14

Radical Sociologist at Howard University, 1912–1916

“What a day to leave!” wrote his mother, after Locke traveled from Camden to take his new job at Howard University. “Yet I am reminded that you go away in a storm—It rained when you left for Harvard and sinfully poured when you left for Eng[land] the first time[.] Is it ominous of what will happen at Harvard [sic]?” Clearly, the rain had not been a consistent predictor of things to come—he had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams at Harvard and failed in ways she could not have imagined at Oxford. The rain did capture her mood of being left alone again and the curious way that his successes always took him away from her. The compensation this time was that he would be earning money and be a mere three-hour train ride away. Mary Locke may also have sensed in that rain the uncertainty of what lay ahead of him at Howard University, the “capstone of Negro education,” and Washington, D.C., the uncrowned capital of Black society. Both were tough, challenging institutions of Black America, and she could not help feeling that her son, whom she still thought of as a little boy, was not ready for that world awaiting him. She expressed those feelings, as she habitually did, in words of motherly concern. “I do wish you had your rubbers—so foolish in this storm not to take them. I am very anxious about you in every way.”¹

At age twenty-seven, however, Locke was ready to construct an adult identity for himself as a Black professional. Howard was the best place for him to do that, as fatherly Bishop Levi Coppin confirmed: “There is where we want you to be, because it is really our principal school. You are now placed and this gives you a chance to make your way to special work. Your splendid ability coupled with exemplary character will do the rest.”²

It was also the right time for him to come to Howard. Founded in 1867 to teach the freedmen, Howard had weathered late nineteenth-century attempts to make it a school for vocational training and become a good liberal arts university by the twentieth century. Howard produced most of the African American teachers, doctors, and other professionals. It also possessed the best faculty in 1912: under outgoing President Wilbur Thirkield, Howard had hired Ernest Just, Benjamin Brawley, and Thomas Montgomery Gregory, all Ivy League school graduates, who would distinguish Howard in biology, literary criticism, and drama over the next decade. Over the next twenty years, Howard University would become known as the “Black Harvard,” because it attracted the increasing number of brilliant Black graduates produced by Harvard as well as other Ivy League schools who could not teach in the institutions that had educated them. In the 1910s and 1920s, Howard would add historians Charles Wesley and Carter G. Woodson, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, political scientist Ralph Bunche, economist Abram Harris, poet Sterling Brown, and critic Arthur P. Davis to its faculty during what could be called Howard University’s “Golden Age.” Arguably, that “Golden Age” began when Alain Locke joined the faculty in 1912.

Locke came to Howard University believing that his responsibilities in the Teachers College would be secondary to his leading the more academically rigorous College of Arts and Sciences.³ But during his first four years at Howard, he worked constantly in the pedagogical Teachers College, and with his relatively low salary, that was disappointing. Not only did the College of Arts and Sciences have better students and more disciplinary-based courses but also it had Kelly Miller as its dean. Miller was a broad-minded intellectual in addition to being a professor of mathematics, an academic visionary who pressured the university to offer modern language courses, to establish a Negro Academy to study Black history, and to allow him to teach the university’s first course in sociology in 1902. Miller was also a public intellectual, who charted a middle course politically between Booker T. Washington and W. E. B. Du Bois, and believed, as Locke did, that objective, scientific study of the Negro was the best answer to racists. As a pragmatist, Miller believed “race advancement” was in the hands of Black people and translated that perspective into a series of demands to make the school a center for teaching and research about the African American experience. But Howard’s conservative board of trustees rejected most of Miller’s proposals, creating conflict between Miller (and younger race-conscious Black professors like Locke around him) and the administration at Howard.

Locke’s fate was in the hands of Dean Lewis B. Moore of the Teachers College. Unlike Miller, who may have still resented Locke’s 1910 snub of the college, Dean Moore was very enthusiastic about Locke, whose presence bolstered the prestige of his Teachers College. Moore also valued Locke’s previous training in pedagogy in Philadelphia. For his part, Locke made jokes about Moore. He told his mother that when he discovered Moore sleeping on a train, the dean resembled a giant walrus. But Moore was a powerful dean at Howard University. He was one of the few faculty who held a PhD and was also a skillful power player, who got his way at Howard University more often than the outspoken Miller. He was also a competent teacher of philosophy, as Locke discovered when he took over Moore’s course in Kantian philosophy when the dean was away from campus. Moore had been the one who decided to hire Locke; whether he liked it or not, Locke’s future was in the hands of this formidable patron at Howard.

Moore’s hiring telegram to Locke had not left him with much time to prepare for his new position. But after hurrying to Washington and moving temporarily into Mrs. Maggie Walker’s rooming house at 1610 15th Street NW, Locke threw himself into the fall semester of teaching. As an assistant professor of the teaching of English and instructor in philosophy and education, Locke taught five courses in English and assisted in a course by Moore on the history and philosophy of education. He taught English Curriculum for Secondary School, English Speech and Usage for Teachers, and Type Forms of English Literature. He particularly liked the Type Forms course, because it allowed him to showcase his knowledge of such literary forms as the epic, the lyric, the ballad, and the novel. His two team-taught English courses—The Teaching of English Language and Literature with Montgomery Gregory and Ethel Robinson, and English Composition, again with Professor Robinson—rounded out his English offerings. Locke was hired primarily to teach English to those who would be teachers, and in some semesters, he would teach English for elementary schoolteachers, as well as additional philosophy and education courses. His rotation of courses remained roughly the same for his first three years at Howard, and a report he submitted to Dean Moore in 1915 gives a sense of how Locke approached these courses. The course in Teaching of English was quite satisfactory, although plagued by its low enrollment. “Undoubtedly registration will be larger as soon as our regulation that students take the methods course in their major subject goes into effect. … The course in Type forms will next year be given at a more favorable hour, and is so scheduled. MacMillan Co. have accepted the M.S.s. of the course and if publication should ensue in time for the Fall list, the course will have its own text next year.” Of course, the low registration in his classes might suggest that Locke was not yet a popular teacher. On the other hand, his comment about Macmillan publishing a text for “Type Forms” suggests that Locke cared enough about that course to pull together a textbook for publication. What most troubled him was the poor preparation of the students. “Regarding the Course in the Literature of Elementary schools, I have found the work very handicapped through deficiencies in the rudiments of English grammar, pronunciation and reading, and I must suggest that either next year pupils be required to take the course in Oral Drill and Speaking that we contemplated and have in the Catalogue, or else the course postponed to the Sophomore year.” Locke had little tolerance for, and perhaps little knowledge of, how to teach those students who were reading at a low high-school level. How could he teach the type of English needed to teach in secondary school when his students could barely read at that level themselves? He admitted work had not gone particularly well in English Composition, because he was prevented from using his “own method” of instruction in that course, presumably because of his co-teacher, Miss Robinson.⁴

Locke preferred the philosophy courses and obtained permission to teach sections of courses that Moore offered previously by his second year at Howard. “The hours that this year were kept open for [my] assistance in the Philosophy courses are available next year, and I suggest an earlier ascertainment of pupils schedules, should you still contemplate assistance in that work.” Locke felt that “the course in Logic and Ethics went as usual,” but, he hoped to improve it by changing the text the next year. He reserved his greatest enthusiasm for Philosophical Bases of Education, a team-taught course that was going very well until two of the four teachers fell ill, and the other one quit.⁵ The picture that emerges is that Locke was a dedicated, innovative teacher, who had yet to hit his stride with the students. Locke wanted to shift entirely to philosophy and education and leave the teaching of English skills to the other professors. Accordingly, Locke’s second correspondence with Moore is punctuated with requests to be promoted from an instructor to an assistant professor of philosophy and education. Perhaps Locke already dreamed of becoming Howard’s future professor of philosophy, but his more immediate need was to increase the $1,000 a year salary that came with being an instructor in the Teachers College.

