrence Migration Series that went to both the Museum of Modern Art as well as the Phillips Collection. But that’s a really small portion of the work that was produced by these artists.

So, the collections that were amassed by Historically Black Colleges and Universities become absolutely critical because they had become, by default, the principal collectors of the works of African American artists.

LYNNE: Many leading figures and artists of the Harlem Renaissance were passionate about education. Some were educators while still being practicing artists. 

CAMPBELL: And many of the artists whom we recognized as major artists in the Harlem Renaissance… I wouldn’t say many, but several of them were faculty members. So, Aaron Douglas went to Fisk and was a distinguished professor at Fisk for many years. Hale Woodruff started the art department at the Atlanta University Center Consortium, and was an absolute leading figure in Atlanta for many years.

LYNNE: Denise, as the curator of the The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism , faced some challenges in finding the work and in restoring important pieces to ensure that they were ready for display.

MURRELL: So, visiting the campuses and seeing the work in storage, and then having to do various degrees of conservation to make it gallery-ready, that’s certainly one challenge. But I think it has also been a fabulous opportunity because now that we know this body of work and we have established contacts, working relationships with the four HBCUs— Howard, Fisk, Clark Atlanta University, and Hampton University—I feel that we will have ongoing partnerships with  those institutions and hopefully other large museums will, as well. And that this project will help bring more attention to that body of work.

COOKS: There are new people, new generations of people that are discovering the art of the Harlem Renaissance for the first time and are often really frustrated that they didn’t know about it until that moment.

LYNNE: This is Bridget R. Cooks, again.

COOKS: It’s proof that we have to sustain and persist in making sure that the visibility of the contributions of African American artists are always part of American art history and American art museums and galleries.

The museum has been an exclusive place and really just an elitist place in terms of defining what is beautiful, what objects are valuable, which stories are important to be told. There has to be a process of making room for people who have been told that they don’t belong in the museum space.

There has to be a component, really, of social practice and engaging with communities in ways that are not extractive, but that are collaborative. And in that way, we think that, not only the art that the museum buys, the art that the museum exhibits will change, but also, the understanding of the value of those people, those histories, and those systems will also be reflected in programing and in wall labels.

There are plenty of ways in which American institutions can show the objects that they currently have, even if they weren’t made by a diverse group of people, to tell a story that accounts for a more accurate history of colonization, exploitation, genocide, conflict, and even hope for the future.

LYNNE: The Harlem Renaissance was a convergence of people from different places, with different talents all working to modernize how they were represented in the larger American story. And we are going to get into the ways they did that.

From the Black Americans working to represent themselves and the spaces they walked into through fashion…

ROBIN GIVHAN: If you are someone you know for whom society has determined that you have to fit into a particular box or a particular category, being able to use fashion to express who you are is extraordinarily powerful.

LYNNE: To the places that they socialized and the sounds they heard while they did it…

CHRISTIAN MCBRIDE: Sitting down and listening to extended improvisational jazz, that wasn’t really quite the case, at that time. It was all about dancing.

LYNNE: To the words and images they were putting down on the page, documenting their experiences, their dreams, their imaginations, wondering what could be…

JOHN KEENE: The writers of Fire!! were not concerned with presenting neat bourgeois representations of Black people.

LYNNE: The Harlem Renaissance was a period of extraordinary creativity and intellectual discovery that continues to resonate today. I’m so excited to dive into all the ways that Harlem... is everywhere.

Harlem Is Everywhere is produced by The Metropolitan Museum of Art in collaboration with Audacy’s Pineapple Street Studios.

Our senior producer is Stephen Key. Our producer is Maria Robins-Somerville. Our editor is Josh Gwynn. Additional production in this episode by Jonathan Menjivar.

Mixing by our senior engineer, Marina Paiz. Additional engineering by our senior audio engineer, Pedro Alvira. Our assistant engineers are Sharon Bardales and Jade Brooks. I’m your host, Jessica Lynne.

Fact checking by Maggie Duffy. Legal services by Kristel Tupja. Original music by Austin Fisher and Epidemic Sound.

The Met’s production staff includes producer, Rachel Smith; managing producer, Christopher Alessandrini; and executive producer, Sarah Wambold.

This show would not be possible without Denise Murrell, the Merryl H. & James S. Tisch Curator at Large and curator for The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism exhibition ; and research associate is Tiarra Brown.

Special thanks to Inka Drögemüller, Douglas Hegley, Skyla Choi, Isabella Garces, David Raymond, Ashliy Sabb, Tess Solot-Kehl, Gretchen Scott, and Frank Mondragon.

Asha Saluja and Je-Anne Berry are executive producers at Pineapple Street.

Support for this podcast is provided by Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Episode two is out now. Tune in to hear from fashion reporter Robin Givhan and scholar and curator Bridget R. Cooks about the fashion of the Harlem Renaissance

More from Harlem Is Everywhere

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 5, Art as Activism

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 4, Music & Nightlife

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 3, Art & Literature

About the contributors, jessica lynne.

Host, Harlem Is Everywhere

Denise Murrell

Merryl H. and James S. Tisch Curator at Large, Modern and Contemporary Art

Richard J. Powell

Scholar and curator

Monica L. Miller

Professor of English and Africana Studies, Barnard College, Columbia University

Bridget R. Cooks

Professor of art history and African American studies, University of California, Irvine

Mary Schmidt Campbell

Former president of Spelman College

Harlem Is Everywhere : Episode 2, Portraiture & Fashion

The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism

Harlem Is Everywhere

Behind the Scenes

For Families

From the Archives

In Circulation

Notes from Museum Leadership

Religion and Spirituality

Social Change

The New Negro and the Dawn of the Harlem Renaissance

In 1925, an anthology of Black creative work heralded the arrival of a movement that had been years in the making.

