Locke, Alain (1885–1954), critic, educator, philosopher, and mentor of the Harlem Renaissance. Alain Locke's role as a general factotum of the Harlem Renaissance has tended to overshadow the full dimensions of an active and productive life. John Edgar Tidwell and John Wright list more than three hundred items spanning the period from 1904 to 1953 in “Alain Locke: A Comprehensive Bibliography of His Published Writings” (Callaloo, Feb.–Oct., 1981). Born in (or near) Philadelphia to parents who were school-teachers, Locke came to maturity in the self-conscious genteel ambiance of Philadelphia's black elite. After completing secondary and normal school studies in Philadelphia, he went to Harvard College, where he majored in philosophy. An appointment as a Rhodes scholar in 1907 followed his undergraduate Harvard experience and he spent time at both Oxford and the University of Berlin, returning to the United States in 1911. Shortly after, he began his long career as a teacher at Howard University. He received his PhD at Harvard in 1917.

Locke began to achieve wide attention as an advisor and contributor to Opportunity, founded in 1923 by Charles S. Johnson under the auspices of the National Urban League. A by-product of this association was his editing The New Negro, the signature anthology of the Harlem Renaissance. During the 1920s, Locke also edited in 1927 Four Negro Poets (Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes) and in the same year (with Montgomery Gregory) Plays of Negro Life. In 1929, Locke began a comprehensive yearly roundup of books relating to Africa and African Americans. These appeared in Opportunity until 1943, and thereafter in Phylon until 1952. They constitute an important record of the discourse relating to African Americans in the period covered. During the 1930s he established the Associates in Negro Folk Education, which published critical works by Sterling A. Brown and others. Locke's own contributions to the series were Negro Art: Past and Present and The Negro and His Music (both 1936). The crowning effort in this project was Locke's landmark illustrated book, The Negro in Art (1940).

From his college days, Locke had been interested in issues of race and culture, leading to his embrace of the concepts of cultural pluralism and cultural relativism. Locke's concept of cultural pluralism had its origins in his interactions with a teacher at Harvard, Horace Kallen, then a graduate assistant to the philosopher George Santayana. Cultural pluralism offers a counter to the cultural amalgamation of the “melting pot” paradigm, since that paradigm would clearly exclude African Americans and other distinctive groups. Cultural relativism is the assertion of the parity of different cultures and the rejection of the social Darwinian hierarchy that supported nineteenth-century racial and political theories inimical to African Americans and other groups. Locke's cultural relativism is closely allied to that which became a tenet of American anthropology as it emerged under the aegis of Franz Boas. It is significant that both Kallen and Boas were Jewish. Locke's early interests in race were explored in a series of lectures offered in 1916, against opposition, at Howard University. These lectures were published only in 1992 in an edition by Jeffrey C. Stewart. Locke's more mature reflections on race and culture are perhaps best represented in his commentaries in the anthology (edited with Bernhard Stern) When Peoples Meet (1942).

By the late 1920s, however, Locke had also refined and propagated a theory of ancestral and folk tradition, particularly stressing its relevance for the visual and literary artist. At first, he was especially drawn to those young writers who seemed to exemplify the fulfillment of his expectations; of these, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Sterling Brown, only the latter retained his confidence in ensuing years.

Locke envisaged summarizing his views in a work to be entitled The Negro in American Culture. Ill health prevented his proceeding with it and the task was entrusted to a protégée, Margaret Just Butcher. The work that appeared under this title, although it mentions Locke's notes, owes little to Locke and must be regarded as an independent production.

Locke ranks with W. E. B. Du Bois and Carter G. Woodson as a seminal intellectual influence in African American culture; he shares with them political and social interests and a sense of mission in “uplifting the race’; he was unique, however, in the breadth and knowledge of artistic expression and achievement that he brought to their shared larger tasks.

Bibliography

• Russell J. Linneman, ed., Alain Locke: Reflections on a Modern Renaissance Man, 1982.
• Jeffrey C. Stewart, ed., The Critical Temper of Alain Locke, 1983.
• Leonard Harris, ed., The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond, 1989.
• Alain Leroy Locke, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, ed. Jeffrey C. Stewart, 1992

Richard A. Long

The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature. Copyright © 2001, 2002 by Oxford University Press, Inc. All rights reserved.