7

Oxford Contrasts

“I find myself an excellent sailor,” Locke noted in his second letter to his mother from on board the Kaiser Wilhelm. He was thrilled to be leaving behind America and sailing into an unknown future abroad. He had “eaten 5 meals a day—not having missed one[.] I feel the trip is doing me lots of good.”¹ Locke looked forward to escaping the American race problem and immersing himself like other American aesthetes in the art and culture of Europe. While an Anglophile, Locke was also interested in Paris, Berlin, and Rome, cities associated with a new artistic modernism and avant-garde of pre–World War Europe. Europe was alive with a creative ferment his professors and fellow students had spoken of incessantly at Harvard. Now he was going to experience that Europe firsthand.

Locke also contemplated the possibility of not coming back. Before he left for England, Oswald Garrison Villard had advised him that it might be best to remain in Europe if he could make a good living there given the racial situation in America. Locke’s letters from the Kaiser Wilhelm suggest that he was already thinking that a literary career in Europe might allow him permanent residence abroad. Life in Europe also promised a more tolerant sexual life, since homosexuality appeared to be more tolerated in European nations than in the United States. Even England, which had been rocked in 1895 by the Oscar Wilde trial, was less legally and morally repressive than the United States. And Oxford—Wilde’s university—was well known as a haven for male homosexuals. Perhaps at Oxford he would find social and sexual acceptance that went beyond Harvard’s. Perhaps such freedom would fire his muse and enable him to move beyond literary criticism to creative writing. Locke welcomed his trip to Oxford as a wonderful possibility of a cosmopolitan life abroad.

Locke’s trip began with many of the familiar attributes of the honeymoon in Europe for Black Americans. There was “no prejudice on board,” he wrote to his mother from the Kaiser Wilhelm, as “we have a seat at the first officer’s table—that is next to the captain’s table, and have very pleasant chatty table mates.” He was readily accepted as a member of the ship’s community and spent his time reading, playing shuffleboard, and participating in games with children. There were some interesting people on board, “the Van Remsaleavs, the Henry’s (relations to [Henry] Jacobs), several Leipsig conservatory students, [and] a Mrs. Wistar Brown who has invited me to visit her in Frankfort on the Main Germany.” In fact, Locke was “a mild sort of curiosity” on board, “which I rather enjoy than resent—They all come up rather shyly from behind—clear their throats as a warning signal and say So you are going to Oxford—”² Rather than leaving race behind in America, Locke had brought it on board where, combined with the status of being a Rhodes Scholar, it made him a celebrity.

Carl Downes’s presence made this trip particularly pleasant. According to Locke, he was an “excellent travelling companion.” For one thing, they were compatible enough to share expenses: Downes had changed all of his money into English currency before boarding, and then learned that the Kaiser Wilhelm only accepted American (or German) money. So Locke paid the expenses on board, while Downes promised to pay their London expenses, which were eventually the larger share. But Downes was an easygoing fellow and not a stickler about money matters (which Locke was) in part because he was relatively well-to-do: his father was footing the bill for his year at Oxford. Even more important, this was Downes’s second trip to Europe, which made him a tour guide for Locke. This was becoming a pattern for Locke: when he entered unknown or unfamiliar situations, he habitually brought someone, usually one of his close White, male friends, as a kind of protector. He had done so when he had made his maiden speech to the Cambridge church. He now had another protector/guide as he went abroad. Locke also seems to have had a romantic interest in Downes. Although Locke had known Downes at Harvard, he had not been as close to him as some of the other fellows. Now, sequestered together for a five-day trip to England, he could determine whether Downes was also interested in him.

Apparently, the trip went well, for when he landed at Plymouth on September 30, he was in an excellent mood. “It was a beautiful landing … and we steamed up through the swellest fleet of French and English sailing vessels I have ever seen. The cliffs were beautiful—covered with dwarfish English trees, all sorts of wonderful shades of green—you really have no idea of what beautiful soft green is until you see England and I hope you will.” They passed through customs without difficulty.

Downes and I tumbled into the compartment (you know the English and continental trains have compartments with doors opening on the sides) with a Mr. Broad of New York—a fellow passenger on the ship who is chief musician of the Perforated Music Company in London—he directed us to Wards hotel—and after a beautiful 4 hours ride on the Great Western to London, we got in a typical London fog—It was only 4 o’clock, but dark as 7 or 8 at home, and a pretty time we would have had finding accommodations by ourselves. We simply got into a cab and drove to Wards where they gave us a very large double room and excellent board for 30 shillings, $7.50 a week … things are much cheaper in England—this was a very nice house in the Russell Square residential district, with 2 flunkey’s in full dress from early morning till night—who said yes sir and thank you if you looked at them.³

After a quick trip up to Oxford on October 2 to register for the term, Locke and Downes returned to London to spend the next ten days sightseeing. Unlike Locke’s first days alone at Harvard where he got down quickly to work, at Oxford with Downes he took a more relaxed approach. He wanted to ease into his studies at Oxford and was glad to have Downes as a companion and guide. “Really, we did London, saw it through and through,” he informed his mother. First, they explored Southampton Row and Oxford Streets, getting lost despite Downes’s familiarity: “I never saw such a city—enormous—and the crowds of people and vehicles far outdoes New York—it really isn’t safe to walk—or doesn’t look so—and wouldn’t be except that the London policemen control everything and everybody with a crook of the finger.” Not only were London policemen impressive, but so was the lifestyle of the elite. “The better classes use cabs and hansoms all together—there are regular cab stands, and every house of the better sort has a cab whistle[:] you step out on your doorstep and blow your cab whistle and in less than a minute your cab’s there[.]” The only drawback was that “you have to tip everybody—you ask someone a direction on the street and its a tip—every cabby expects a tip[,] but fortunately they are not large—you just have to carry around a pocket ful [l] of small coin[.]” Locke found even that troublesome because “their penny is as large and as heavy as a half dollar[!]”⁴