Locke’s family friends and school acquaintances eased his first-year grind at Howard University by introducing him to Washington’s Black society. The social elite in Black Washington were famous for their sophisticated social set, dominated by private clubs, sumptuous northwest Washington homes, and considerable political clout garnered by such federal appointees as Recorder of Deeds; a former Reconstruction governor, P. B. S. Pinchback; and Robert Terrell, a federal judge. To gain status in such a society, one needed a patron, and Locke’s most prominent and indulgent patron was an old family friend, Major Christian Fleetwood. This tall, refined, and retired military officer was one of only sixteen African Americans to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroism in the Civil War. Fleetwood, as a sergeant major of the 4th United States Colored Troops at the battle of New Market Heights and Chaffin’s Farm in September 1864, had grabbed the Union flag after two color-bearers had been shot and, in the absence of any officers, had rallied a group of reserves to attack the fort during the final successful battle of the engagement. Fleetwood was a member of the Acanthus Club, a prestigious African American gentleman’s club in Washington, and a prominent member of the Black elite of the city. A widower with two daughters, Fleetwood was an old friend of Mary Locke, perhaps from the Institute of Colored Youth days in Philadelphia, but at least as far back as the 1880s, when Pliny had been an appointee at the Treasury Department. When Locke first visited Washington in February, Mary Locke encouraged him to look up the old family friend. When Locke wrote to apologize for not calling on him, Christian Fleetwood replied in the rococo prose of a seasoned Black Victorian. “Knowing from experience how impossible it is to get to see all whom one wishes to see, in a limited time, I have the largest charity and consideration.”⁶

Once they connected, Fleetwood took Mary Locke’s only son under his ample social wings. “Major Fleetwood took me last night to Miss Lucy Motens. [I] was invited back to an exclusive coterie of intellectuals next Wednesday. Chris likes this sort of thing—he chaperones well.” The Fleetwoods seemed to adopt Locke as their own, often inviting him over, and holding a special reception when his mother spent Thanksgiving in Washington. “Ask your mother,” Fleetwood wrote Locke, “to kindly send me a list of the friends whom she remembers from earlier days and whom she would like to see. And as far as practicable we will try to gather them together (informally) to meet her again.” Socializing with the major and his daughters was good ballast to Locke’s heavy teaching responsibilities. “Going out now to Fleetwoods,” he reported to his mother. “Class work and other stuff very heavy, but going nicely. Cannot get home till Saturday morning—important meeting on Emancipation down here, and Major Wright and Bishop Walters on the string.”⁷ The next month, Locke was again bogged down and unable to get to Philadelphia for the weekend, and again the Fleetwoods provided needed diversion. “I am having the deuce of a lot of work to do. Particularly for Dean Moore. I hope the tickets for the Boston Symphony have come, in which case meet the train due 7:40 at Broad Street Station. I took the Fleetwoods to hear [Roland] Hayes. He really has a fine voice. So much for my personal debt to them. I got out cheap as usual.”⁸ Even after Major Fleetwood died on September 28, 1914, his daughter, Edith, continued to invite Locke to intellectual club meetings.

Of course, Locke’s father’s friend and Howard Law School classmate John W. Cromwell, and Locke’s own Harvard colleague, Roscoe Conkling Bruce, steered Locke through the social intricacies of Black Washington. Of the two, Locke grew closest to Bruce, although Locke found aspects of Bruce’s social conduct almost ridiculous. “Bruce Evans summarily dismissed,” Locke wrote his mother, “from the Armstrong school—more scandal. Bruce (Roscoe) just wallows in this sort of thing. They are the limit down here.”⁹ Gossip, innuendo, and scandal dominated social relations in Black bourgeois Washington, in part because the number of Black aspirants far outnumbered the number of respectable federal and local positions available. Bruce himself would become a victim of scandal in 1919 and lose his job as administrator in the District of Columbia. There also was the possibility of scandal for Locke. Eventually, someone would begin to wonder why such an eligible and socially acceptable gentleman was not married, and then the gossip and rumors would start. Locke knew he could never feel completely comfortable in Washington, because no matter how much he excelled academically or socially his sexuality made him an outsider to its patriarchal culture.

Managing his sexual orientation within the context of being a Howard University professor came to symbolize how Locke managed his alienation from bourgeois Black life generally. As a letter from his friend de Fonseka in March 1913 shows, it was difficult for alienated aesthetes like them to identify fully with their professional roles. “I wish you hadn’t become a Professor,” de Fonseka chided. “You will get fossilized like the rest in no time. You will no longer be the charming sceptic that you were.” That was unlikely, given Locke’s basic personality; but de Fonseka had picked up something about the new Locke that he had sniffed out the year before: in taking up “stump speaking,” as de Fonseka called Locke’s lecturing before Negro historical societies, Locke revealed that he was willing to become an ideologue in order to get power. “You will inevitably,” de Fonseka continued, “have to adopt some comfortable creed and batten and fatten on it in order to fill the chair that you occupy.” How far would Locke be willing to go, to sell out, de Fonseka implied, to become a success? “Alas, for the young men who start life with a perfect outlook and end by accepting a useful Professorship. Would not Wilde have wept if he had lived.” His recommendation? “Chuck your job, my dear fellow, universities were once the repositories, but they are now only the cenotaphs of thought.”¹⁰

With his debts, Locke was not about to “chuck” his Howard job. But de Fonseka’s teasing captured something of the tension in Locke’s life as a professor—it could never embody all of his creativity as a person. A double life was required to survive at Howard and Washington, D.C. Advocacy of art and literature away from the university would give him spiritual sustenance and allow him to express his sexuality in his artistic interests and among of his artistic friends, while remaining relatively strait-laced in his professional life at Howard. But his rigid division of work and love, of ego and id, and of America and Europe would become a punishing self-discipline, for he had to have the energy to sustain two lives—an increasingly authoritarian academic and a flagrantly subversive aesthete. It was the former that de Fonseka could not stomach; he could not become a spokesperson for the establishment, even the Sinhalese establishment. “Philip,” de Fonseka continued, “has excommunicated himself by marriage, as you say—that is pardonable. But you have excommunicated yourself for the means to marriage. I have once for all chosen my path in life—that of a vagabond.”

De Fonseka lied. He also stood on the brink of a similar transition into the fossilized life of the professional. After The Decorative Theory of Art had been published, de Fonseka’s father had traveled personally to Oxford to communicate his anger about his son writing books on aesthetics instead of preparing for the law. De Fonseka Sr. demanded his son complete his studies, return home, and get married, which de Fonseka Jr. agreed to do—although de Fonseka said he would marry a European, not a Sinhalese, woman, because, as he put it, he needed some complexity in his life. De Fonseka did return home, become a lawyer, and disappear from the literary world after he reached Ceylon. Although Locke had “accepted a useful Professorship,” he had not accepted masquerading as a married bourgeois to save his private reputation from rumor and scandal.

But de Fonseka had put his finger on a problem: by becoming an academic, Locke was giving up the kind of intellectual freedom he had enjoyed in Europe for the insularity of the ivory tower. By choosing an academic post, Locke protected himself from having to dialogue directly with the public to earn a living. John Bruce, Arthur Schomburg, John W. Cromwell, William Monroe Trotter, and W. E. B. Du Bois, whether university trained or not, were intellectuals whose continued existence depended on their relationship with the Black public to survive. Their social voice was crafted in response to the daily struggles of Black people and the criticality that bubbled up from the experience of race in America. Joining Howard hampered Locke in sensing his audience, as he nestled in an academic institution dominated by a White president and a conservative board of trustees. But American intellectual life was shifting away from generalists who often wrote in a variety of genres for newspapers, magazines, and social welfare journals toward specialists who taught at universities and published in scholarly journals. The days when people like John Bruce, who worked as a clerk in the Treasury Department, could be regarded by the White power structure as authorities on the Black experience, were quickly passing. What neither de Fonseka nor Locke could see, however, in 1912, was that a “useful Professorship” was not even a certain path to the kind of power Locke longed for and de Fonseka feared would warp his friend.

Indeed, Locke did not have much power in 1912. The key, of course, was to tap into the institutional power structure at Howard. Locke wasted no time in trying to find out who were the influential figures at Howard and how he might ally himself with them. Chief among his early allies was Alexander Walters, the influential bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church and Howard trustee. Having met Walters on board the Lusitania in 1910, Locke renewed their relationship when he came to Howard, working closely with the bishop after Locke was elected secretary of the Teachers College faculty in February 1913. That post brought with it a spot on “Bishop Walter’s Council,” his organization for lobbying Congress on behalf of the university.¹¹ Walters’s political stock had skyrocketed after the election of Woodrow Wilson to the presidency in November 1912, for Walters was one of the few Black Democrats, and he hoped to serve Wilson as Washington had served Roosevelt—as the trusted Black advisor who dispensed presidential favors and influence. Perhaps Walters’s influence might help improve Locke’s position at the university and gain him access to Wilson. From his part, Walters liked having a trusted lieutenant like Locke at the university. The collusion developing between Locke and Walters can be gleaned from a letter Walters wrote Locke on April 9, 1913. “Your ‘special’ just received, too late to even telegraph you to go to Brooklyn. I hardly think it is necessary for either one of us to be on hand. Our close connection with the administration makes our position secure.” Locke and Walters shared a taste for political intrigue and a talent for organizational gamesmanship. “I do not think that we have anything to fear from that source,” Walters continued. “I was urged by the chairman of the committee to be present, it looked to me to be a trap, hence I decided not to go.”¹²

