Alain Locke
Intro. “The New Negro”
Alain Locke, “The Father of the Harlem
Renaissance” (1885-1954)
1907) Graduates from Harvard with degrees in English and Philosophy
1910-11) Studies in Germany and France as a Rhodes Scholar
1911) Works with Carter Woodson at Howard University where he comes in close contact with
other race leaders like Du Bois.
1918) Receives Ph.D. from Harvard for his doctoral thesis The Problem of Classification in the
Theory of Value
1918) Becomes chair of the Howard Department of Philosophy
1918-1925) Locke tirelessly promotes African American artists, writers, and musicians,
encouraging them to look to Africa as an inspiration for their works
1925) Publishes his issue of Survey Graphic which becomes the template for the New Negro
Selected Bibliography
* “Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro.” Survey Graphic 6.6 (1 March 1925). [1].
* When Peoples Meet: A Study of Race and Culture Contacts. Alain Locke and Bernhard J.
Stern, eds.New York: Committee on Workshops, Progressive Education Association, 1942.
* The Philosophy of Alain Locke: Harlem Renaissance and Beyond. Edited by Leonard Harris.
Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989.
* Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures of the Theory and Practice of Race.
Washington, D.C.: Howard University Press, 1916. Reprinted & edited by Jeffery C. Stewart.
Washington: Howard University Press, 1992.
* Negro Art Past and Present. Washington: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936.
(Bronze Booklet No. 3).
* The Negro and His Music. Washington: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936. (Bronze
Booklet No. 2).
* “The Negro in the Three Americas.” Journal of Negro Education 14 (Winter 1944): 7–18.
Alain Locke, “The Father of the Harlem Renaissance” (18851954)
Bibliography Cont.
Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States (1940). Compact disc. New York: Bridge, 2002. Audio (1:14).
* “Spirituals” (1940). The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture. Edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart. New York and London: Garland, 1983. Pp. 123–26.
* The New Negro: An Interpretation. New York: Arno Press, 1925.
* Four Negro Poets. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1927.
* Plays of Negro Life: a Source-Book of Native American Drama. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1927.
* A Decade of Negro Self-Expression. Charlottesville, Virginia, 1928.
* The Negro in America. Chicago: American Library Association, 1933.
* Negro Art - Past and Present. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936.
* The Negro and His Music. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1936; also New York: Kennikat Press, 1936.
* The Negro in Art: A Pictorial Record of the Negro Artist and of the Negro Theme in Art. Washington, D.C.: Associates in Negro Folk Education, 1940; also New York: Hacker Art Books,
1940.
* A Collection of Congo Art. Arts 2 (February 1927): 60–70.
* Harlem: Dark Weather-vane. Survey Graphic 25 (August 1936): 457–462, 493-495.
* The Negro and the American Stage. Theatre Arts Monthly 10 (February 1926): 112–120.
* The Negro in Art. Christian Education 13 (November 1931): 210–220.
* Negro Speaks for Himself. The Survey 52 (April 15, 1924): 71–72.
* The Negro's Contribution to American Art and Literature The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 140 (November 1928): 234–247.
* The Negro's Contribution to American Culture. Journal of Negro Education 8 (July 1939): 521–529.
* A Note on African Art. Opportunity 2 (May 1924): 134–138.
* Our Little Renaissance. Ebony and Topaz, edited by Charles S. Johnson. New York: National Urban League, 1927.
* Steps Towards the Negro Theatre. Crisis 25 (December 1922): 66–68.
* The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value: or an Outline of a Genetic System of Values. Ph.D. dissertation: Harvard, 1917.
* “Locke, Alain.” [Autobiographical sketch.] Twentieth Century Authors. Ed. Stanley Kunitz and Howard Haycroft. New York: 1942. P. 837.
* “The Negro Group.” Group Relations and Group Antagonisms. Edited by Robert M. MacIver. New York: Institute for Religious Studies, 1943
* World View on Race and Democracy: A Study Guide in Human Group Relations. Chicago: American Library Association, 1943.
* Le rôle du Negro dans la culture des Amerique. Port-au-Prince: Haiti Imprimerie de l’état, 1943.
* “Values and Imperatives.” American Philosophy, Today and Tomorrow. Ed. Sidney Hook and Horace M. Kallen. New York: Lee Furman, 1935. Pp. 312–33. Reprints: Freeport, NY: Books
West) 18.10 (January 1928): 315–16.
* “Educator and Publicist,” Star of the West 22.8 (November 1931) 254–55. [Obituary of George William Cook [Baha'i], 1855–1931].
* “Minorities and the Social Mind.” Progressive Education 12 (March 1935): 141–50.
* “The High Cost of Prejudice.” Forum 78 (Dec. 1927).
* “The Negro Poets of the United States.” Anthology of Magazine Verse 1926 and Yearbook of American Poetry. Sesquicentennial edition. Ed. William S. Braithwaite. Boston: B.J. Brimmer,
1926. Pp. 143–151. The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Selection of His Essays on Art and Culture. Edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart. New York and London: Garland, 1983. Pp. 43–45.
* Plays of Negro Life: A Source-Book of Native American Drama. Alain Locke and Montgomery Davis, eds. New York and Evanston: Harper and Row, 1927. “Decorations and Illustrations
by Aaron Douglas.”
* “Impressions of Luxor.” The Howard Alumnus 2.4 (May 1924): 74–78.