Once accustomed to their surroundings, Locke and Downes swept through the major cultural sites. First, they visited the National Art Gallery, which astounded him: “I never saw such a collection of pictures … the Reynolds and Gainsboroughs and Reyburns—There is an enormous collection of Turners pictures in one large gallery—some very wonderful and others quite bad to my thinking—I never saw such a collection of Italian paintings though—some of them are marvelous.” He promised to send her the catalog and mark the paintings he liked the best. They also went twice to the “Royal Opera at Covent Garden—for 5 shillings 1.25 we got seats in the dress circle stalls and rubbed elbows with the upper middle class—just think of it—the upper middle class—why I suppose we belong to the lower – higher class don’t we Mother—at any rate we’re going up—Well we saw Carmen—a most remarkable performance and Faust not so good.”⁵

Downes encouraged Locke to take in more eccentric sightseeing along with the traditional high-culture spots. “We went next night to the commonest theatre in Shoreditch and saw a bloody melodrama sitting besides innumerable Currys and Curretts (?)—old English couples who brought bread in their pockets, cut it with the old man’s jack knife and munched and munched and munched like the sailor’s wife in MacBeth.” Back on the traditional tourist trail, they visited Westminster Abbey, which Locke deemed “the great sight of our trip. Twas very impressive.” They also had time to see the Henry VII Chapel: “it contains the tombs of Elisabeth and Mary Queen of Scots—and is a beautiful example of flowery Gothic.”⁶ Here was the beginning of a fascination with Gothic chapels and cathedrals in Europe that would continue for years.

Locke was also able to begin making important contacts. “I must tell you that Mr. Isaka Seme—a wealthy East Indian met us—took us to the Middle Temple—the law courts—the Temple is the ancient association of English judges and barristers—they have beautiful old Gothic buildings just opposite Temple Bar Library—”⁷ Seme, actually a Zulu from South Africa, had received a BA from Columbia University and was studying law at Jesus College while residing in London where he worked as a legal assistant at Middle Temple. Already an able and ambitious attorney, Seme had dreams of starting a Pan-African organization in England comprising Africans from around the world. His March letter welcoming Locke to Oxford while he was still at Harvard may have been part of his plan to enlist the Black Rhodes Scholar in his Pan-African vision. Apparently, after arriving in London, Locke contacted Seme and, in turn, the South African arranged for Locke to meet one of the most important thinkers of African descent in England, Dr. Theophilis Scholes, whom Locke described as “a negro author of some repute here[.]” Locke met Seme and Scholes on October 6, attended service at St. Paul’s Cathedral with them, and then “dined with Dr. Scholes at his house.”⁸ Locke enjoyed being the star attraction.

Locke may have dawdled in London that first week because he had not yet resolved where he would reside at Oxford. His last letter to Francis Wylie had threatened to refuse residence in Hertford and resubmit his application to Magdalen (or one of the other renowned colleges on his original list). That would have been disastrous for Wylie, as mass confusion might have resulted if Locke had gained admission to another college, and other Rhodes Scholars had demanded to be moved out of that college. It was imperative for Wylie, therefore, to persuade Locke to accept Hertford. Shortly after Locke’s October 2 visit to Oxford, Wylie invited Locke to lunch at the Rhodes Trust office in London with Dr. George Parkin. The three men discussed things “very frankly,” Locke recalled later to his mother, and they persuaded him to accept the place offered at Hertford. He admitted that it was

a smaller college … but a very good one[.] Magdalen[,] the college I wanted to get into[,] is very expensive and if you are not of the English nobility you get very poor accommodations—besides it is down by the river and is very damp and unhealthy—Still it is a most beautiful place—a perfect dream and I should ever so much like to be there—It was proposed that in 2 or 3 years I try the fellowship examinations and perhaps I then shall be able to go to my beloved Magdalen[.]⁹

Of course, such untitled students had obtained perfectly acceptable rooms in Magdalen. But the college had selected students mainly from elite private schools such as Eton and Wykeham and had accepted very few Rhodes Scholars in the four years the Trust had operated. Wylie’s advice, though self-serving, was sound: there was little chance an upstart Rhodes Scholar could muscle his way in at such a late date. And Locke did not put up much of a fight; having just arrived in England, he was enjoying himself immensely and did not want to antagonize his hosts. Indeed he impressed them with his common sense and reasonableness. Parkin, a man who had initially been skeptical about Locke’s prospects, was mildly enthusiastic about Locke after their meeting: “Have just met the negro Rhodes scholar Locke of Pennsylvania the other day; He is not at all a bad little fellow himself: and I hope things will go all right. He is quite prepared for having difficulties, which he says he is already accustomed to, but he seems to be going to face them cheerfully.” Parkin could not help noticing, “he has the grace and politeness of manner of a Frenchman or Italian.”¹⁰ Locke was already the Wendell-like dandy, a man who had cultivated a persona that perfectly matched the Italianate manner dominant at Oxford.