But Wilson’s record on civil rights turned out to be so disastrous, that there was no chance to turn association with Wilson into political capital in the Black community. As early as the spring of 1913, Wilson had asked all the prominent Black federal appointees from previous administrations to resign and then refused to appoint African Americans to replace them. Simultaneously, Wilson made it known that he would not appoint any Negroes to positions in the South, because it would anger Whites in the region. Over the summer of 1913, Wilson supported subordinates in the Treasury, the Post Office, the Bureau of Census, and the Bureau of Printing and Engraving who instituted a policy of segregating Blacks and Whites in the working, eating, and restroom environments of these government departments. A storm of protest erupted from the Black community, and even such friends of Wilson as Oswald Garrison Villard, the secretary of the NAACP, who had earlier sought Wilson’s endorsement of a Race Conference, released to the press an official NAACP letter condemning the administration’s segregationist policies. Even worse for Alexander Walters, when Wilson was challenged on his belief that Negroes favored segregation, Wilson claimed that a number of Black leaders agreed with him; when Villard and others asked for their names, one of Wilson’s subordinates let it be known that Walters was one of them. Whether true or not, this rumor led to Walters’s resignation from the NAACP and tarnished his reputation among the Black intelligentsia.¹³

Here was one of the pitfalls of alliances with conservatives during a time of increasing protest from progressives, but Locke appeared not to recognize them. He continued to support Walters and Wilson, despite the worsening situation, even though Walters informed him little good could come from an association with Wilson now. “With you,” Walters wrote to Locke on September 3, 1913, “I cannot but believe that Mr. Wilson intends to make good; but I fear that he has let his most favorable opportunity pass. So far as the colored people are concerned untoward sentiment has crystalized against him; and he will never be able to retrieve his lost prestige no matter what he may do in the future to aid them.”¹⁴ Locke enthused about Wilson in part because he had made a proposal to Wilson, perhaps through Walters, and hoped to benefit personally from his administration. Here was a weakness in Locke’s political vision: his private schemes for gain from certain officials made it difficult for him to identify with rising Black anger against them. Locke even criticized, privately of course, friends such as Roscoe Conkling Bruce who responded to the segregation crisis by joining the NAACP. “It is disgusting,” he wrote his mother, “to see the way these Negroes down here, Bruce etc. flop over at the slightest change of fortune. They are all Villardists now.”¹⁵

Locke was correct to see Bruce as an opportunist, who had supported Booker T. Washington’s policies when they were in vogue and helpful to his career. But at least Bruce was cognizant enough of the mood of the Black community to sense when it changed and that he needed to change with it. By contrast, Locke characterized the racial climate under Wilson as “the slightest change of fortune.” This was absurd. Even in Washington, D.C., where Negroes had been excluded from downtown hotels, theaters, and restaurants for years, Wilson’s election spread segregationist sentiment to the point that the Central Citizens Association demanded streetcars of Washington, D.C., be Jim Crowed. Although a well-organized, NAACP-led protest blocked the effort in April 1913, over the next three years, six bills would be introduced in Congress to segregate the District of Columbia streetcars, and Congress would pass an anti-intermarriage bill for the District as well.

Locke’s abhorrence of protest blinded him to the realization that Black politics had shifted and he needed to shift with it or risk not being able to speak as a representative voice. His loyalty to past friends, a noble attribute, marginalized him politically in the 1910s. “Today [I have] a rather important conference with Walters,” he announced to his mother in January 1914, “who is about to form an alliance with Booker T. largely at Booker’s initiation strange to say. I have large prospects under such leadership. Walters swears by me.”¹⁶ It was not strange that Washington sought an alliance with Walters, given Washington’s own declining support among Blacks. By contrast, NAACP membership soared, and NAACP leaders such as Villard and Du Bois became heroes to most Black people. Locke’s “large prospects” were rather diminutive considering how invested in conservative Negro leaders he was in 1913.

Locke’s views were somewhat more typical of the older Black bourgeoisie of Washington, D.C., who, though faced with worsening race relations in their city, also tended to respond with acquiescence, which was less a political philosophy and more a sign of their inability to stem the worsening tide. Such conservatism had made sense in the nineteenth century, when the African American elite, especially light-skinned bourgeois, had been able to thwart segregation by gaining access to otherwise all-White establishments because of that conservatism or their skin color, or both. But by the second decade of the twentieth century, such access was gone. This was particularly problematical for Locke, given that he had always dined in the best restaurants and shopped at the best stores. Now, in segregated Washington, he could only enjoy a nice dinner in the Union Station restaurant, a federally supervised facility. Once again, America forced upon him the politics of escape. When the school year closed in 1913, he hurried off to the Harvard commencement, where he could hobnob with his former classmates, Pfromm and Dickerman, and enjoy the Boston symphony, the opera, and the theater free of segregation.

Locke could not afford to go to Europe that summer, yet upon his return to Camden from Boston, he longed to avoid hot, segregated Washington and avoid remaining in his mother’s cramped rooming-house apartment in Camden. His outstanding Oxford debts lingered; he had paid off only part of what he owed with his meager Howard University salary. Locke had deliberately held back from paying off all of the debts, especially those owed to Mrs. Addis and others who had angered him, in order to save something for a summer vacation. But where could he and his mother go where they would not be segregated or, worse, excluded altogether. Europe had spoiled them, and it was hard to settle back into the rituals of raced space in America. Locke also wanted to avoid the typical Black bourgeoisie watering holes like Saratoga and Cape May.

Perhaps at the suggestion of one of his friends, Locke elected to spend a good part of August with his mother in Bermuda. Scrapbooks in the Locke Papers are filled with postcards from this trip, with picturesque views of “Moonlight at Bathing Bay, Bermuda,” “Leaving the Devil’s Hole, Bermuda,” “Kyber Pass, Warwick, Bermuda,” and the “Royal Palms at Paget, Bermuda.” Like many of the Black bourgeoisie, Locke felt hampered by the constraints of segregated vacationing in America; but he sought and found a tropical paradise just off the American shore that embodied all of the Victorian imagery of paradise that he and his mother had come to value in their vacations. In viewing the photographs of Locke in all-white shirts and shorts, his brown knees exposed, and of Mary bedecked in sun-protective hats and veils, one can sense what this Caribbean island meant to them—another honeymoon closer to home.

When Locke returned to Howard University that fall of 1913, he confronted again the reality that he was stuck professionally at Howard. Over the summer, his closest friend among the teachers at Howard, Montgomery Gregory, had obtained a position as an assistant professor of English in the College of Arts and Sciences under Kelly Miller. Locke remained in the Teachers College teaching reading and writing. Gregory had a Harvard pedigree as well, being a graduate and a protégé of George Pierce Baker, the great Harvard dramatist. Kelly Miller and others at the university had dreams of a university drama group, and Gregory was picked to start what became known as the Howard Players. Gregory also became Miller’s main teacher of English literature and public speaking in the pre–World War I years, teaching American Literature and the Novel, the Elizabethan Drama, and Debate and Composition. These were all courses that Locke would have liked to teach. Locke complained in several letters to his mother in 1913 and 1914 that Gregory’s mother was “pushing her son ahead.” Although Locke got along quite well with the fair-complexioned, curly-haired Gregory—he would later assist Gregory in forming not only the Howard Players but also the Howard Stylus, a literary club—it was difficult for Locke to see a man his junior promoted ahead of him.

Locke did have some professional opportunities. Not long after he accepted the job at Howard University, Locke was contacted to help organize northern semicentennial Emancipation expositions, one at Atlantic City, the other at Philadelphia. Such expositions were designed to advertise the gains the race had made since 1863, and hence one reason Locke was recruited: he was the winner of the Rhodes Scholarship. But Locke also used the exposition to advocate for a research program that could carry out a sociological analysis of the New Jersey Negro in concert with what he had learned at the Universal Races Congress in 1911. Locke wanted to move beyond simply holding a fair that celebrated the Negro’s arrival in the twentieth century and success at assimilating White American middle-class accomplishments, which was often the focal point of such expositions. But Locke lacked a research team or a community of like-minded comparative theorists to carry out a comparative world analysis of the Negro community in New Jersey. Locke could not transform the celebration program into the kind of examination of this northern urban community with the international scholarly vision he brought with him from abroad.¹⁷

But in truth, Locke’s mind was not really focused on sociological research or the Emancipation celebration, but on advancing his career as a teacher at Howard in 1913. The only way to advance his academic standing at Howard was to get a PhD. Indeed, there was no reason to worry about his failure to get the Oxford degree: he had put down that he had it, and it still didn’t matter; it was just another bachelor’s degree as far as Howard was concerned. He needed a PhD, the pinnacle of academic distinction in the United States, and his trip to Harvard over the summer had rekindled his desire for graduate study at Harvard with his favorite teacher, Josiah Royce. If he could find a way to get to Harvard in the coming years and obtain a PhD, perhaps he could get promoted into the College of Letters and Science and get more salary. But study at Harvard was expensive, and he was not at all certain that he could get in: letters from the head of the Andover Theological Seminary about his welshing on the debt to Mrs. Addis had probably not helped his reputation. For that reason, his thoughts began to turn to Berlin in the spring of 1914, for he was still enrolled under the philosophical faculty at the German university.