If 1925 was “the greatest year for books ever,”  as has been claimed , readers will be able to see for themselves in 2021, when a number of those works enter the public domain. Among them is a collection of works by Black authors who, today, represent the creative movement of the 1920s known as the Harlem Renaissance . The New Negro: An Interpretation , edited by Alain Locke, features writers that formed “the fundaments of the black canon today,” writes Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Of course, Black writers were creating artistic and literary works long before the Harlem Renaissance came to be. As Gates points out, there was a “full decade of unprecedented literary productions by black women,” which culminated in “a dozen novels and […] their own literary journal between 1890 and 1900.” This precedent was, in some ways, a response to the racism that the artists experienced. It was a way to create a new vision of themselves, one free of everything except the ability to tell their stories in their authentic voices. It was, as Gates explains, “an image unfettered by the racist burdens of the past […] disenfranchisement, peonage, black codes, and legalized Jim Crow—not to mention the vicious assault on negro freedom and political rights enacted in literature, in theater and on the vaudeville stage, and throughout the popular visual arts.”

This precedent gave way to what was then called the New Negro Movement of the 1920s. Locke saw that Black arts coupled with politics represented a new era. As Roger M. Valade III writes , Locke argued that Black art and culture were a “means of moving towards social, political, and economic equality.” Nowhere was that more evident than in the arts scene in Harlem, the center of New York’s Black life. It was, as Gates writes, “the ‘Mecca of the New Negro’ (as Alain Locke put it).”

Locke saw this wave of creativity as cause for celebration and assembled these new writers into a 446-page anthology. The New Negro included works by Langston Hughes , Zora Neale Hurston , Anne Spencer, and Countee Cullen, among others. In the book’s foreword, Locke explains that the volume is a “fresh spiritual and cultural focusing.” But this new outlook, Gates explains, was also a political one. Locke believed the awakening “would facilitate the Negro’s demand for civil rights and for social and economic equality.”

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The Harlem Renaissance period didn’t last long. Financially, outside forces like the stock market crash of 1929 saw many of its patrons unable to continue to support the work, and politically, the artists weren’t “able to usher in the new world of civil rights through art.” What the movement did do, however, was create a pathway for new generations of Black artists, in all genres, who both celebrated and critiqued the movement in their works.

It’s fitting that Locke dedicated his volume to “the younger generation,” as the work in the anthology would, years after its publication, continue to inspire new generations of artists.

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The New Negro

Readings on race, representation, and african american culture, 1892-1938.

• Edited by: Henry Louis Gates and Gene Andrew Jarrett
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• Language: English
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Copyright year: 2008
• Audience: Professional and scholarly;College/higher education;
• Main content: 608
• Keywords: Adams ; John Quincy ; African Methodism ; African music ; Army of the James ; Babbitt figure ; Bad Lazarus figure ; Bandana Land (musical show) ; Belgium ; cabarets ; Caedmon ; Cape Colony ; Cervantes ; Miguel de ; chicken wheel (dance) ; Clarkson ; Thomas ; Cohen ; Octavius Roy ; communism ; composers ; Cotton Pickers ; Dahomey ; democracy ; Dunbar-Nelson ; Alice ; economics: Barnes on ; Egyptian art ; environment ; Family Story Paper ; Federal Theatre Project ; Gabon ; gambling ; Garveyism ; Giraudoux ; Jean ; Gompers ; Samuel ; Grant ; Duncan ; Guernica ; Hamilton ; Thomas ; Harold (anonymous) ; Harper’s Ferry ; Hawkins ; Coleman ; Henson ; Josiah ; immigration ; imperialism ; intelligentsia ; internationalism ; jazz instruments ; jazz orchestra ; Kadalie ; Clements ; Kirkpatrick ; Sidney ; Knoxville College ; Lafayette Players ; liberalism ; Manchuria ; medical profession ; National Academy of Design
• Published: June 8, 2021
• ISBN: 9781400827879

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The Man Who Led the Harlem Renaissance—and His Hidden Hungers

By Tobi Haslett

Alain Locke led a life of scrupulous refinement and slashing contradiction. Photographs flatter him: there he is, with his bright, taut prettiness, delicately clenching the muscles of his face. Philosophy and history, poetry and art, loneliness and longing—the face holds all of these in a melancholy balance. The eyes glimmer and the lips purse.

It was this face that appeared, one summer morning in 1924, at the Paris flat of a destitute Langston Hughes, who put the scene in his memoir “ The Big Sea .” “ Qui est-il ?” Hughes had asked through the closed door. He was stunned by the reply:

A mild and gentle voice answered: “Alain Locke.” And sure enough, there was Dr. Alain Locke of Washington, a little, brown man with spats and a cultured accent, and a degree from Oxford. The same Dr. Locke who had written me about my poems, and who wanted to come to see me almost two years before on the fleet of dead ships, anchored up the Hudson. He had got my address from the Crisis in New York, to whom I had sent some poems from Paris. Now in Europe on vacation, he had come to call.