Once settled in, Locke was “tremendously pleased with Hertford.” The small but intimate Hertford College stood opposite the famous Bodleian Library and Sheldonian Theatre on Cate Street. It was certainly more centrally located than Magdalen. Originally founded in 1740, Hertford College had closed for lack of funds in 1818, but reopened in 1874 through the benefaction of T. C. Baring, a noted banker. Although not one of the oldest of Oxford colleges, its recent completion of the North Quad, or New Buildings as Locke called them, gave Hertford the most modern accommodations in Oxford. As he wrote his mother, “I have elegant rooms in the New Buildings,” including

a large sitter with lounge chair, morris chair, long sofa upon which 3 or 4 fellows stretch out every evening [—] it must be six or seven feet long on open grate—writing desk, sideboard, 2 window seats—hanging electric light chandelier—desk light—and for two pound $10 a term I have hired a stylish English weathered oak piano with weathered oak bench—The sideboard is for food and wines—let me tell you how we live—I have a man servant—a scout who is hired by the college—(we have to tip him though) who takes complete charge of five or six men—He comes in every morning at 7:30 makes the fire—runs the water in the bath and then wakes you up with Good morning sir what will you have for breakfast—you get up order breakfast—take a dip—dress—(and what dressing) in the morning you put on grey flannel trousers and I have a brown norfolk jacket with brown leather buttons flannel shirt (all of which had to be made to order) dress I say—put on cap and gown and go to chapel—or if you don’t want to go to chapel—go to the lodge and report to the Dean—just think of it,—dressed by 8 o’clock in the morning—each college has its own chapel.¹¹

What bothered him most during those first two weeks in England was that he did not receive any letters from his mother. Despite his precise instructions to address them care of the Lloyds Company in London, her letters had gone astray. Anxious to hear from her, he had walked every day since landing from his hotel in Bloomsbury to the Lloyd Company’s offices on Cockspur Street to ask for letters; every time he had been disappointed. Even after he had moved up to Oxford, he heard nothing. “Saturday, the 12, I went down to London especially—went to the Cockspur street office—not a single piece of mail had been received. I then went to Wards Private Hotel[—]they had had no mail[.] I gave both of them forwarding orders when I left London.” Giving in to his mounting panic, he cabled her—“Worried anything wrong. Can cable money, Roy Locke,” with a request for an immediate answer, which she supplied. Reassured, he wrote on October 23, “You were surprised I guess at the cablegram, but I could do nothing else—I was never so worried up in my life. I told you, you know, to write right off—there must have been some hitch somewhere.” Then, he confessed, “If I had waited till now and not heard anything, I should have sailed right off.” It was worth the money, he declared, because “when we are so far away from each other I daresay it will have to be used. It cost me $7 or thereabouts, but you see I got an answer from you in a few hours.” After encouraging her to cable if she needed to reach him instantly, he set up a code to use in cabling—her code name was “Stevenlock Camden,” his “Hertlock Oxford”—to save money on the address in future cables. Perhaps to shift attention away from his needs, he inquired about her financial situation, because “I have been anxiously waiting your letters, for I do not know just how money matters stand.”¹² But realistically, the two weeks between letters precluded him from providing the close supervision of her finances he had exercised from Harvard. More likely, Locke’s panic stemmed from a deeper source: his stay at Oxford was the first time in his life that he was really separated from his mother and the stabilizing influence she had exerted in his emotional life. Locke had needed to hear from her and to feel her soothing presence, but she had not been there.

More than separation anxiety caused his burning need to hear from her: Locke had begun to experience some of the “difficulties” that Parkin had predicted for him. The best contemporary record of the racial problems Locke experienced upon his arrival at Oxford comes from a diary kept by Horace Kallen. An October 18 entry in Kallen’s diary suggests that even before Locke had matriculated into the university there were discussions among the Americans about the southern Rhodes Scholars and Locke. “Tuesday night Louis Dyer [a former Harvard professor then a fellow of Balliol College at Oxford] called. … Our conversation was about Harvard—Bliss Perry & Schofield & their jobs, the trubble [sic] about Locke & Meriman’s damned impertinent interference; the objections of the southern Rhodes Scholars to him[.]”¹³ The southern Rhodes Scholars who had tried initially to get Locke disqualified stepped up their objections to him in person. For the first time in his life, he was experiencing naked racism, directed at and focused on him.

So intense was the controversy that Kallen, in an October 22 letter, asked Barrett Wendell to lend some assistance in the struggle.

Now I want to ask a favor of you. You will perhaps remember little Locke. The yellow boy who took Comp. Lit. I when you first gave it as English 42. He is here as a Rhodes Scholar; and some people have been in [sic] America officious and mean-spirited enough to draw “the color-line” for the benefit of Englishmen. The boy earned his scholarship in an open competition. He has said nothing to me himself. Others have deprecated his being there. But he is here, one of America’s scholars, and a Harvard man. He finds himself suddenly shut out of things,—unhappy, and lonely and [he] doesn’t know why.¹⁴

Interestingly, Kallen knew Locke was being shut out of things without discussing it with him. Kallen apparently heard the comments and noticed that Locke was absent from many of the gatherings for the Rhodes Scholars. In staking out his racial position in his letter to Wendell, who was not only anti-Black but also anti-Jewish, Kallen found it necessary to articulate the reservations of even a liberal to social contact with ordinary Negroes. “As you know, I have neither respect nor liking for his race—but individually they have to be taken, each on his own merits and value, and if ever a negro was worthy, this boy is.” Kallen acknowledged that “I have remembered your warning [presumably, a warning not to get involved] and have been silent on the matter, but I listened with great anger and I have said all that I could concerning what was commendable in him, and now I want to get you to write a word to Dyer and others, if you can, to help right this wrong.”