Locke left for Berlin probably in late June 1914 taking his mother with him. Of course, this was not surprising. Since being back in the United States, he had settled down and been very productive at Howard in Washington, D.C., with his mother close by. Perhaps he decided to take his mother with him to Berlin to help him get the doctorate or perhaps simply to get him settled before she returned to her teaching job in Camden—it’s not clear which. Indeed, Mary Locke may not have known exactly what his plans were. After the crossing, they stopped briefly in England, and then went on to Berlin, where Locke set about trying to register for fall classes at the University of Berlin. Mary accompanied him even though she believed going to Germany unwise. “I was impressed not to come,” as she wrote her cousin Varick from Berlin on August 4. “But Roy is so determined, he wanted to increase his salary or get a better position at Howard by continuing his studies here.”¹⁸ Locke ignored negative advice from other people, so it is not surprising warnings from her friends did not deter him. But when a Serbian nationalist assassinated the archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary at Sarajevo on June 28, a chain reaction led to war by the end of July. It certainly caught the Lockes by surprise. “War declared in Germany, July 31, 1914,” Mary Locke wrote in her diary. Alain and Mary Locke heard the “declaration of war read by [the] Kaiser from [a] balcony window of Place amid crowds of people, who with cheering and shouts expressed their joy and approval. The vast multitudes united in singing ‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.’ The bells of the Cathedral opposite began to play German hymns and national airs. The Kaiser accompanied by his whole family went on foot to Cathedral to service of prayer and praise.”¹⁹

They were now trapped in Berlin. Since Germany was at war with almost all of its neighbors, the kaiser closed its borders, making it impossible to leave. Twenty-five thousand Americans were detained in Germany on the excuse that all trains must be commandeered to move troops and military equipment to the front. German officials were also very concerned about spies and wanted to ensure that no one with classified materials or photographs of military preparations slipped out of the country. Although Germany assured American officials that Americans would soon be released after mobilization had been completed, the situation worsened when Britain declared war on Germany on August 7. In Berlin, Germans rioted and stoned the British embassy and became suspicious of anyone speaking English. Germany also cut off all communications and financial transactions with London, stopping mail service between England and Germany. This action cut off the Lockes from a hundred dollars awaiting them at Cooks in London. Even “the University of Berlin closed … students in great numbers, with uncovered heads, marching through the streets, singing the ‘Watch on the Rhine’—in which they are joined by crowds in the street.” It did not take Mary Locke long to conclude that “we are in a terrible situation, the whole country seems to be at war—the city of Berlin is under martial law. Roy has his American passport and has registered at the American Embassy. [Our] only hope in getting out of this is that the U.S. will send warships to take the Americans home and that we may be included. The Embassy is crowded with Americans.” Unsure that they would ever make it back alive, Mary Locke sent her cousin instructions to “go to Claphans—get the cedar chest open, it has all papers belonging to us. Roy is insured in three companies, Metropolitan of New York, National Benefit of Washington and an accident policy. I have about $500 due on Metropolitan … sell everything you can, let the other debts go and whatever there is, use for Money. Do this as quickly as you can.”²⁰

Perhaps Mary Locke hoped Varick could wire money to Berlin, but that was hopeless: all diplomatic and financial communications between the United States and Germany had been cut off. By August 7, their Berlin landlords, fearful that the Lockes, like many other Americans, were out of money, demanded that the rent be paid in cash every morning. Fortunately, Alain and Mary Locke had budgeted carefully for the trip and still had money, unlike the hundreds of Americans who crowded the American embassy trying to get advances on suddenly worthless checks. Actually, the Americans were the lucky foreigners in Berlin, for all others were suspected of being spies. “A Russian was dragged out of the house in which we are staying,” Mary Locke continued to Varick, “his wife left penniless, and he sent to prison. They have shot a number of Russians, whom they suspected of being spies—as you walk along the streets, you see men arrested on every side as suspects. Last night the English Ambassador [Sir Edward Goschen] tried to leave, his auto was stoned, and he was forced to take refuge in a hotel.” Being African American helped in this situation. “The police opened Roy’s door early in the morning a day or so ago, saw his black face in the bed, and went on. They were searching the house for Russians and Frenchmen.”²¹

In fact, the Lockes escaped any harassment from the Germans and were able to move about freely in the capital of the Axis powers. Locke seemed to enjoy being in Berlin at such a propitious moment in modern history. As a German sympathizer, he believed that Germany would win the war and teach the British a lesson, and he seemed to be enthralled by the war preparations. He was thrilled by the show of patriotism on the part of the German people, at the organized way Germans prepared themselves for the war, and at the spirit of elation with which even Berlin’s art, theater, and music people took trains to the front. Here was the spirit of nationalism that he appreciated in the Germans and wished for among the African Americans back home. There was always something of a martial spirit in Alain Locke, a man who thought of himself as a literary general. On a more practical level, Locke also approached being a trapped American with the kind of organization that he esteemed in his German friends. He attended all of the mass meetings at the American Embassy, had his passport updated, with his mother listed as his wife (a diplomatic move to simplify his exit), and had a personal meeting with Ambassador James Gerard to ask that he and his mother be given special and early passage out of Berlin. Since both Locke and his mother were schoolteachers, whom the American press had identified as persons particularly in need of quick exit from Berlin, Locke had every expectation that he would receive special treatment. As a former Rhodes Scholar, Locke may have felt that he possessed the cachet to prevail on Ambassador Gerard for a quick exit from Berlin. For now that there was no hope of continuing at the University of Berlin, he needed to get back to the United States and into his position at Howard University as quickly as possible. A quick exit would also allay his mother’s mounting anxiety.

Locke’s early departure was not to be, however. On August 12, Ambassador Gerard led a train of four hundred Americans out of Berlin that stopped in Amsterdam and then in Rotterdam, Holland, where “a steamer on the Holland-American line” brought the distraught Americans to the United States.²² Locke and his mother were not among those “rescued” by that first train out of Berlin. The reason appears to have been racial. In October, after he did make it out of Berlin, Locke informed Gilchrist Stewart, a deputy clerk in the New York State Assembly, that Gerard had informed him that Locke and his mother could not leave on that first train, because of the “color question.” Apparently, Gilchrist Stewart had heard of Locke’s experience from someone else, possibly John Bruce, and telegraphed Locke asking for confirmation. “Wire me at my expense 203 Broadway if report is true that Ambassador Gerard told you to wait until he [had] taken care of the whites marooned before taking care of any colored.”²³ Locke’s reply, scribbled in his hand on the telegram, confirmed that that was true, along with his usual attempt to play down the role of racism in his life. “It is true that Ambassador Gerard in private conversation admitted reluctantly that color question prevented granting special accomodation [sic] claimed and promised re personal transportation, even condoning situation. Case special |personal| however without reference [to] others. Would [deprecate?] newspaper or sensational use of facts because of extreme courtesy and consideration [by] other officials and members of staff [and] also because vigorous protest was lodged there and later in influential official quarters. Had considered and have no objection however [to] sensible use of generalized charge in New York campaign.”²⁴ The “charge” was important because Gerard was the Democratic candidate for senator from New York in the fall, and such Black newspapers as the New York Age had come out for the Republican candidate. The charge seems not to have made it into the newspapers, however, or to have been part of the campaign in any way. Still, if true, the incident shows how pervasive American racism was even in Germany at such a cataclysmic moment.

The Lockes were not the only African Americans in Berlin. Hazel Harrison, the pianist, had come to Berlin to study with Borsini, while Kemper Harreld, the violinist, accompanied by his wife, was spending the summer there taking lessons from master violinist Siegfried Eberhardt. Kemper Harreld kept a diary of his experiences in Berlin that detailed the formal declaration of war, the patriotism of the German people, and the kind treatment the Harrelds received from the Germans. Like Locke, Harreld seemed to be relatively unperturbed by the war preparations and continued his lessons with Eberhardt at the latter’s residence through the second and third weeks of August. Interestingly enough, the Harrelds and Miss Harrison also remained in Berlin after the departure of the August 12 train, but Harreld made no mention of race or discrimination in his diary. “First train leaves tomorrow for Holland since the mobilization began. Many Americans who have surcured [sic] passage on Holland ships to America will embrace this opportunity to travel to their ships.”²⁵ Given that the Harrelds’ ship reservations to depart London for the United States were not until August 29, they had not attempted to leave on the August 12 train. The Harrelds probably only learned of Locke’s experience on the seventeenth, when the Harrelds had “Miss Harrison, Mr. Locke and his mother come for coffee.” Even then the Harrelds might not have learned of Locke’s experience, since Locke might not have felt that it was politic to mention his attempt to obtain special treatment.