During the next two weeks, the middle-aged Locke, then a philosophy professor at Howard University, snatched the young Hughes from dingy Montmartre and took him on an extravagant march through ballet, opera, gardens, and the Louvre. This was the first time they’d met—but, after more than a year of sighing letters, Locke had come to Paris flushed with amorous feeling. The feeling was mismatched. Each man was trapped in the other’s fantasy: Hughes appeared as the scruffy poet who had fled his studies at Columbia for the pleasures of la vie bohème , while Locke was the “little, brown man” with status and degrees.

Days passed in a state of dreamy ambiguity. “Locke’s here,” Hughes wrote to their mutual friend Countee Cullen. “We are having a glorious time. I like him a great deal.” The words are grinning—and sexless. Hughes had found a use for the gallant Locke: an entrée to the bold movement in black American writing then rumbling to life. Cullen was gaining renown; the novelist Jessie Fauset was the literary editor of The Crisis; and Jean Toomer’s “Cane”—a novel in jagged fragments—had trumpeted the arrival of a new black art, one chained to the fate of a roiling, bullied, “emancipated” people. “I think we have enough talent,” W. E. B. Du Bois had announced in 1920, “to start a renaissance.”

Locke drove it forward and is remembered, dimly, as its “dean.” Whoever knows his name today likely links it to “ The New Negro: An Interpretation ,” a 1925 anthology that planted some of the bravest black writers of the nineteen-twenties—Hughes, Cullen, Toomer, Fauset, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston—squarely in the public eye. “The New Negro,” which appeared just a year after Locke’s summer visit with Hughes, launched the Negro Renaissance and marked the birth of a new style: the swank, gritty, fractious style of blackness streaking through the modern world.

Jeffrey C. Stewart’s new biography bears the perhaps inevitable title “ The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke .” But the title makes a point: the New Negro, that lively protagonist stomping onto the proscenium of history, might also be thought of, tenderly, as a figure for Locke himself. Stewart writes,

Locke became a “mid-wife to a generation of young writers,” as he labeled himself, a catalyst for a revolution in thinking called the New Negro. The deeper truth was that he, Alain Locke, was also the New Negro, for he embodied all of its contradictions as well as its promise. Rather than lamenting his situation, his marginality, his quiet suffering, he would take what his society and his culture had given him and make something revolutionary out of it.

Here was a man who enshrined his passions in collections, producing anthologies, exhibitions, and catalogues that refracted, according to Stewart, an abiding “need for love.” But even love could be captured and slotted into a series. Stewart tells us that among Locke’s posthumous effects was a shocking item that was promptly destroyed: a collection of semen samples from his lovers, stored neatly in a box.

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Meticulousness was a virtue among Philadelphia’s black bourgeoisie, the anxious world into which Locke was born. On September 13, 1885, Mary Locke, the wife of Pliny, delivered a feeble, sickly son at their home on South Nineteenth Street. Arthur LeRoy Locke, as the boy was christened, spent his first year seized by the rheumatic fever that he had contracted at birth. The Lockes were Black Victorians, or, as Alain later put it, “fanatically middle class,” and their mores and strivings shaped his self-conception and bestowed upon him an unusual entitlement to a black intellectual life. Pliny was well educated—he was a graduate of Howard Law School—but he suffered, as a black man, from a series of wrongful firings that scrambled the family’s finances.

Roy (as Alain was known in childhood) was Pliny’s project. “I was indulgently but intelligently treated,” Locke later recalled. “No special indulgence as to sentiment; very little kissing, little or no fairy stories, no frightening talk or games.” Instead, Pliny read aloud from Virgil and Homer, but only after Roy had finished his early-morning math exercises. He was being cultivated to be a race leader: a metallic statue of polished masculinity. But he was powerfully drawn to his mother. Pliny opposed this, and worked to shred the bond. Locke later recounted that his father’s death, when he was six, “threw me into the closest companionship with my mother, which remained, except for the separation of three years at college and four years abroad, close until her death at 71, when I was thirty six.” Under the watchful care of the struggling Mary, Roy became a precocious aesthete. And he proceeded, with striking ambition, from Central High School to the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy to Harvard.

Alain, as he was now called, fashioned himself as a yearning man of letters. Enraptured by his white professors, he decorated his modest lodgings in punctilious imitation of their homes. Not quite five feet tall, he had bloomed into a dandy, strutting down the streets of Cambridge in a genteel ensemble—gray suit, gray gloves, elegant overcoat—while displaying a shuddering reluctance to associate with the other black students at Harvard. They weren’t “gentlemen,” and, when a black classmate introduced him to a group of them, he was appalled:

Of course they were colored. He took me right up into the filthy bedroom and there were 5 niggers, all Harvard men. Well, their pluck and their conceit are wonderful. Some are ugly enough to frighten you but I guess they are bright. . . . They are not fit for company even if they are energetic and plodding fellows. I’m not used to that class and I don’t intend to get used to them.

This is from a letter to his mother, and the bile streams so freely that one assumes that Mary indulged the young Locke’s contempt. But his arrogance followed from the strangulating tension between who and what he was: blackness was limiting, oppressive, banal, a boorish hurdle in his brilliant path. “I am not a race problem,” he later wrote to Mary. “I am Alain LeRoy Locke.”