Unfortunately, there is no record of Locke’s view of these early hostilities at Oxford. His letters to his mother in October do not mention any trouble. Even when he wrote her later about this period, he did not mention these problems, focusing instead on how popular he was at Oxford. According to Locke, he was showered with invitations to tea, to dinner, and to the theater from English undergraduates, colonial students, and prominent Oxford professors. Indeed, he had been invited out so much that he had had to spend almost all of his allowance for the Michaelmas term on clothes, in part because he had to have them specially made for his frame. Some days he was so swamped with invitations, he wrote his mother, that he had to change clothes four or five times a day, as he went from morning chapel to lectures to luncheon invitations to Greek lessons with his tutor, to boating exercises as coxswain, to tea with fellow Americans, and then formal dinners with Englishmen. He complained that the fellows seldom left him alone, dropping by at all hours to ask him out or to lie around on his sofa, so that he hardly had any time for reading or writing. In short, his letters to his mother seem to indicate that Oxford had so completely opened its bosom to him that he felt totally accepted socially.

Locke was fabulously entertained, but his popularity was engineered by those around him who rallied to his side in the face of the conflict. Locke may or may not have known of Kallen’s correspondence, but if he did, he certainly did not relay it to his mother. As Sir Edgar Williams, the Oxford Rhodes Secretary after Wylie, recalled, Oxonians probably responded to Locke in part out of embarrassment over the “impertinence” and bad manners of the southern scholars. Wylie and his wife tried to help by contacting those they thought might befriend Locke. By the end of October, their solicitations bore fruit. “I believe you had a message through Mr. Wylie,” Elinor Dicey wrote Locke, “that my husband Professor Dicey would be glad to make your acquaintance & that we are as a rule at home on Sunday afternoons from 4–5:30. Possibly Mr. Wylie only mentioned last Sunday—so write to say we shall hope to see you on the 27th.” Locke went, of course. Dicey, who had taught at Harvard, was a friend of William James and a prominent constitutional law professor at All Souls College known for both his liberalism and his championship of Oxford’s leadership role in the Empire. Locke wrote on his invitation: “Called the twenty seventh with Clarke—met Dicey[;] kept me talking of race problems in America. Very interesting old fellow.”¹⁵ Apparently, Locke became a regular at the Diceys’ Sunday “at homes.” Similarly, Louis Dyer invited Locke to Balliol College. Race was a factor in his initial reception in an unusual sense: Locke’s social success was probably helped by the controversy that surrounded his presence at Oxford. Indeed, so popular did Locke become that Lady Wylie stated that Locke got “rather spoilt” while he was at Oxford. There seems to be some truth to that. As he continued in his December 1 letter:

So many fellows have come to know me that I have to have a guest to lunch or lunch out almost every other day—I send you a lunch menu—I generally have cold game bread and butter and cheese and wine—these Englishmen drink every meal but breakfast—I have been as economical as I can but have used about $10 worth of wine already—I was wise and got some cheap but very good Italian wine Nebeollo Spumante and they think it is rare because they never tasted it before—Well we generally eat lunch undressed—don’t be surprised at anything—everyone lunches in athletic togs—I am boating and lunch in white slippers—golfing stockings to my knees, short white flannel knee trousers and white sweater—my little brown knees bare—right after lunch I have to hurry down to the river where each college has a boat house or “barge” as they call it—Every afternoon except Sunday rain or shine I am out with my crew—trying to steer them in and out of the narrowest[,] twistiest [sic] little snake of a river you ever saw—I had my times at first—the coaches run or ride along the bank, the varsity coaches on horseback and coach the crew—but the coxswain in England is an auxillary coach[.] So first they taught me how to swim and then how to row[,] mind you[,] so that I could help teach the others—I am so light that I have a very good chance and someday your little duckling may be a star in English sporting world as Varsity coxswain … the other day we had our “Torpid fours” that means the fall races in four oared boats—and I had great luck—my boat won a very close race in the first heat—and through my enthusiastic yelling and steering won out in the second heat—so I just got my first athletic cup—a large silver pot—pint size with Hertford College Torpid fours, the college arms and the names of the crew engraved on it (including my own name) this gives me a good chance to coxswain the college eight oar next term—I was ever so glad as it gives me social position from the jump and gives the black eye to those people who said I did not qualify athletically for the Rhodes scholarship.¹⁶

According to Kallen’s November 12 letter to Wendell, Locke’s plan to win social position through athletics was working.

While Lady Wylie was certainly accurate, her characterization of Locke as “spoilt” was not quite fair, as it silenced the racial conflict that was his backdrop. The “attention” of others was actually a bulwark against prejudice and the isolation that would be his fate if he were not aggressively social. In one sense, he was merely continuing the plan he had begun at Harvard, whereby he sought social success as much as academic success. But it took on added urgency at Oxford, where socializing was more important and more pervasive than at Harvard, and where for Locke it was the key to survival in a hostile environment.

