Alain Leroy Locke

1. Alain Leroy Locke Ariona Marks 5th Block 3/5/13 African American Project

2. Alain Leroy Locke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on September 13, 1886. He was brought up in a stable, African-American household by both of his loving parents. His father was a successful lawyer in Philadelphia, and his mother was a well-liked public school teacher. As a child, Alain survived a bout with rheumatic fever that permanently damaged his heart. Eventually he became healthy enough to attend school. While attending Central High School in Philadelphia, Locke excelled in his studies, graduating second in his class. Afterwards, he attended the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, where he graduated first in his class. Because of his outstanding academic achievements, Locke was accepted into Harvard University in 1907.

3. Locke achieved great things in his years at Harvard. During his junior year, he became a member of Phi Beta Kappa, the nation’s oldest and largest academic honor society, and became very popular with his classmates. Locke’s new friends at the university began to draw his attention to a major issue on campus: racism. As an African-American, he became concerned. He did not feel inferior to his white classmates and hoped to address these issues later on in his career. Through his hard work and dedication, Alain graduated from Harvard in just three years and was awarded the prestigious Bowdoin Prize in English Literature for an essay he had written in an English class.

4. Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954), the first black Rhodes Scholar and a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance, became a Bahá’í in 1918. After publishing The New Negro, an anthology of writings by African American authors, he gained national prominence as a spokesman for African-Americans. As a humanist and philosopher, he is recognized as a major contributor to the Harlem Rennaissance, was started in the 1920s and produced the likes of Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Louis Armstrong. Dr. Locke promoted what he called “cultural pluralism,” which contends that cultural groups can maintain their own identity and still be part of a broader culture. Some of his writings, including three essays published for the first time in their entirety, can be found in the 2005 Vol 36. #3 edition of World Order magazine. After becoming a Bahá’í in his early 30s, Dr. Locke focused on the Bahá’í principle of oneness and wrote: “The intellectual core of the problems of the peace … will be the discovery of the necessary common denominators …involved in a democratic world order or democracy on a world scale.”

5. Furthermore Locke edited the Bronze Booklet a study of cultural achievements for blacks. For almost two decades he annually reviewed literature written by and about blacks in the magazines Opportunity and Phylon. Locke’s most famous works include Four Negro Poets (1927), Frederick Douglass, a Biography of Anti-Slavery (1935), Negro Art--Past and Present (1936), and The Negro and His Music (1936). Through these works he suggests and advocated one of his strongest inferences, that “defining the artistic connection to Africa would be an important step in defining African American culture,” (Kwuame 512). Locke also wrote an essay leading up to World War I and republished again before World War II, it was called Moral Imperatives for World Order and includes his beliefs of the social and cultural guidelines of the modern world.