He’d arrived at Harvard when William James and then John Dewey had electrified philosophy in America under the banner of pragmatism, a movement that repudiated idealism and tested concepts against practice. Locke, who also became a devotee of the philosopher and belletristic aesthete George Santayana, went on to become the first black Rhodes Scholar—though as soon as he got to Oxford he was humiliated by white Americans, who shut him out of their gatherings. The scorn was instructive: the foppish Locke joined the Cosmopolitan Club, a debate society composed of colonial élites, who exposed him to the urgencies of anti-imperial struggle and, crucially, to the gratifications of racial and political solidarity. He finished a thesis—ultimately rejected by Oxford—on value theory, while slaking his sexual thirst in pre-Great War Berlin. He returned to Harvard to earn his Ph.D. in philosophy, for which he submitted a more elaborate version of his Oxford thesis, before joining the faculty at Howard. Mary moved down to Washington, where she was cared for by her doting son.

Locke’s other devotions were ill-fated. Much of his erotic life was a series of adroit manipulations and disastrous disappointments; Langston Hughes was just one of the younger men who fell within the blast radius of the older man’s sexual voracity as they chased his prestige. He fancied himself a suitor in the Grecian style, dispensing a sentimental education to his charges, assistants, protégés, and students—but hungering for mutuality and lasting love. Locke had affairs with at least a few of the writers included in “The New Negro.” His desultory sexual romps with Cullen stretched over years—though Cullen himself would flee the gay life by marrying W. E. B. Du Bois’s daughter Yolanda, in a lavish service with sixteen bridesmaids and thirteen hundred guests. Her father described the spectacle in The Crisis as “the symbolic march of young black America,” possessed of a “dark and shimmering beauty” and announcing “a new race; a new thought; a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world.” To Locke, it was a farce.

He found his own way to stay afloat in the world of the black élite. Pliny had wanted his son to be a race man, and now Alain was lecturing widely and contributing articles to Du Bois’s Crisis , which was attached to the N.A.A.C.P., and Charles Johnson’s Opportunity , the house organ of the National Urban League. But he stood aloof from the strenuous heroism of Negro uplift, and what he thought of as its flat-footed insistence on “political” art. Locke was a voluptuary: he worried that Du Bois and the younger, further-left members of the movement—notably Hughes and McKay—had debased Negro expression, jamming it into the crate of politics. The titles of Locke’s essays on aesthetics (“Beauty Instead of Ashes,” “Art or Propaganda?,” “Propaganda—or Poetry?”) made deflating little incisions in his contemporaries’ political hopes. Black art, in Locke’s view, was mutable and vast.

Not unlike blackness itself. In 1916, Locke delivered a series of lectures called “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations,” in which he painstakingly disproved the narrowly “biological” understanding of race while insisting on the power of culture to distinguish, but not sunder, black from white. Armed with his pragmatist training, he hacked a path to a new philosophical vista: “cultural pluralism.”

The term had surfaced in private debates with Horace Kallen, a Jewish student who overlapped with Locke at both Harvard and Oxford. Kallen declared that philosophy should, as his mentor William James insisted, concern itself only with differences that “make a difference”—which included, Kallen thought, the intractable facts of his Jewishness and Locke’s blackness. Locke demurred. Race, ethnicity, the very notion of a “people”: these weren’t expressions of some frozen essence but were molded from that suppler stuff, tradition —to be elevated and transmuted by the force and ingenuity of human practice. He could value his people’s origins without bolting them to their past.

His own past had begun to break painfully away. Mary Locke died in 1922, leaving Alain crushed and adrift. But her death also released him, psychically, from the vanished world of the fin-de-siècle black élite, with its asphyxiating diktats. As he moved into modernism, he found that his life was freer and looser; his pomp flared into camp. At Mary’s wake, Locke didn’t present her lying in state; rather, he installed her, alarmingly, on the parlor couch—her corpse propped like a hostess before a room of horrified guests.

“The New Negro,” which appeared three years later, stood as proof, Locke insisted, of a vital new sensibility: here was a briskly modern attitude hoisted up by the race’s youth. The collection, which expanded upon a special issue of the magazine Survey Graphic , revelled in its eclecticism, as literature, music, scholarship, and art all jostled beside stately pronouncements by the race’s patriarchs, Du Bois and James Weldon Johnson. The anthology was meant to signal a gutting and remaking of the black collective spirit. Locke would feed and discipline that spirit, playing the critic, publicist, taskmaster, and impresario to the movement’s most luminous figures. He was an exalted member of the squabbling clique that Hurston called “the niggerati”—and which we know, simply, as the Harlem Renaissance.

The term has a crispness that the thing itself did not. It was a movement spiked with rivalries and political hostility—not least because it ran alongside the sociological dramas of Communism, Garveyism, mob violence, and a staggering revolution in the shape and texture of black American life, as millions fled the poverty and the lynchings of the Jim Crow South. The cities of the North awaited them—as did higher wages and white police. With the Great Migration came a loud new world and a baffling new life, a chance to lunge, finally, at the transformative dream of the nation they’d been forced, at gunpoint, to build. Modernity had anointed a new hero, and invented, Locke thought, a New Negro.

But he hoped that this new figure would stride beyond politics. Radicals irked him; he regarded them with a kind of princely ennui. In his mind, the New Negro was more than mere effect: history and demography alone couldn’t possibly account for the wit, chic, or thrilling force of “the younger generation” to whom he dedicated the volume. In the title essay, Locke presented a race whose inner conversion had flown past the lumbering outside world. The Negro leaped not just from country to city but, crucially, “from medieval America to modern.” Previously, “the American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact,” he wrote, but now, “in Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination. It is—or promises at least to be—a race capital.”