Locke was so preoccupied with social maneuverings that he had little time or energy for his academic work that first term at Oxford. Of course, he had come to Oxford with grand hopes.

I shall be a gorgeous peacock when I get my last degree here [.Y]ou see I hope to be a Bachelor of Arts and a Bachelor of Letters BA and B. Litt. In three years[.] Then after 2 years (without any more study or residence) but not without certain money fees[,] the MA will be conferred on me—and then 2 years after that seven years from now in all the Doctors of Literature[—]one of the famous degrees[—]will be conferred if I have done scholarly and literary work in the interim[.] The D. Phil. robe] is a gown of crimson flannel (red flannel[,] just think of it[:] many a Georgia darky has it hasn’t he[?]) with grey silk sleeves and trimmings and a red and grey silk hood. Oh what a gorgeous wrapper.¹⁷

The educational plan Locke revealed to his mother was actually a compromise: he had wanted to begin graduate work in Literae Humaniores immediately, but apparently was dissuaded by Wylie at their October 21 conference on his academic program.¹⁸ Wylie was familiar with the desire of Rhodes Scholars from America to read for a graduate degree because almost all of the Americans had already received BAs from their American colleges, but by the middle of the term, Locke began to realize that even the work for a BA in Literae Humaniores, or “Greats” as it was commonly called, was going to be difficult. Their undergraduate educations in the United States had not prepared most American Rhodes Scholars for the kind of intensive study in the original Greek and Latin that was required to pass the honor exams in Greats. Although he had taken Greek and Latin as a student, Locke was not nearly as proficient in ancient languages as the average Oxford undergraduate; so, Locke had a tutor that first year. “One goes to lectures till twelve generally,” he informed his mother, but “I have fewer lectures than most people because I have to go three mornings a week to a coach—a … clergyman with a wig who reads my latin and Greek with me—you see I must learn within a year to read Latin and Greek almost as English—and it keeps me stepping I tell you[.]”¹⁹ It was particularly difficult to focus on his work with all of the socializing.

By the middle of November, Locke’s letters had stopped coming. Having not heard from Locke for almost a month, his mother grew concerned. Her suspicions had been aroused by friends who told her of articles in the New York newspapers about his being the center of racial hostility from the southern Rhodes Scholars at Oxford. She cautioned him not to go out alone, because “friends here believe that the southerners may try something underhanded.” In reality, the situation was worse than she knew. Early in November, these same southern Rhodes Scholars had succeeded in convincing the American Club not to invite Locke to the annual Thanksgiving Dinner.

Kallen rather matter-of-factly noted his invitation to the dinner in his November 12 letter to Wendell, “There is an American Club. It came to my notice in the shape of an announcement of a Thanksgiving Dinner to be held on November 28, to the tune of two dollars, odd, per head.” The club’s significance would grow in Kallen’s eyes as news of Locke’s exclusion got out, and the American community divided over the issue. An informal organization meant to provide Americans with a sense of community away from home, the American Club had its own rooms where Americans dropped in, but it was better known for its annual Thanksgiving meal. Although the dinner was not officially a Rhodes Scholar function, all of the other Americans were invited, most of whom were Rhodes Scholars. Apparently, the southerners threatened to boycott the dinner if Locke was invited, and in a flawed attempt to maintain American unity, the club had not invited him. But the decision to exclude Locke remained controversial and in the weeks before dinner, several meetings were held to debate the appropriateness of the club’s decision. Locke’s exclusion particularly angered Kallen, and even when he recalled the incident forty-eight years later it still burned in his memory.

There were among the Rhodes scholars at Oxford gentlemen from Dixie who could not possibly associate with Negroes. They could not possibly attend the Thanksgiving dinner celebrated by Americans if a Negro was to be there. So although students from elsewhere in the United States outnumbered the gentlemen from Dixie, Locke was not invited, and one or two persons, authentically Americans, refused in consequence to attend. You might say it was a dinner of inauthentic Americans.²⁰

In addition to Kallen, Professors Dyer and Dicey refused to attend the official dinner. Instead, Dicey invited Locke to the Thanksgiving Reception held in Balliol that Wednesday, November 27, while Dyer invited the young man to dine with his family on Thanksgiving. “It will give me & my two sons,—a bachelor trio for the moment as you know, great pleasure if you will dine here with us on Thanksgiving Day, Nov. 28th at 7:30 P.M. We must rejoice together for several things, among others for such brilliant November weather! May we expect you?” Of course, Locke accepted. The day’s activities began with a sermon preached in Christ Church’s chapel by Bishop Worthington of Nebraska, to which Locke was invited. When Thanksgiving Thursday arrived, Locke quietly attended the noonday sermon with Kallen and then accompanied his Jewish ally to a synagogue. Later that evening, Locke went to Dyer’s house in Banbury Road. Yet the American Club incident was significant enough that the next day Bishop Worthington made a special visit to Locke’s rooms to speak with the young man. “The Vicar of St. Phillips and St. James,” Locke wrote his mother on December 1, “called on me the other afternoon much to the surprise and disgust of some I daresay with Bishop Worthington of Nebraska—who preached the Thanksgiving service for Americans in Christ Church Cathedral[.] Worthington is very much of a fool—but very pleasant.”²¹

That last line gives us a feeling for the tone Locke adopted in presenting the incident to his mother and perhaps even to himself. After all, he was a seasoned Black Victorian who had successfully used his culture and civilization to circumvent problems in the past. In the same letter, he gives the impression that he was merely inconvenienced and that he had turned his exclusion from the official dinner to his social advantage.