The New Negro:
How to account for a new psychology
Talking Points
1)
The Sociologist,
Philanthropist, Race
Leader, and the New
Negro
2)
The theme of a
younger generation
awakening the masses
3)
The role of literature in
this project of
awakening.
The “Old Negro” in American Letters
Talking Points
1)
The portrayal of
African Americas in
letters before the New
Negro movement
2)
The polemical
necessity of the Old
Negro and his status
as antiquated in the
field of letters
3)
Righting historical
fiction
4)
The Enlightenment vs.
the Modernist
missions of African
American letters
The shadow of Self Awareness:
The Sense of Self as a Social Problem
Talking Points
1)
Echoes of Du Bois:
racial uplift and its ties
to self-understanding
2)
The necessity to
confront social
problems and the
necessity to
understand selfawareness as a social
problem
3)
The metaphor of the
veil and the shadow
Self Understanding and Art:
Shedding Folk Shame
Talking Points
1)
The point towards
“Negro” art as “folk art”
and its political
implications
2)
The necessity for self
understanding in
“Negro emancipation”
3)
Imitation, Inferiority,
Pride, Emancipation
Current Artistic Production:
Yielding a New Self Knowledge
Talking Points
1)
The relationship
between race
leadership and artistic
production
2)
The buoyancy of
psychic life and the
precariousness of
“conditions without”
3)
Mental and physical
migrations.
The Great Migration’s Consequences
Part I
Talking Points
1)
Fact and the art of
the New Negro vs.
the “bogeys” of
melodramas past
2)
The Migration and
the Negro problem
as a a national
problem
3)
The pitfalls of
sectionalism
4)
The advent of the
black middle class
Part II
Cosmopolitanism, Heterogeneity and Melding a Race
Talking Points
1)
The conflagration of
sociological shifts in
the Negro community
and the advent of the
New Negro
2)
The heterogeneity and
unifying principle of
race sympathy
3)
Harlem as a Racial
Metropole
Race radicals:
The Vanguard and a New Era
Talking Points
1)
Harlem as
Prophetic: The
New City on
Sugar Hill
2)
Echoes of the
“Talented Tenth”
and the
responsibility of
the “Race man”
v.s. the onset of
a truly mass-led
movement
3)
The dual edge
of patronage:
Garrison v.s.
Mason
Cultural Nationalism in an Interracial Republic
Talking Points
1)
The Negro as an Object of
Study: the importance of the
international academy
2)
The Negro as an Object of
Art: realism and caricature
3)
The Study of the Negro and
Negro Art as Interracial
contact
4)
The question of labor
organization and racist union
practices
5)
Philanthropy and “Long
distance philanthropy”: the
question of patronage
Negro “Self Expression”:
Achieving National Expression and Understanding
Talking Points
1)
The desire to be
understood v.s. the
desire for
understanding
2)
The New Negro,
Democracy, and the
fruition pf American
Culture
3)
Arts and letters as
means to bypass the
“spite wall” by allowing
for “fuller, truer selfexpression….”
Racialism and Americanism:
Non-Exclusive Terms
Talking Points
1)
Separatism,
Nationalism, and
Racial Uplift
2)
The Negro Problem as
a test of American
Democracy
Repositioning the Negro in Letters and Society
Self-Respect and Self-Reliance
Talking Points
1)
The decline of
sentimental appeal in
favor of the “inner
objective” of a
mentality centered on
self-respect and self
reliance.
2)
Reconstruction and
the Sentimental
Romance
3)
Race pride as a social
contribution
4)
The Recognition of
and Incorporation of
the Negro as he
stands”
Art: Tension Ideals and Reality
Talking Points
1)
The Negro Artist as
member of both racial
and national
vanguards and as a
vehicle for social
change.
2) The relationship
between the republic’s
professed ideals and
the Negro artist
3) Locke’s own method:
searching for evidence
of mass movement in
artistic production
Negro Art:
Social Creeds and Social Practices
Talking Points
1)
The “moral advantage”
of the Negro Artist and
his avoidance of
cynicism
2)
The inadequacy of
passive resistance and
the project of letters as
social activism
3)
The absence of an
alternative
The Practices of Diaspora?
Talking Points
1)
The New Negro and
Internationalism: the
race problem as a
world problem
2)
Pan-Africanism and
the Negro’s Zionism
3)
Heterogeneity and
Collectivity
4)
Colonialism and the
the “common
interests” of darker
peoples.
Re-evaluating Art Past and Present:
Where the Negro Already Is…
Talking Points
1)
The theme of
American art as Negro
folk art and music
2)
Negro artistic
contributions as extant
national expression
3)
The call for a reevaluation of Negro
contribution to
mainstream
contemporary life.
Internationalism:
Garvey, the American Negro, and pan-Africanisms
Talking Points
1)
Cooperative
development between
Africa and the New
Negro
2)
Marcus Garvey and
the UNIA
3)
“Black is Beautiful”
4)
The American Negro’s
“New Internationalism”
The Renaissance: The Promise of the 2nd Crop
Talking Points
1)
The dual and daunting
charge: the betterment
of the race and the
development of selfexpression
2)
The Promise of the
Second Crop,
Democracy, and a
New Spiritual Coming
of Age
Selections from The New Negro
• Zora Neale Hurston: Spunk
• Poetry: Cullen, McKay, Toomer, Johnson, Hughes,
Bontemps, Johnson, Spencer, Grimke, Alexander
• Countee Cullen “Heritage”
• Alain Locke “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” and
“American Negro Folk Literature”
• W.E.B. Du Bois “The Negro Mind Reaches Out”