Black people had snapped their moorings to servitude and arrived at the advanced subjectivity lushly evinced by their art: their poems and paintings, their novels and spirituals. Aaron Douglas had made boldly stylized drawings and designs for the anthology, which rhymed with the photographs of African sculptures that dotted its pages: masks from the Baoulé and the Bushongo; a grand Dahomey bronze. Negroes were a distinct people, with distinct traditions and values held in common. Their modern art would revive their “folk spirit,” displaying a vigorous continuity with their African patrimony and an embrace of American verve. “So far as he is culturally articulate,” Locke wrote in the foreword to his anthology, “we shall let the Negro speak for himself.”

The sentence shines with triumph; it warms and breaks the heart. Behind Locke’s bombast was the inexorable question of suffering: how it forged and brutalized the collective, forcing a desperate solidarity on people not treated as such. The task that confronted any black modernist—after a bloody emancipation, a failed Reconstruction, and the carnage of the First World War—was to decide the place, within this blazing new power, of pain. Locke preached a kind of militant poise. His New Negro would face history without drowning in it; would grasp, but never cling to, the harrowing past. In the anthology, he cheered on “the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and self-reliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hyper-sensitiveness and ‘touchy’ nerves.” So the book’s roar of modernist exuberance came to seem, in a way, strained.

But also lavish, stylish, jaunty, tart; bristling with whimsy and gleaming with sex. “The New Negro” thrust forth all the ironies of Locke’s ethos: his emphatic propriety and angular vision, his bourgeois composure and libertine tastes. “What jungle tree have you slept under, / Dark brown girl of the swaying hips?” asks a Hughes poem, titled “Nude Young Dancer.” Locke liked it—but was scandalized by jazz. And though he wrote an admiring essay in the anthology on the passion of Negro spirituals, he also chose to include “Spunk,” a short fable by Hurston about cheating and murder.

Locke relished every titillating contradiction but shrank, still, from political extremes. Hoping to avoid the charge of radicalism, he changed the title of McKay’s protest poem from “White House” to “White Houses”—an act of censorship that severed the two men’s alliance. “No wonder Garvey remains strong despite his glaring defects,” the affronted poet wrote to Locke. “When the Negro intellectuals like you take such a weak line!”

And such a blurred line. In a gesture of editorial agnosticism, Locke brought voices to “The New Negro” that challenged his own. Among the more scholarly contributions to the anthology was “Capital of the Black Middle Class,” an ambivalent study of Durham, North Carolina, by E. Franklin Frazier, a young social scientist. More than thirty years later, Frazier savaged the pretensions and the perfidies of Negro professionals in his study “The Black Bourgeoisie.” A work of Marxist sociology and scalding polemic, it took a gratuitous swipe at the New Negro: the black upper class, Frazier said, had “either ignored the Negro Renaissance or, when they exhibited any interest in it, they revealed their ambivalence towards the Negro masses.” Aesthetics had been reduced to an ornament for a feckless élite.

The years after “The New Negro” were marked by an agitated perplexity. Locke yearned for something solid: a home for black art, somewhere to nourish, protect, refine, and control it. He’d been formed and polished by élite institutions, and he longed to see them multiply. But the Great Depression shattered his efforts to extend the New Negro project, pressing him further into the byzantine patronage system of Charlotte Mason, an older white widow gripped by an eccentric fascination with “primitive peoples.” Salvation obsessed her. She believed that black culture could rescue American society by replenishing the spiritual values that had been evaporated by modernity, but that pumped, still, through the Negro’s unspoiled heart.

Mason was rich, and Locke had sought her backing for a proposed Harlem Museum of African Art. Although the project failed (as did his plans for a Harlem Community Arts Center), Mason remained a meddling, confused presence in his life until her death, in 1946. During their association, he passed through a gantlet of prickling degradations. Her vision of Negro culture obviously didn’t align with his; she demanded to be called Godmother; and she was prone to angry suspicion, demanding a fastidious accounting of how her funds were spent. But those funds were indispensable, finally, to the work of Hughes and, especially, Hurston. Locke, as the erstwhile “mid-wife” of black modernism, was dispatched to handle the writers—much to their dismay. He welcomed the authority, swelling into a supercilious manager (and, to Hughes, a bullying admirer) who handed down edicts from Godmother while enforcing a few of his own.

The thirties also brought revelations and violent political emergencies that plunged Locke into a rapprochement with the left. Locke the glossy belletrist gave way to Locke the fellow-traveller, Locke the savvy champion of proletarian realism. There was a fitful attempt to write a biography of Frederick Douglass, and a dutiful visit to the Soviet Union. But he was never a proper Communist. After the Harlem riot of 1935, he wrote an essay titled “Harlem: Dark Weather-Vane” for Survey Graphic , in which he pronounced the failure of the state and its economic system, but congratulated Mayor LaGuardia on his response to the riot, while also cautioning against both “capitalistic exploitation on the one hand and radical exploitation on the other.” Frazier thought this a mealymouthed capitulation; taking Locke on a ride around Washington in his Packard coupe, Frazier screamed denunciations at his trapped, flustered passenger.

Locke was middling as an ideologue, but remained a fiercely committed pragmatist. The rise of Fascism saw his philosophical work make crackling contact with politics. “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace,” a lecture delivered in the early nineteen-forties, took aim at the nation’s enemies and their “passion for arbitrary unity and conformity.” He sometimes groped clumsily for the radical language of recrimination: inching further from his earlier aestheticism, he praised Richard Wright’s “ Native Son ” as a “Zolaesque J’accuse pointing to the danger symptoms of a self-frustrating democracy.” And he remained riveted by the Negro’s internal flight. One of his most gratifying contributions was his advocacy of the painter Jacob Lawrence, and his sixty-panel tribute to the Great Migration. (Inspecting a layout of Lawrence’s series in the offices of Fortune , Locke exulted that “ The New Masses couldn’t have done this thing better.”) Lawrence had expressed what Locke, with his fidgeting dignity, couldn’t quite: the anger, the desolation, and the bracing thrill of a people crashing into history.