In any event, a second train arranged by Ambassador Gerard left Berlin on August 25 with four hundred Americans on board, including Miss Harrison, the Harrelds, and the Lockes. It moved very slowly through the German countryside “for fear of accident” and arrived the next day at “the border town of Bentheim.” After having their passports and tickets checked, the passengers continued on the same train to the Hague, where they disembarked. Unfortunately, the “Hotels in the Hague and Rotterdam [were] unable to accommodate Americans who must wait for ship transportation.” We don’t know how Locke and his mother fared, but they seemed to tough it out with the Harrelds and Miss Harrison until the next day, when all left the Hague for Flushing. They went aboard “ship at night,” so as not to attract attention, and crossed the English Channel to Folkestone, where they took a train and arrived in London late in the evening on August 28. Harreld was pleasantly surprised to learn that “our return reservations purchased in America is good.” Locke and his mother were not so lucky: Mary Locke had booked her return passage to the United States from Bremen, Germany, and Locke himself had not even had a reservation to return since he had believed he would be staying in Berlin indefinitely. So, in the midst of “great excitement in England over German victories in Belgium and France,” Locke and his mother had to scrounge for whatever accommodations they could get. Josephine Harreld Love recalls her parents telling her that the Lockes returned on the same boat, but had to book passage on steerage—a real indignity to Mrs. Locke. Earlier, in 1911, when Locke had proposed coming home with little money, his mother had stated, “whatever you do, do not come over on steerage—the disease, the filth, I would be crazy with worry.”²⁶ But in this desperate situation, both Locke and his mother had to put their class fears aside. Indeed, they were not alone: millionaires, according to press reports of the time, were electing steerage over remaining in a sinking Europe. As with war generally, the Great War was breaking down class barriers, if only on the trip home.

Once Alain and Mary Locke landed in New York, they hurried home, Mary Locke disembarking at Philadelphia to report late to her school in Camden. The Camden Black community already knew that she had been detained in Berlin, and she was inundated with visits from nosy neighbors and school colleagues. A note from the ambassador about why she was delayed smoothed over whatever problems her lateness caused with school officials. The situation that faced Locke is more unclear: Had he informed the Howard administration he would not be coming back for the fall? Or had he simply not told them he might not be back? It is unclear, but Locke appears to have gotten his old job back without a hitch.

Locke also gained a more radical voice. Being in Europe at the beginning of the war inspired him to revisit his criticality about imperialism that he had explored in his talks before the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club and that he had planned to develop in his aborted comparative race studies lecture series in Europe. The Great War confirmed what he had been working himself toward intellectually for sometime—that imperialist rivalry would one day lead to Europeans attacking one another and revealing that their so-called civilization was little more than naked violence and power. The war unveiled the dirty little secret of European domination, that imperialism was a racial virus that now infected those who had spread it. With this theme amplified by his German internment, Locke approached John Bruce of the Yonkers Historical Society about delivering a new address. On September 26, he returned to Yonkers to deliver “The Great Disillusionment,” a powerful paper that argued that World War I was a race war, which had broken out between the two arms of Anglo-Saxon civilization, England and Germany, over the spoils of empire. Locke argued that it was not the outcome of the struggle, but its outbreak that was most significant. The first consequence of the war was the breakup of the Anglo-Saxon partnership in the spoils of imperialism. “Up to a few days ago England[,] America[,] and Germany were custodians of Anglo-Saxon civilization[.] Now before the youngest as a neutral spectator, the elder partners struggle in [a] death-grip” for control of that civilization. Britain had created the imperial model in its naked grab for trade and raw materials in Asia and Africa, but “as modern imperialism came more and more to be a racial matter, the philosopher and statesmen were forced, even in view of their bitter rivalries, to assert the co-partnership of European nations[.]”²⁷

Apologists for empire had rationalized imperial domination in social Darwinist terms as the White man’s burden of bringing progress and civilization to barbaric Asian and African peoples. But the war showed that European civilization was itself “barbaric” and unable to resolve its disputes in a rational manner. The war exposed that “civilizing” the Colored races had been only a pretension, that the lust for empire and world domination had been the main motivation of imperialism. Once the spoils had been divided up and there were no more easy pickings for the latecomers like Germany and Russia to the rape of Africa and Asia, the imperialist nations had gone after one another’s holdings. The second consequence was that the war delivered a fatal blow to the notion that Europe had an inalienable right to rule. “Indeed, one of the predictable results of the war will be its inevitable lesson to other races and alien civilizations that I trust will forever make impossible the Frankenstein of the nineteenth-century—the pretensions of European civilization to world-dominance and eternal superiority.” While the war did not mean the “end of the enterprise … it does mean the lapse of the old charter, the divine right of certain nations to govern others. For whichever nation wins[,] empire can no longer mean the God-given privilege to rule the world.”²⁸

Interestingly, Locke found confirmation of this view in an editorial on the war in the September 1914 issue of the North American Review that he read to his Yonkers audience:

Consider the possible reactions of this European conflagration upon the world at large. Up to a month ago the white race was master of this planet. Africa was absolutely beneath European sway, while in Asia only the island Empire of Japan had made good its position. … But in these last ten years a strange breath has passed over the Asiatic world. The victories of Japan have awakened the dormant spirit of the East, and the countless millions of the Orient, once so passive, to chafe sullenly at the European yoke. India is seething with unrest at the British “Raj”; “unchanging” China is changing at last, and their teeming populations are beating fiercely against the white man’s own frontier and answering his exclusion laws with threats and menaces which portend still mightier race struggles in the years to come—struggles beside which even the present battle of the nations might seem tame indeed.²⁹

Locke acknowledged, “Many will dispute the fact that the imperial rivalry is the ground cause of the present conflict.” Even most of the African Americans in his 1914 audience probably believed that militarism, navalism, or petty conflicts between European emperors were more likely causes. But Locke argued forcefully, “An examination can as easily substantiate this claim as well now as history must later. To my mind the most certain proof that this is [the] main issue between Germany and Great Britain is the hysterical assertion of each that they are fighting for the same thing,” for “a leadership that only one can exercise. This is the essence of the imperial idea: it is not as nations but as empires that Germany and Britain rival each other. … What lies back of the most commonly asserted cause, militarism, with its complement of navalism, are in their modern forms a product of empire.” Imperialism, in Locke’s analysis, was not solely the racial domination of India by England—it was also a policy by which the elder imperial nations tried to draw into their orbit other European nations as junior partners; what was “Germany[’s] sponsorship for Austria, but the tutelage of a younger and more unsuccessful accomplice at the imperial game. What is Russia’s shibboleth, the Pan-Slavic idea—another imperial scheme.” Rather than a war of cliques and emperors, it was “nearer the truth to say that it was a war of peoples—a race war—but truest of all, and worst of all, it is a war of ideas, for the utopia of empire and the dream of an unlimited and permanent overlordship.”³⁰

The Great War destroyed the pretension that Europeans pursued imperialism and colonialism to “civilize” the non-Western peoples, since now Europeans were acting in the most barbaric way possible—eschewing diplomacy and negotiation to kill millions of their own peoples. Locke was invoking here a version of Plato’s discourse on justice, in which Socrates argues that justice is never simply the “right of the stronger.” By that logic, the Great War is not a just war, since justice involves rulers acting in the best interest of those whose welfare has been entrusted to them. By the same logic, imperialism was exposed by the war as unjust, for instead of being pursued in the interest of the ruled, it was in fact pursued for the naked self-interest of European nations. Once that self-interest could not be satisfied by more bounty from the colonies, they turned on one another and exposed that greed was their only real motivation all along. While such an exposé hardly seems earth shattering today, it was an important critique to his African American audience that was wrestling with its own ambiguous relationship to Africa and subjected to the ideology of the civilizing mission of Europe as imperialism’s justification in Africa.

