The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke

A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the century to mentor a generation of young artists including Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro--the creative African Americans whose art, literature, music, and drama would inspire Black people to greatness. In The New Negro : The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally. He narrates the education of Locke, including his becoming the first African American Rhodes Scholar and earning a PhD in philosophy at Harvard University, and his long career as a professor at Howard University. Locke also received a cosmopolitan, aesthetic education through his travels in continental Europe, where he came to appreciate the beauty of art and experienced a freedom unknown to him in the United States. And yet he became most closely associated with the flowering of Black culture in Jazz Age America and his promotion of the literary and artistic work of African Americans as the quintessential creations of American modernism. In the process he looked to Africa to find the proud and beautiful roots of the race. Shifting the discussion of race from politics and economics to the arts, he helped establish the idea that Black urban communities could be crucibles of creativity. Stewart explores both Locke's professional and private life, including his relationships with his mother, his friends, and his white patrons, as well as his lifelong search for love as a gay man. Stewart's thought-provoking biography recreates the worlds of this illustrious, enigmatic man who, in promoting the cultural heritage of Black people, became--in the process--a New Negro himself.

Section I. The Education of Alain Locke --
1. A Death and a Birth --
2. A Black Victorian Childhood --
3. Child God and Black Aesthete --
4. An Errand of Culture at Howard College, 1904-1905 --
5. Locke's Intellectual Awakening at Harvard, 1905-1907 --
6. Going for the Rhodes --
7. Oxford Contrasts --
8. Black Cosmopolitan --
9. Paying Second Year Dues at Oxford, 1908-1909 --
10. Italy and America, 1909-1910 --
11. Berlin Stories --
12. Exile's Return --
13. Race Cosmopolitan Comes Home, 1911-1912 --
14. Radical Sociologist at Howard University, 1912-1916 --
15. Rapprochement and Silence : Harvard, 1916-1917 --
16. Fitting in Washington, DC, 1917-1922 --
Section II. Enter the New Negro --
17. Rebirth --
18. Mother of a Movement, Mothered in Return, 1922-1923 --
19. Europe Before Egypt --
20. Egypt Bound --
21. Renaissance Self-Fashioning in 1924 --
22. The Dinner and the Dean --
23. Battling the Barnes --
24. Looking for Love and Finding the New Negro --
25. Harlem Issues --
26. The New Negro and Howard --
27. The New Negro and The Blacks --
28. Beauty or Propaganda? --
29. Black Curator and White Momma --
30. Langston's Indian Summer --
31. The American Scholar --
32. On Maternalism --
Section III. Metamorphosis --
33. The Naked and the Nude --
34. The Saving Grace of Realism --
35. Bronze Booklets, Gold Art --
36. Warn A Brother --
37. The Riot and the Ride --
38. Transformation --
39. Two Trains Running --
40. The Queer Toussaint --
41. The Invisible Locke --
42. FBI, Haiti, and Diasporic Democracy --
43. Wisdom de Profundis --
44. The New Negro Lives --
Epilogue.

A tiny, fastidiously dressed man emerged from Black Philadelphia around the turn of the twentieth century to mentor a generation of young artists like Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and Jacob Lawrence and call them the New Negro—the gender ambiguous, transformative, artistic African Americans whose art would subjectivize Black people and embolden greatness.