Locke was still driven by a need for order, for meticulous systems: the project that towered over his final years was “The Negro in American Culture,” a book he hoped would be his summum opus. “The New Negro” anthology had been a delectably shambling sample of an era, confected from disparate styles and stuffed with conflicting positions. But “The Negro in American Culture”—he’d signed a contract for it with Random House, in 1945—was to be the lordly consummation of a life spent in the service of black expression. The book is a fixture of his later letters: either as an excuse for his absences (“It’s an awful bother,” he apologized to one friend, “but must turn out up to expectation in the long run”) or as something to flaunt before a sexual prospect. Mason’s death had sapped some of his power, so this new mission refreshed his stature and his righteous purpose.

But he couldn’t finish the thing: his health was failing, he was stretched between too many obligations, and he was consumed, as ever, by the torment of unrequited love. His life was still replete with younger men to whom he was an aide and a guide—but not a sexual equal. “What I am trying to say, Alain,” the young Robert E. Claybrooks wrote, “is that you excite me in every other area but a sexual one. It has nothing to do with the differences in ages. Of that I’m certain. Perhaps physical contact was precipitated too soon—I don’t know. But I do know, and this I have withheld until now, an intense feeling of nausea accompanied me after the initial affair, and I know it would be repeated each time, if such were to happen again.” Solomon Rosenfeld, Collins George, Hercules Armstrong: the names flit through the last chapters of Locke’s life, delivering the little sting of sexual insult. By the end, he called himself “an old girl.”

Yet Stewart’s biography aims to heave Locke out of obscurity and prop him next to the reputations he launched. At more than nine hundred pages, it’s a thudding, shapeless text, despotic in its pedantry and exhausting in its zeal, marked by excruciating attention to the most minuscule irrelevances. This is touching—and strangely fitting. Stewart’s research arrives at a kind of Lockean intensity. But even Stewart’s vigor falters as Locke’s own scholarly energies start to wane. “Locke’s involvement with the race issue,” Stewart finally admits about “The Negro in American Culture,” “had been pragmatic, a means to advance himself—to gain recognition, to be esteemed, and ultimately to be loved by the people.”

Love: the word is applied like glue, keeping this vast book in one preposterous piece. Locke’s most lasting lover was Maurice Russell, who was a teen-ager when he found himself looped into Locke’s affections. “You see youth is my hobby,” Locke wrote him at one point. “But the sad thing is the increasing paucity of serious minded and really refined youth.” Russell was there—along with a few other ex-beaux—in 1954, at Benta’s Funeral Home, on 132nd Street in Harlem, after Locke’s death, from congestive heart failure. W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley; Mrs. Paul Robeson; Arthur Fauset; and Charles Johnson all paid their respects to the small, noble figure lying in the coffin, who perhaps would have smiled at a line in Du Bois’s eulogy: “singular in a stupid land.”

The New Negro was a hero, a fetish, a polemical posture—and a blurry portrait of a flinching soul. But Locke took his place, at last, in the history he wished to redeem. “We’re going to let our children know,” Martin Luther King, Jr., declared in Mississippi in 1968, “that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe.” Locke’s class had cleaved him from the “masses”—and his desires had estranged him from his class. From this doubled alienation sprang a baffled psyche: an aesthete traipsing nimbly through an age of brutal rupture. Wincing from humiliation and romantic rejection, he tried to offer his heart to his race. “With all my sensuality and sentimentality,” he wrote to Hughes after Paris, “I love sublimated things.” ♦

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The New Negro Essay Questions

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What is the significance of the title ‘The New Negro’?

This book was written during the 20th century when racism in America was the order of the day. The Black Americans were forced to assimilate into the American culture to fit in society. However, Locke thinks that people should not abandon their culture and blindly start following others. Locke disagrees with authors like Booker Washington, who promotes accommodationist theory that the Blacks in America should integrate white culture for them to fit in. Consequently, this book's title is significant because it advocates for the so-called "new Negroism" in which blacks should appreciate their culture and demand respect for it.

What is the emblematic meaning of the ‘New Negro’?

The 'New Negro' is used by the author to symbolize racial reconciliation. The author introduces the 'New Negro' to counter the narrative of the 'Old Negro' in which the Blacks blindly follow culture assimilation to please the other race. According to the author, Black Americans need to appreciate who they are and fight for their rights instead of imitating the whites' way of doing things. The author thinks that Black people will remain Africans regardless of copying the American culture. Therefore, the 'New Negro' is a terminology that signifies the importance of appreciating oneself and genuinely fighting for your rights.

What is the most significant predicament facing African Americans?

According to Locke, the biggest challenge facing black people is self-denial and lack of self-understanding. African Americans apparently do not want to understand themselves, but they expect the whites to understand them. Failure to stand firm and appreciate African American culture has a negative impact on the war racial discrimination. Therefore, the biggest challenge facing black people is the desire to imitate the whites instead of understanding that they have a culture to safeguard and demand respect.

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The New Negro study guide contains a biography of Alain Locke, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

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The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

Jeffrey C. Stewart

Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 2018

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Where Kamala Harris Lives, a Little-Known History of Enslavement

The vice president’s official residence is in a quiet Washington enclave once home to 34 enslaved people. Ms. Harris has sought to reconnect the property to its Black heritage.