But what made Locke’s analysis most radical was that he described the Great War as a race war that now divided the Europeans themselves. The war had broken out at the center of the “great European civilization, rather than at its extremities” in Africa or in Asia, because European nations or empires now competed with one another to determine whose empire would dominate not only Africa and Asia but also the rest of Europe. Europeans were speaking of other Europeans in racial terms—as inferiors, as barbaric, and as backward—terms that had generally been reserved for the peoples of Africa and Asia. The hatred that burst out in Europe in 1914 was not just a conflict between ruling elites, but a racial feud whereby “in each country the common folk feel their existence is in jeopardy. Possessing often a common culture and tradition, they are nevertheless forced to regard themselves as bitterly estranged. The epithet of barbarian and enemy of civilization is hurled at blood brothers[;] the idea of Empire, the nemesis of alien races, has turned upon its authors.” In places like the Alsace-Lorraine, people who had lived side by side for centuries now regarded themselves as different as races. “The Great Disillusionment” expanded the notion of race to show the way in which the average European was a victim of the kind of racial polarization that imperialism had spawned.

The Great War was clearly a case of chickens coming home to roost, as “the idea of Empire, the nemesis of alien races, has turned upon its authors.”³¹ The war was a morality lesson “that like a handwriting on the wall, suddenly looms up out of our darkness before us” to teach us what are the consequences to those who dominate the political and economic lives of others. Since the Great War was not a just war, African Americans should distance themselves from the conflict.

In my first communication to this society in 1911[,] I distinctly claimed that we should be prouder as a people of having acquired this [European] civilization and culture than of having it as an inheritance. I said this first in the interests of sincerity[.] I thought our culture would be sounder if we made no false claims to it, and had a sense of our own racial and ethnical past as a foundation upon which to rear it[.] But now not merely for our own pride’s sake[,] but to avoid their shame, let us realize and confess that the civilization which is at war with itself is not ours in the intimate sense that we owe it a blood debt or even an irrevocable allegiance.³²

Locke’s declaration that African Americans did not owe a “blood debt or even an irrevocable allegiance” to the “Anglo-Saxon partnership” came close to advocating the Black nonparticipation in the war, should “the youngest as a neutral spectator,” America, be drawn into this war over the future of the Anglo-Saxon partnership. Followed to its logical conclusion, Locke’s cultural nationalism led to a conscientious objection for racial reasons. That certainly went beyond the kind of neutrality that Woodrow Wilson could have endorsed.

It also went beyond the analysis of Locke’s intellectual rival, W. E. B. Du Bois, who, in a November 1914 editorial in the Crisis, also argued that imperialism was the underlying cause of the war. Coming so soon after “The Great Disillusionment,” Du Bois’s editorial may have been inspired by news of Locke’s well-received lecture. But Du Bois’s editorial focused more narrowly on Africa, whereas Locke went further and argued that imperialism not only explained the origins of the war, but that Europe itself was a racialized continent. Where Du Bois believed that Black interests lay in defending the British, who as colonizers were not as bad as the Germans, Locke concluded that England and Germany pursued the same policies: “it is simply a question [of] which is the most efficient agent, the weapon of conquest or the weapon of maintenance, physical force or material resources.”³³ Clearly, Locke found in “The Great Disillusionment” an independent voice and a more thoroughly transnationalist viewpoint on the war than that of Du Bois. Ironically, it was Locke’s closer connection with the European experience, and his own love of Germany, that gave him the more revealing critique of imperialism as something that embodied but transcended color.

Locke had found a way to win the acclaim of the society’s members, as his speech was greeted, at least according to his letters back to his mother, by thunderous applause, general approval, and cries of “better than Du Bois.” This latter must have been particularly satisfying, for in truth, he had been working in Du Bois’s intellectual shadow since returning to America in 1912. “The Negro and a Race Tradition,” as well as Locke’s subsequent lectures on the education of the Negro, worked within lines that had first been drawn by Du Bois. Now, Locke had an issue that was his, or so it seemed, until the November editorial, and Du Bois’s more formal article on the subject, “The African Roots of the War,” appeared in May 1915 in the Atlantic Monthly. After the latter article appeared, Du Bois would be known as the African American intellectual who provided an imperialist analysis of World War I. That occurred, in part, because Locke’s speech was never published.

Once again, Locke struggled with his continuing problem of invisibility. Du Bois’s piece, of course, deserved its reputation. Reading “The Great Disillusionment” and “The African Roots of the War” confirms how much more scholarly and detailed was Du Bois’s essay, especially when compared to Locke’s sketchy, but more challenging racial deconstruction of the idea of imperialism. But, Locke’s analysis deserved a broader hearing, for it took the discussion of imperialism out of the narrow confines of the impact of African colonialism on Europe and suggested before Du Bois that imperialism was the international practice of race in a way that anticipated the kind of critique that Lenin would advance in his “Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism.” Where Lenin analyzed imperialism as an example of “late capitalism,” Locke analyzed imperialism as a metastasized stage of racism. Indeed, “The Great Disillusionment” owed a debt to Marx as well as Lenin, showing that Locke in Berlin and in the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club had learned enough Marxism to transform it into a critique of imperialism from a colonial perspective. Locke’s cosmopolitan sojourn to Oxford and Berlin was beginning to pay off in a radical sociological analysis of race in ways that Marx had analyzed class—as the pivot of contemporary global economic and political domination. And just as Lenin later saw the war as a turning point in the world history of the class conflict, Locke saw the war as the turning point in the history of a race conflict, for it exposed the fundamentally ideological nature of imperialism. And its signature insight that race defined the relations between European nations would not be flushed out in more detail until 1983 and the publication of Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition.

Locke’s speech before the Yonkers Historical Society also allowed him to renew his relationship with John E. Bruce. Bruce had argued in private correspondence with John W. Cromwell that Alexander Walters would fail in his attempt to turn his status as a loyal Black Democrat into political capital for the Negro once Wilson was elected. By the fall of 1914, it was clear that Bruce had been right, and he probably used his time with Locke, whom Bruce saw as a protégé, to emphasize that point. Bruce probably tried to wean Locke from too close an association with Walters and the Democratic Party, which Bruce believed was fundamentally inimical to the interests of the Negro. It was probably at the dinner and festivities that followed Locke’s address that Bruce learned of Locke’s experience with discrimination at the hands of Ambassador Gerard in Berlin. Later, Bruce probably passed that information on to Gilchrist Stewart, because Bruce viewed Gerard’s defeat as a blow against the Wilson administration that had put the reluctant ambassador up for the New York Senate. Locke’s reply to Stewart showed that, although he often eschewed politics, he was willing to contribute to the struggle against Gerard and the Democratic Party in New York. Locke’s visit to Bruce’s Sunnyslope farm, therefore, drew Locke into the Republican fold. Shortly after Gerard’s defeat in the November election, Locke wrote his mother, “Things are looking up for our friends, the Republicans and the Germans.”³⁴

That fall, war was Locke’s consuming concern, such that he was almost “bankrupting myself” buying papers to follow each punch and counterpunch of the European conflict. Locke enthused over every German victory and even the rebellion of the South African Boers—anyone who threatened the hated hegemony of the British. Part of that enthusiasm derived from Locke’s belief that armed struggle connoted to a people a degree of self-respect. “Our friends the Germans are looking up these days—it is wonderful isn’t it? I am sorry no colored race has had the courage of the Boers, but I think like the rest of us they’ll imitate now that someone else has started.”³⁵

Such harsh judgments came easily for Locke. He used a similar one to castigate an old acquaintance, Jessie Fauset, a fellow Philadelphian, who was coming up to Howard University every week. Fauset graciously invited him, along with her chaperone, Helen Irvin, over for dinner in November 1914. “I called on Jessie Fauset last night—(at her written invitation) she comes up each week to the University and is more civilized and sensible than she was I think. Like most strong medicine the war seems to have driven some insane people sane as well as made many mad who were not.”³⁶ Such a harsh response to such a friendly gesture as an invitation to dinner suggests that something else was going on. Was Fauset’s more “sensible” behavior Locke’s way of stating that she was no longer as forward as she might have been when they first met during his undergraduate days at Harvard? Had Fauset been attracted to Locke in those early years until she heard through “the grapevine” that Locke was gay? Locke may also have been attracted to Fauset, but knew that he could only go so far with such an interest. It may have then been far easier, therefore, for Locke to deal with her once she was less aggressive. Or Fauset may simply have been interested in a position at the university and believed that Locke might help her obtain it. Certainly, she would be on her best behavior in such circumstances. Given that she never got hired, Fauset may have also gained a negative message from her attempt at rapprochement with Locke. Perhaps no matter what she did, Fauset could expect little if any support from him. As Locke became more popular on the Washington social scene, he had to use his sarcasm and deprecating wit to keep his involvement with women at a safe distance.