Mr. Dyer a retired Harvard professor has been very cordial—he is honorary fellow of Balliol[,] has married very rich[,] lives on fashionable Banbury Road—he is the acknowledged grandaddy of all Americans here—he has introduced me to some of the best of the professors, and when the American club didn’t invite me to their Thanksgiving banquet—he and Professor Dicey, both honorary members of the club refused to attend and Dyer, his cousin from Balliol[,] and I ate Thanksgiving dinner together at Dyer’s home. I am anxious to hear how you got over Thanksgiving.²²

Of course, her holiday had been difficult too, because he had not been there on a day they almost always spent together. Yet it seems he wanted to deflect attention away from his Thanksgiving and racial problems at Oxford. Locke downplayed the incident in his letters to avoid alarming his mother.

Indeed, it was difficult for Locke to admit that he was wounded by racism for the first time in his life.

I never was better or happier—never had better chances. … Do let me hear about the American papers—there is nothing over here—several of the Rhodes men have asked to be introduced to me—the Southerners are silent—and my patrons Dyer and Dicey are two of the biggest men in Oxford. I visit 5 houses in Banbury Road which is like Rittenhouse Square. Send me the clippings but its all American newspaper talk—I have forgotten almost I was colored.²³

Certainly, his not encountering Blacks on campus as at Harvard meant Locke was freed from having to define himself in terms of the Black group. Yet it is hard to believe that the incident did not hurt. Locke had never really experienced any blatant racial prejudice and certainly not the overt racial exclusion of the Thanksgiving incident. Never before in his twelve years at predominantly White Philadelphia schools or at Harvard had he been excluded from an official school event because of race. He had come to Oxford believing that he had finally escaped the racial problem, and that if he did encounter any little obstacle, his manners, sophistication, and culture would overcome it. The victory of the southerners opened the door to the possibility of other such violations of his dignity and humanity at Oxford. The Thanksgiving incident was just the first of many skirmishes and power struggles between him and them for the rest of his stay.

It is interesting that Locke chose Kallen—or perhaps Kallen invited himself—to accompany him on this holiday. Perhaps he chose Kallen because he was Jewish, or because he was older and a friendly acquaintance from his class with Santayana. But Locke may have chosen the tall, sandy-haired, militant Zionist as a masculine ally. On a day when he would certainly be observed, Locke chose the political and heterosexual Kallen over sexually ambiguous aesthetic Downes as his escort. Kallen’s personality was certainly a factor as well. Kallen was already known as someone who was a fighter, who, like the big brother he never had, would take the pressure off of him. Locke repeated the strategy he had used as a young child when bullies accosted him on the way to school, and a “big boy” defended him.²⁴ Thousands of miles from home, no matter how good an act he put on for his mother, Locke must have again felt vulnerable, and Kallen came to his aid.

Of course, Kallen was not a completely neutral participant. He was conflicted about Locke and Blacks in general. Not only his statements about Blacks in his letters to Wendell but also Kallen’s private diary confirmed he was ambivalent about Blacks. In one instance, Kallen observed that Harley, Locke’s West Indian friend also at Oxford, had “more of the objectionable Negro ways than Locke.” This is ironic given that Harvard professors like Wendell routinely commented and evaluated Jews with similar sensitivity to Jewish “ways.” Locke, for his part, characterized Kallen’s upward mobility in stereotypical terms when he identified Kallen to his mother as a “Ghetto Jew I met at Harvard who is making a social sensation.” Yet at Oxford, Locke held onto Kallen’s coat-tails and Kallen, for his part, felt sympathetic toward Locke’s predicament. Coming to Locke’s aid may have also reflected Kallen’s own struggle with identity while in England. Jews in England were able to pass very easily, but Kallen saw that as a problem of Jewish identity and solidarity. In one diary entry, he confirmed that he had the darndest time telling who was Jewish, and a veritable little dance of curiosity and gesture would go on between him and someone he suspected was Jewish until one would ask delicately if the other was Jewish. But no matter how socially sophisticated Locke was, he could not pass—and thus he became a perfect case study for Kallen to reflect on the primacy of racial self-definition in the biography of Jewish—and with Locke in mind, minority—intellectuals.

Kallen recalled that when the two of them discussed the meaning of the Thanksgiving incident afterward, Locke was angry and confused and asserted that he was a human being like other human beings. Kallen concluded:

Now the impact of that kind of experience left scars, the more so in a philosophic spirit. For the dominant trend among philosophers is always to prove unity and to work at unifications—to assert one humanity, one universe, one system of values and ideals which somehow is coercive of the many and somehow argues away the actualities of penalization for one’s being oneself into unimportant appearances, without in any way relieving the feelings of dehumanization, the pain and the suffering; and without lessening the desire never again to expose oneself to them.²⁵

Kallen credited these discussions with clarifying the true meaning of cultural pluralism. “We had to argue out the question of how the differences made differences, and in arguing out those questions, the formulae, then phrases, developed—‘cultural pluralism,’ ‘the right to be different.’ ”²⁶