By Robert Draper

Reporting from Washington

Three years ago this month, Vice President Kamala Harris moved into her official residence in northwest Washington, a quiet 73-acre enclave where the U.S. Navy keeps an observatory as well as the nation’s master clock. Early in her stay she saw evidence of digging near her house, and after asking around, learned that an archaeological team had recently found part of a foundation of an Italianate villa, known as North View, that had been there more than a century and a half before.

Near the villa, the team had found something else: A brick foundation of a smokehouse used to cure meat. Ms. Harris did not have to be told who had used it. Well before moving to the new residence, the nation’s first Black vice president had been told by aides about the 34 individuals who once lived on the property against their will. A subsequent opinion essay for CQ Roll Call was the first mention of it in the news media.

The names of the enslaved people were recorded in a document of the era. Peter, Mary and Ellen Jenkins. Chapman, Sarah, Henry, Joseph, Louisa, Daniel and Eliza Toyer. Towley, Jane, Resin, Samuel, Judah and Andrew Yates. Kitty, William, Gilbert and Phillip Silas. Susan, Dennis, Ann Maria and William Carroll. Becky, Milly, Margaret and Mortimer Briscoe. Richard Williams. Mary Young. John Thomas. Mary Brown. John Chapman. William Cyrus.

They ranged in age from 4 months to 65 years, and in skill from winemaking to carpentry. Five of them would go off to the Civil War as Union soldiers. Another would flee at age 13, destination unknown. For those who remained on a property that was known at the time as Pretty Prospects, the abject conditions of their lives are hinted at in documents now preserved at the National Archives.

Mortimer Briscoe, 30, “had one of his toes frost bitten, but is otherwise sound.” John Thomas, 41, “has three fingers on his left hand injured by a corn sheller” but “can drive the carriage and work as well as before.”

Until these enslaved people and roughly 3,000 others in the nation’s capital were emancipated by an act of Congress on April 16, 1862, the 34 inhabitants of Pretty Prospects were the property of a widow, Margaret C. Barber, who lived in the North View villa. Together they constitute a largely unknown chapter in a historic property whose famous resident today believes herself to be descended from an enslaved Jamaican.

After learning about the smokehouse, aides said Ms. Harris asked if any other evidence about the 34 enslaved people had been uncovered. No, she was told. But the discovery, which has now been documented in a new report that will soon be published by the District of Columbia Historic Preservation Office, prompted Ms. Harris to do some digging of her own.

Aides said she studied the old map that the archaeological team had consulted, dated 1882, which displayed the exact location of North View and the nearby smokehouse. About a quarter of a mile from where she lives now was a long-gone dwelling referred to as “Negro House,” where the 34 enslaved workers lived.

Ms. Harris then began poring over photographs taken on the property during the past half-century. The subjects were vice presidents, all white males, with their families and guests. The images conveyed nothing about the role Black people played in the history of the nation’s capital, much less on the property itself.

A Widow on a Farm

The history of a slave farm that then became the U.S. Naval Observatory and today the residence of the nation’s first Black vice president has previously been told only in fragments. This account is based on interviews with associates of Ms. Harris. It is also based on information provided by the naval archaeologist who unearthed the smokehouse, Brian Cleven, and on a trove of historical literature, much of it culled from archives and libraries by the Washington historian Carlton Fletcher.

Ms. Harris has never mentioned the residence’s legacy of slavery in public remarks. Aides said the very idea of moving to such a place only became palatable to her once she was assured that her new home was not the same structure where Ms. Barber’s servants once worked, and that they had been emancipated three decades before it was built.

The Obamas could relate. Michelle Obama, in her speech to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, cited the fact that she lived in the White House as a Black first lady as “the story of generations of people who felt the lash of bondage, the shame of servitude, the sting of segregation, but who kept on striving and hoping and doing what needed to be done so that today I wake up every morning in a house that was built by slaves and I watch my daughters — two beautiful, intelligent, Black young women — playing with their dogs on the White House lawn.”

C.R. Gibbs, a local historian, said that many tourists are unaware of this chapter in Washington’s history. “What people don’t realize when they come to visit the Smithsonian Museum, the Washington Monument, the Capitol or the White House is that they’re standing on slave-worked land,” he said. “And the same holds true with the vice president’s residence.”

North View was built in the early 1850s for a wealthy Baltimore planter, Cornelius Barber. His wife, Margaret, was the offspring of a viticulturist, John Adlum, whose vineyard on the banks of Rock Creek drew admirers like Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. Five of the Barbers’ six children perished from disease, as would the father in 1853, leaving the 43-year-old widow to mind the country estate.

But she had help. The 34 enslaved farmhands and domestic servants under Ms. Barber made her second among the city’s slaveholders. (The first, the tobacco planter George Washington Young, owned 68 people of African descent.) Ms. Barber frequently rented out her men to neighbors who owned farms, tanneries and slaughterhouses. Throughout the 1850s, she netted an annual income of around $1,600, or about $61,000 in today’s currency.

One of Ms. Barber’s female domestic servants, Ellen Jenkins, had been bequeathed to her by her viticulturist father in his will, with the stipulation that Ms. Jenkins would be freed from servitude upon turning 50. But Ms. Barber described Ms. Jenkins in a document as a “good cook” and did not relinquish her servant until the 1862 law emancipated Ms. Jenkins, when she was 60.