Things were also looking up for Locke on the academic front that fall of 1914. The time seemed to be right to begin building a base for himself as a cutting-edge sociological thinker at Howard University. In December 1914, a Negro trustee, Dr. Jesse Moorland, donated his enormous collection of books, manuscripts, and statuary on the Negro to Howard University. Kelly Miller had encouraged Moorland to donate his collection, as part of Miller’s plan to make Howard a center of research on African American life and culture. Miller gambled that the university would be unwilling to reject the contribution of a Negro trustee as well respected as Moorland. The university graciously accepted what became known as the Moorland Collection and with it Moorland’s recommendation that a special room in the library be set aside to house it. Suddenly, a place existed on campus devoted to the study of the Negro, and Locke joined Miller in recommending that a Negro history museum be established at Howard University for the collection and study of African American artifacts and memorabilia. Locke also proposed that the university hire a full-time researcher to produce a bibliography of the collection and other works of Negro Americana that would be collected in the library. Ultimately, this library would become a center, in Locke’s view, for what would become Black Studies. As with most of Locke’s schemes, his personal advancement was part of the idea: Locke intended that he would be appointed the bibliographer. He even lobbied Booker T. Washington with examples of the kinds of materials that he and Miller wanted to see collected in the bibliography of Negro-Americana.³⁷ Although the board thought the idea important enough to refer it to a committee for further study, it ultimately turned down his request. Did the board react to Locke’s proposal out of its racial conservatism or against the obvious self-interest of Locke in the project? While this is unclear, the decision blocked what was a legitimate attempt to establish the first African American Studies program at a Negro university.

Undaunted, Locke redoubled his efforts to win approval of another of his proposals, a course he wished to teach on race theory and practices. Actually, he had submitted the same proposal early in 1914, when Howard’s board of trustees had rejected it. Locke then repackaged his course into a series of five lectures he proposed to give outside the curriculum, under the auspices of the campus NAACP, but that too was blocked effectively in April when the board of deans decided he could say all he had to in one lecture evening. Not to be outdone by his opposition, Locke decided to submit his race course proposal during the summer for inclusion in the fall 1914 curriculum. Again, it was rejected. In January 1915, in the afterglow of the school’s acceptance of the Moorland Collection, the climate at Howard was right for another attempt by Locke to teach “a new course I wish to give if I am to be here next year.”³⁸ Although this proposal was also rejected, it paved the way for permission to give the course in the five public lectures, on campus, with the support of both the NAACP chapter and the Social Science Club at Howard. Locke delivered those lectures in 1915 and was able to synthesize all he had learned in the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, at the University of Berlin, the Universal Races Congress, and his own experience of the European war mobilization to express a new way of thinking about race in America and in the world.

But it would be another year before Locke got to deliver the lectures to the influential audience he wanted to reach and deliver them on campus at Howard University. On the afternoon of March 27, 1916, a terrific rainstorm raged in Washington, D.C., and worried Locke as he hurried to the lecture hall of the Carnegie Library on Howard’s campus, umbrella in hand, to the first of his five lectures he would deliver that afternoon. Last year’s audience for the lectures had been small and bereft of the more famous people at the university. He was delivering them a second time because he needed to reach a larger audience this time, especially Howard’s influential circle of deans and administrators. He was giving the lectures to gain an appointment in the College of Arts and Sciences and to establish an institute of race relations at Howard. As William Sinclair, a trustee of Howard University, put it in a letter to President Newman, Locke planned to establish at a Black university the kind of Sociology Department that Columbia University was beginning to found.³⁹ At the very least, Locke hoped that if his lectures were a success, they would make the case that he belonged in the College of Arts and Sciences with Miller. Spectacular success might mean he would be recognized as a new sociological authority and given an opportunity to lead a race studies center at Howard.

As Locke paced the stage for several minutes before beginning, the hall filled as people slowly came in from the heavy rain, hung up their raincoats, and settled into the hardwood seats in Carnegie Library. The stenographer, a White George Washington law student Locke had hired to record the lectures, sharpened his pencils and readied his pads while the compulsive Locke looked nervously at his pocket watch. By the time Locke delivered his opening remarks shortly after 4 p.m., the most important Howard people had arrived, including College of Arts and Sciences dean Kelly Miller and Locke’s own dean Lewis Moore.

Begun on the last Monday of March and continued each afternoon of the following four Mondays in April, Locke’s lectures laid out a new sociological theory that race was not a biological but a historical phenomenon. In his first lecture, “The Theoretical and Scientific Conceptions of Race,” delivered that first rainy night, Locke used the work of Franz Boas, specifically his Race Congress lectures, “The Instability of Race Types,” to show that racial characteristics were not innate or permanent. Recent anthropology had found that physical traits—skin color, head size, hair type, and so forth—varied dramatically within groups, such that one could find dark-skinned and very light-skinned Negro Americans; and one could find similar traits (hair texture, for example) in a variety of different race groups. Even within a group, Boas’s research had shown that certain physical traits, specifically head shape and size, changed over time with changes in the social and cultural environment of immigrant groups. Locke concluded that there were no static factors of race and therefore no permanent physical characteristics that were possessed by any race.

In 1916, Boas’s work was known to only a handful of Americans and would have to wait until his graduate students Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, and Margaret Mead popularized his views in the 1930s and 1940s. In 1916, Locke was the intellectual who most fully realized that Boas’s insights revolutionized racial science by shifting the burden of proof onto the racists and took from them the sanction of anthropology. Locke’s first lecture demonstrated there were no static factors of race, that even physical characteristics changed with alterations in the social and cultural environment, and went even further than Boas to assert that biology had no influence on race types. Race was simply another word for national or social groups that shared a common history. It was culture—social, political, and economic processes—that produced racial character, not the other way around.

What then, the listener in the Faculty Club might have asked, was the significance of race? Locke answered such a question in lecture 2, “The Political and Practical Conception of Race,” by arguing that race mainly defined one’s relationship to power. Here was the lesson he had delivered in “The Great Disillusionment,” that one’s race was really just one’s reputation, that being the inferior race was just the record of having lost out in conflicts like the Great War raging in Europe. Races had begun as extended kinship groups with a sense of us-versus-them developing as a kind of blood relationship; but that was all fictive now after generations of mixing of different groups, such that now, races were imagined national or social groups that competed for scarce resources and used racial discourses to justify their seizure of more of those resources for their own group. Imperialism was thus little more than the practice of race, the use of power to take what one wanted, and justify it with a rhetoric, a mythos, of inherent difference.

What was perhaps most interesting about these lectures is what Locke did on the third Monday in the lecture “Phenomena and Laws of Race Contacts.” For there Locke donned the hat of the sociologist and analyzed race as the vortex of modern social relations. A history of race contacts might be interesting, Locke opined, but what was really needed was a sociology of race contacts, an analysis of how groups of people interacted through race, and how race perceptions shaped group interactions. Like Marx, Locke asked his listeners to look behind the apparent nature of conflict—class conflict for Marx, race conflicts for Locke—and see those racial conflicts as originating, “after all, not in the mind, but in the practical problems of human living.” Racial categories were usually class categories that had become hereditary, such that certain jobs were performed by certain groups of people, such that the slave or the servant came to define what many people thought of when they said Black. Competition for scarce resources—money, status, reputation—was the underlying cause of most racial conflict and perhaps the key to understanding why racial conflict increased or subsided in relation to poor or improving economic conditions. Indeed, one of the reasons for the ebb and flow of racial feelings was that elites manipulated race feelings to divide and conquer the working classes. That insight revealed an even more fundamental one: race feelings changed over time in response to changing historical conditions and racism passed through distinct phases in response to varying economic conditions.

But Locke was unwilling to reduce race to simply a reflection of class conflicts or interests like traditional Marxists. Race was a social psychological calculus by which a group or people measured its success in relation to others. Racial feelings had some as yet undetermined relation to population such that racial feelings often changed with removal of formal barriers or dramatic changes in population. Racial feelings often changed in relation to perceived changes in the social status of a group and were particularly prevalent in democratic societies where in the absence of aristocratic barriers to upward or downward mobility, competition for status and power was open to all. Race was thus a tool used in competition for scarce resources but also a feeling about the fate of one’s group that reached down into the emotional psyche of a people. That was one of the reasons racial feelings could be so virulent and passionate, often more violent than class feelings. Race, in other words, deserved its own sophisticated sociology to understand how modern societies functioned but also suffered because of race perceptions and relations.

