Harlem, New York, once known as America’s “Black Mecca,” is as much a household name as the Harlem Renaissance, the artistic and cultural movement that ignited, flourished and extinguished in the early 20th century. This year, in Harlem and in cities across the country, community organizations and universities are among those that will culminate multi-year observances to mark the indelible legacy and centennial of the Harlem Renaissance.
Perhaps lesser known is Dr. Alain LeRoy Locke, the longtime Howard University professor, art critic, Harvard-educated writer, first Black Rhodes Scholar, pioneering philosopher and complex race man who gave expression to the movement he called “the New Negro.” We know it as the Harlem Renaissance.
Locke, whose contributions reached beyond the arts, also provided answers to a generation of Blacks not born into slavery in search of identity, place and self-expression. One of them was writer and poet Langston Hughes. A fixture of the Harlem Renaissance, Hughes first described Locke as “… a little, Brown man with spats and a cultured accent, and a degree from Oxford.”
To learn more about Locke, the man behind the movement, Diverse spoke with Dr. Jacoby Adeshei Carter, an associate professor of philosophy at Howard University and chair of the university’s philosophy department, a position that Locke also held while there. Carter is also an author and director of the Alain LeRoy Locke Society.
DIVERSE: In your 2016 book, African American Contributions to the Americas’ Cultures: A Critical Edition of Lectures by Alaine Locke, why did you want to focus on Locke’s 1943 lectures in Haiti? What did they reveal about how we understand Black art and culture in the U.S.?
CARTER: Those lectures represent the culmination of Locke’s philosophical worldview. During the end of his life, I think that he was getting a broader, more inclusive understanding of African descendent peoples in the United States and throughout the Americas. His initial foray into articulating that can be found largely in those lectures. Because they had not been published in English in the United States, they were little known and were a drastically understudied aspect of Locke’s scholarship.