Ms. Barber gave up Ms. Jenkins and her other enslaved workers only after hiring a lawyer, who argued to a government committee that the widow was entitled to compensation for her loss. She sought $750 each for them. In the end, Ms. Barber settled for $270 per worker, totaling $9,000, or about $336,500 today. She moved out of the villa, whose grand paintings and chandeliered ballrooms were later defiled by Union soldiers. Ms. Barber died of influenza at age 80 in 1892, around the same time North View was torn down.

A Return of Black History

Today Ms. Harris lives in a white turreted Queen Anne-style three-story building, one with a history less fraught than that of the villa it replaced.

Built in 1893 for the superintendent of the naval observatory and later the home of the Chief of Naval Operations, in 1974 it was designated by Congress as the vice president’s official residence. Walter F. Mondale moved in with his family three years later, abiding with good cheer the not-yet-updated plumbing. He chortled about it in interviews, and said the family became friends with the plumber. The hot water went out a lot.

At some point during the 1980s, Vice President George H.W. Bush added a horseshoe pit to the property. His successor, Dan Quayle, had a putting green and a swimming pool installed, which later endeared Mr. Quayle to Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who along with his wife, Jill, was fond of taking evening dips there. Vice President Dick Cheney preferred the residence’s hammock, where he oversaw the romping of his Labradors, Jackson and Dave. The Pences contributed a beehive and hosted pumpkin-decorating activities on Halloween.

A notable first came two years ago, when Ms. Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, welcomed a gathering of predominantly Black Washington families to celebrate Juneteenth. In her off-the-record remarks that day, the vice president made a passing reference to the 34 individuals who once lived on the property against their will.

Ms. Harris has sought to reconnect the residence with the Black American experience and to showcase the works of minority artists. Last September she hosted a hip-hop concert on the lawn, dancing with 400 guests to performances by Lil Wayne and Q-Tip. She turned to a Harlem-based designer, Sheila Bridges, to reimagine the interior.

In decorating its walls, Ms. Harris passed on landscape paintings offered to her by the Smithsonian and instead installed art that includes works by the Black photographers Carrie Mae Weems and Roy DeCarava, a painting by the Cherokee artist Kay Walkingstick and a quilt by the women of Gee’s Bend, Ala., who are descended from enslaved cotton pickers.

To date, there are no plans by Ms. Harris to commemorate the 34 Black men and women. Their individual histories have all but vanished. The remains of only two have been accounted for.

One of them, Mary Brown, was about 16 at the time of her emancipation and later worked as a housekeeper in Washington before dying in 1886 at the age of 40. The other was Ellen Jenkins, the cook. Ms. Jenkins became a nurse and lived until she was 80.

Both women were buried in a Black cemetery that is now the site of Walter Pierce Park, two miles east of where Ms. Harris lives today.

Because of an editing error, an earlier version of this article misspelled the surname of a Harlem-based designer. She is Sheila Bridges, not Sheila Bridge.

How we handle corrections

Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades. More about Robert Draper

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C.C. Sabathia honors Jackie Robinson's legacy in new FOX Sports video essay

What does it mean to truly change the world? To turn the impossible into the possible? To open minds, open hearts and open paths?

C.C. Sabathia, the former star MLB pitcher for Cleveland , Milwaukee and the New York Yankees , poses those questions and more in a new video essay for FOX Sports to honor Jackie Robinson.

Monday marks the 77th anniversary of Robinson's MLB debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers , which broke the league's color barrier and made him the first Black player in league history. MLB now celebrates Jackie Robinson Day every April 15th, with every uniform in the league changed to No. 42 — the only uniform number retired league-wide — among many other tributes.

As Sabathia alludes to at the beginning of the two-and-a-half-minute essay, Robinson paved the way for Black baseball stars like him to succeed at the sport's highest level.

Sabathia goes on to quote Robinson acknowledging the significance of what he was doing, including the racist backlash he would receive and what it meant for Black Americans everywhere to see him playing in the previously-segregated MLB. As Sabathia pointed out, Robinson played a major role in paving the way for the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s.

One of those Black Americans was a young boy in Mobile, Alabama, whose father pulled him out of school to watch Robinson give a speech and then play in an exhibition game nearby. The boy's name was Henry Aaron. Sabathia quotes MLB's future home run king as saying, "I was allowed to dream after that."

[Related: Baseball Hall of Fame announces Hank Aaron statue on 50th anniversary of his 715th home run ]

Speaking of dreams, MLB will host a special "Field of Dreams"-style regular-season game at Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, this year — the same field where Robinson and a traveling All-Star team played an exhibition game in 1953 at the height of Jim Crow-era segregation in the South. 

As Sabathia points out, segregation was so heightened in that area at that time that, due to an ordinance prohibiting mixed-race games of any kind, the three white players on the team had to sit the game out. Robinson returned to the field with the Dodgers in April 1954 — with the ordinance temporarily lifted — allowing fans to not only watch Robinson play alongside his white Dodgers teammates but also a 20-year-old Hank Aaron take the field for the opposing Milwaukee Braves.

Watch Sabathia's full essay on Robinson's legacy, including those historic games at Rickwood Field, below. 

MLB at Rickwood Field: A tribute to the Negro Leagues will take place on June 20 at 7 p.m. ET on FOX and the FOX Sports App. The game between the San Francisco Giants and St. Louis Cardinals will serve as a tribute to the former Negro Leagues team that called the field home, the Birmingham Black Barons, and in particular its greatest living player, Hall of Famer and Giants legend Willie Mays.

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