A life crisis had erupted for Locke: his social expectations, personal negotiations, and philosophical speculations on the terrain of race were suddenly and simultaneously under assault. He had crossed over educationally, intellectually, and socially into an elite English world, but remained categorized as Black by the Americans. The reaction of Americans crystallized Locke’s feelings of alienation from his homeland. As Kallen recalled:

There were times that year when Locke thought never to return to the United States. In fact, he deeply wanted not to. He was at ease in Europe. The penalties for “color,” especially in France and on the Continent, were not apparent. They were not as apparent in England as they are today. But however or wherever the penalties were laid, Locke felt he could not expose himself to their indignities. As a human being with an individuality of his own, he knew that no commitment or obligation could be laid on him heavier than anybody else’s, and that the necessities of vindicating his integrity and realizing his own potentialities in his own way had the first claim and the last.²⁷

Of course, on a day-to-day basis, race was not a paramount issue, because the majority of the English, especially the young undergraduates, lacked the race feeling the southerners exhibited. Yet his claim that he had “forgotten” he “was colored” is unbelievable. Locke was, after all, the focal point of several meetings and discussions among the Americans that centered on his Blackness, and the decision to exclude him from the dinner had divided the American community and forced people to take sides. Certainly, his presence had raised the issue of race in a way that neither he nor the Oxford community had had to face before.

Even after this incident, numerous other uncomfortable encounters with the southerners must have taken place on his daily travels through the narrow walkways around Oxford. He did seem to take his mother’s advice and generally traveled in the company of one of his friends, if not Downes then Kallen. On one of those trips, Kallen recalled in his diary that the hostility toward Locke did not come solely from Americans. After Locke visited Kallen’s rooms, Kallen recalled, “I went back with him in a great rain. A big fat person opened his gate & looked him up and down with infinite scorn.”²⁸ Given that Kallen generally noted Americans when they entered the scene in his diary, the “big fat person” was probably English. Even Kallen’s racial consciousness was exacerbated in the Oxford environment. In his diary, he recorded that “Thursday night Locke & Harley called … Locke is at Hertford College. He seems darker than at home.”²⁹ In the overwhelmingly White and Anglo-Saxon environment of Edwardian England, even this “nut-brown man,” as the historian Nathan Huggins once described Locke, stood out for Kallen in stark contrast to the overall population. If Locke had forgotten he was Colored, he was the only person in Oxford who had.

Locke’s homosexuality, however, may have cushioned the racial conflicts. Being gay gave him access on a private level to the world of some English and White American undergraduates who he may very well have viewed as compensating for the public exclusion he endured. That may explain why he remained optimistic about “his chances” at Oxford. He had a trump card in the game of sociability at Oxford that the southerners could not easily match. In a letter to an anonymous friend, Locke wrote from Oxford: “Let me tell you about the men. I have met some of the best specimens among the English that I have met since School of Practice [Central High] days.” Even more than Harvard, Oxford possessed a rich, diverse, and thriving homosexual community that controlled Oxford social life. In such circumstances, Locke’s sexual opportunities were greater as a gay Black man than they would have been as a straight Black man. That fact leavened and assuaged the racial stress of the Oxford experience. It may have also keyed his extreme popularity at Oxford. “I sometimes have three or four invitations a day to answer or send out[.]”³⁰

Some of the more attractive men were not even English. At Oxford, Locke noted to his mother, he was meeting wealthy and attractive East Indian men, who were the epitome of sophistication in their manners and tastes. He met most of them through the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, which invited him to its fall dinner. At that dinner, which he attended with Downes, Locke met Lionel de Fonseka, the Ceylonese literary intellectual, who was studying at Merton and would become one of his best friends. He also met Satya Mukerjea, a wealthy Brahmin from the Bengali region in India. The Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, begun in early 1907, had been formed to “promote mutual knowledge and sympathy between members of the different nationalities at Oxford,” a kind of international club for members to read papers and argue how best to promote cosmopolitanism. But for Locke, the group seemed to serve a dual purpose of bringing him into closer collegial connection with men who, like him, shared an interest if not indulgence in homosexuality; further, it brought him into contact with other intellectuals of color who were working out the conflicts between personal assimilation and loyalty to their ethnic or national identities. At Oxford, the club would become the most important center for Locke’s working out of his future destiny in regard to his people and his country. For now it provided him with a welcome escape from the social world of priggish Americans and scornful Englishmen.

Even Locke was beginning to acknowledge why he was such a popular invitation that first term. He admitted to his mother that there was “a good deal of curiosity about your ugly duckling … teas have been given as excuses for meeting the ‘chinese ? puzzle.’ ” That seemed to be the case when Satya Mukerjea invited him for tea. “Remember you are to come like an obedient child to my rooms for tea. Otherwise the ladies will be disappointed.” Locke did not disappoint them, but afterward noted to his mother that they “are very nice but rather masculine women—in fact they are public women interested in the Woman Suffragist movement.”³¹ That meeting was symptomatic: although he had invitations to meet people as the “chinese puzzle,” many of them came from people who were themselves on the fringes of English society. The majority of the other invitations came from Americans or from Englishmen with American wives, or from the Scots, as in the case of the Cairds, the former master of Balliol and his wife, who frequently asked him to their home. During his second term, he would begin to reveal to his mother it was with the Americans and the Scottish with whom he was most congenial, rather than those from Oxford’s elite English stock. Such social activities were crucial to his sense of acceptance, but they did not add up to him feeling very good, overall, about his Oxford educational experience or powerful enough to apply himself in earnest to his studies at Oxford by the end of the Michaelmas term, 1907.

Ever since those days at the Charles Close Elementary in Philadelphia, he had struggled with being productive away from his mother. Separation anxiety often descended on him whenever he was too far away from his mother to easily refer to her unconditional love. All of his greatest achievements had been like some adult child practicing phase in which he had ventured out on his own into uncharted space, yet not too far that he could not refer to her emotionally for reinforcement. Certainly, that had been true at Harvard where almost daily letters were supplemented by quick visits back home. There was an ideal space, distance really, from her, between him and her that allowed his naturally propulsive self to roam aggressively, yet not too far to remind him that he was alone.

Now, as 1907 came to a catastrophic close for him, he felt very lonely. No one but Locke knew how lonely he felt. Despite his protestations to his mother that he was thoroughly enjoying himself at Oxford, he informed her in his December letter that he would be spending his vacation away from Oxford traveling with Downes. They would spend the first of the six weeks’ vacation on the Scilly Islands on the Atlantic coast of England before going on to France. “We are going there because living is very cheap there in winter and both of us have a lot of studying and writing to do—I have had no time to think of a short story much less write one. Here[’] s my chance—we shall stay there 3 weeks then sail by way of the Island of Jersey for the French coast landing at Dieppe and going to Paris via Rouen[,] a Norman town with beautiful cathedrals we want to see and write about[.]”³² He was anxious to flee Oxford for the kind of love affair he had had in London. Traveling in Europe would be a yelling escape from those dastardly southern Rhodes Scholars who made every walk alone through Oxford’s narrow streets an anxiety-filled journey.

But leaving with Downes was also the point. Here was the great experiment of his adult life. Ever since his first sexual experience, the remarkable thing was that he could be that close to someone other than his mother. Now, the second part of that story began—could being close to another male assuage the loneliness, that existential bereft feeling, he now felt more than five thousand miles away from Momma, facing the most vicious racism he had encountered in his life? Could Downes and the pursuit of beauty on the Continent heal his soul enough that he could return to Oxford and get down to work? Something led him instinctively to believe that this was his best chance to save his life.

But before he left Oxford, he was able to write “with much trouble and countless interruptions” his “impressions of Oxford.” In December he sent it off to the Independent, which had asked him to write something for them. The resultant article, “Oxford Contrasts,” appeared in print much later, in July 1909, but is a revealing interpretation of his first term’s experience at Oxford. He was quick to praise Oxford for the modernity of its social life and by implication its lack of racial discrimination. But he criticized Oxford for its “medieval educational” system and its disrespect for Rhodes Scholars. Indeed, “Oxford Contrasts” remains one of the best defenses of the Rhodes Scholars against the Oxford critique that they were not up to the quality of English students academically or socially.

Locke’s article is all the more remarkable given that the Americans were the bane of his existence at Oxford. In an ironic but important way, Locke responded to being discriminated against by other Americans by claiming his right to speak for them. The experience of living in England for the first time in his life heightened his American identity. He may have felt—and he may have been right—that he was excluded as much because he was an American as because he was Black. The editor of the Independent wished him to deal with the race question, but he had refused, except at the end. There, in an addendum comparing American and English approaches to race, he noted that the English were much more subtle than the Americans; and yet, he preferred the directness of the American to the circumspection and “indifference” of the English.

What did that mean? “Oxford Contrasts” was the beginning of the comparative study of racial attitudes Locke continued throughout his adult life. Americans believed in rigid social exclusion and separation of Black people, but the English perfected imperial racism by which the best and the brightest of the colonial subjects were plucked from their native lands, brought to England, indoctrinated with the imperial ideal, and sent back to their countries to carry out British colonial policies. Since A. V. Dicey was a prominent supporter of the notion that Oxford should be an integral agent in supplying the administrators of the British Empire, he had welcomed Locke as the type of “colonial” that he (and Parkin, another architect of the imperial role of Oxford) felt the empire needed to carry out its imperial mission. Through his growing association with colonial students in the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, Locke was beginning to understand how imperialism produced an even more insidious form of racial practice than the brutality of the Americans. He was beginning the second phase of his race education and learning imperialism was as much the practice of race as segregation.

That Locke really preferred the naked hostility of the southern Rhodes Scholars to the more sophisticated indulgence of the English students at Oxford seems unlikely. But writing that he preferred the American version of racism was an act of cultural resistance—claiming the right to represent America regardless of those, from Wendell to the southern Rhodes Scholars, who denied him that right. Racist Americans would not deny him the right to affirm America abroad. As Locke wrote his mother, he did not want “anything Negroid to spoil his first appearance in print.”³³ Southern racists would not paint him into a corner where he could appear in print only as a Negro and not as an American. At Oxford, dealing with the Americans made him Black, but dealing with the English made him American.

While “Oxford Contrasts” represented a breakthrough, his not wanting “anything Negroid to spoil his first appearance in print” shows Locke had not yet resolved the conflict the Thanksgiving incident had uncovered. He wanted to keep hidden the truth of what he had experienced that fall of 1907, that his sojourn to Oxford already had been “spoiled.” He was not simply an American not taken seriously by the English, but an American denied his right to give thanks for America by other Americans. In the end, “Oxford Contrasts” masked the most important contrast of all. At Harvard, Locke had been a favorite son. At Oxford, he was a pariah.

Oxford Cosmopolitan dinner, ca. 1909. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.