Even though there were no fixed biological indicators of race, thinking of oneself as part of a race persisted, because once constructed by a society, race consciousness shaped how people reacted to one another, particularly in competitive social situations. Locke’s intellectual innovation was important for his time for it solved the problem faced by other Black intellectuals of how to reject scientific theories of biological racism without also having to jettison any possibility that Blacks could regard themselves positively as a racial group. Such Black intellectuals as Alexander Crummel, John Bruce, and W. E. B. Du Bois believed that African Americans needed a positive conception of race to restore Black self-esteem in the aftermath of slavery and Reconstruction. But most of these intellectuals found themselves unconsciously buying into nineteenth-century notions of race when they spoke about the Black group as a race. For example, race seemed to be a fixed and permanent entity in Du Bois’s essay “The Conservation of the Races” (1897), when he wrote that “in our calmer moments we must acknowledge that human beings are divided into races; that in this country the two most extreme types of the world’s races have met.”⁴⁰

Locke’s more flexible sociological approach to races occurred also because he was constantly injecting the comparative perspective into his lectures. Locke’s discussions with other colonial intellectuals at Oxford and his European traveling experiences convinced him that other groups experienced racial or group prejudice that was on a par with that suffered by Blacks in America. Particularly in lecture 4, “Modern Race Creeds and Their Fallacies,” Locke compared American racism with European anti-Semitism and found the latter as intense in places like France as anything he had witnessed in America. Europe had its own internal race conflicts, between northern and southern, western and eastern Europeans, such that Lithuanians who revealed their national identity by their accent found themselves discriminated against in Austrian restaurants. Race and racial divisions, categories, and conflicts were always constructed out of the particular histories of societies in which they occurred, such that in Austria, the Lithuanians, or in France, the Jews, were the “niggers” of those societies. Locke stressed the comparative approach because he wanted to free his listeners from the belief that their experience of oppression was unique in world history and so unprecedented that no way existed for them to grapple successfully with it in the American racial situation.

What Locke most wanted to give his listeners in the lecture hall of Carnegie Library was a sense of their agency in America. Since race attitudes changed over time, hope existed even in the America of 1916 for Black Americans to shape their future. If Locke’s analysis was correct, then the American racial situation would change, inevitably, and with it Black prospects for empowerment in America. Therefore, the question was, how could African Americans respond to their historical situation in such a way that they could improve the prospects for the race as a whole? Locke’s answer, articulated in lecture 5, “Race Progress and Race Adjustment,” echoed and updated what he had argued in “The Negro and a Race Tradition” and “Cosmopolitanism and Culture.” Although race was a biological myth, it was a powerful historical myth that unified those peoples who believed in it. In practical terms, a sense of racial solidarity was essential to the success of modern nations or groups. Locke believed that African Americans needed a sense of racial consciousness to compete with other groups in a modern capitalist order.

The problem, of course, was how to mobilize Black people to succeed in a system that was stacked against them in terms of the message that racialized American society delivered relentlessly to African Americans. Black people needed to develop a stronger sense of race consciousness, of pride and group self-respect, the positive characteristics of race, while avoiding its more pernicious manifestations in prejudice, racism, and xenophobia. Locke recommended focusing on the artistic and cultural celebration of race or national consciousness, instead of its political forms. European examples again supplied Locke with his most compelling models, especially “[t]he Celtic and the Pan-Slavic movements in arts and letters—movements by which the submerged classes are coming to their expression in art—seem to be the forerunners of that kind of recognition which they are ultimately striving for, namely, recognition [of an] economic, [a] civic, and [a] social sort; and these [movements] are the gateways through which culture-citizenship can be finally reached.”⁴¹

Locke wanted to alter American racism by strengthening African Americans’ ability to compete more successfully with other groups by amplifying their group sense, their group self-esteem and self-respect, and through amplifying their positive sense of race consciousness, increase their power. The way he advocated doing that was through literature, art, and music—the literacies of Black culture. That process had already begun under slavery when Blacks and Whites, slaves and masters, lived in such close proximity that the powerful African-based forms of Black American culture had powerfully shaped the folkways, music, and formal culture of southern America. Even in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cultural exchange was occurring between Black and White cultures under segregation because exclusion and separation actually heightened assimilation, in Locke’s analysis, because the oppressed and oppressors became more curious and desirous of precisely those things, those forms, that were verboten by official racial policy. America was already a composite culture, despite all the efforts of racial segregationists. What Locke recommended is that Black Americans capitalize on their cultural agency and turn the “reign” of their culture, eventually, into a source of political and economic freedom. Here was Locke’s theory of the social use of art to attain culture-citizenship.

Locke’s Race Contacts lectures were a bold attempt to provide a clear sociological argument for the emergence of the New Negro. The Race Contacts lectures showed that Locke had made himself into a keen theoretical sociologist of race in Washington, D.C., by 1916 just as “The Concept of Value” had showed Locke had made himself into a philosopher in Berlin by 1910. His sociological modernism consisted of his ability to reveal that race relations were changeable, liminal, and unfinished—something that Black people could contribute to redefining through their consciousness and actions. These lectures were also his most militant statement of his views, fueled perhaps in part by his anger over the war and the militant turn that Black political discourse had taken in America by the mid-1910s, of the possibility of a cultural revolution in America. They were radical in their sociological mapping of how race worked in modern capitalism to ensure the continued success of certain ethnic groups in stealing a disproportionate amount of the world’s precious resources. But Locke studiously avoided any recommendation of organized protest by Black Americans in his lecture on “race progress.” In recommending art and culture as the path of Black liberation, Locke built on his subtle observation in the lectures that a sociology of race relations revealed that the most powerful races could not control the interactions between themselves and other less powerful groups no matter how hard they tried. The less powerful groups or races had in fact profoundly shaped culturally and socially the so-called dominant groups, and within that scenario there was hope for the Negro. Could art and cultural influence seduce the powerful into a more humane approach to race contacts? If race was in essence consciousness, might art and literature that emerged from and shaped consciousness be a tool for change?

Once concluded, Locke felt that his 1916 lecture series was a success. Locke was especially pleased that he obtained a near complete transcript of his remarks that were delivered each Monday from scattered notecards. His White stenographer not only took down the notes but typed up the transcripts and gave them to Locke to edit. The previous year’s stenographer had failed to attend all of the lectures and had not produced a coherent record. Locke read the difference as racial. “Yesterday I spent nearly three hours trying to get or persuade various colored stenographers to no avail. I phoned a white stenographers bureau, and in a half hour a law student at George Washington University appeared … exactly on time. Says he will make cut rates as he is ‘glad to get the practice’ … the difference!”⁴²

Locke also had created his own permanent record: he had spent much of February and early March writing and privately publishing a pamphlet-sized syllabus that summarized the lecture contents and gave suggested additional readings. The syllabus suggested the tremendous range of Locke’s reading, from Edward Blyden’s Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race and Glimpses of the Ages to such obscure foreign-language texts as Hertz’s Moderne Rassenprobleme and Beaulieu Leroy’s De la colonisation chez les peuples modernes. Particularly strong was the large number of histories and studies of imperialism and early twentieth-century race thinking. Locke was pleased with the clean printed copies of the syllabus, even if they were not ready until the end of his lectures.

Unfortunately, while Locke’s lectures in 1916 succeeded in attracting key figures of the administration, they had little immediate impact on the Black political discourse of the day. “I gave the second lecture,” he wrote his mother on April 3, “last night to a small and rather indifferent audience.” That lecture, “The Practical and Political Conceptions of Race,” was his boldest lecture on race and British imperialism and missonarism. But when he concluded his final lecture on April 24, there was little response from the Howard community, which was distracted by other issues. During the second week of Locke’s lectures, a student strike had erupted on campus and had consumed the attention of the faculty, the deans, and the board of trustees for nearly two weeks. This strike also reduced attendance at his lectures, which must have seemed irrelevant to most of the students involved in the uprising. Actually, the lectures were not, for Locke could have predicted with his theory that such a generational rebellion was due, for race attitudes, even within the oppressed minorities, were also subject to change. On April 9, he notified his mother:

We have been having the devil of a time. Since Tuesday the whole student body has been on strike against the arbitrary discipline of the President and the Deans—Dean Cook precipitated the trouble, but it has been brewing a long while. I, of course, sympathize with the students but have not let it get known. Gregory on the other hand largely because of the debates which have had to be postponed has been very partisan—openly—and has I fear gotten in bad with the authorities. Sinclair is here—and I am having him take up the matter of my leave of absence while here.⁴³

With Booker T. Washington dead, the New Negro was in a protest mood and ready to attack inherited authority that kept the African American intellectual community in check. Unfortunately, because of his dismissive attitude toward protest, Locke lost the support he might have gotten from students at his lectures. Locke’s posture of scientific objectivity, on the one hand, and cultural expressiveness, on the other, was not the political fashion.

Of all those who attended, Kelly Miller may have been the person who most appreciated Locke’s contribution, although even he had been there only sporadically. Miller had written a scathing critique of President Wilson’s policy of segregation and had lectured before the Washington, D.C., Mu-So-Lit Club in 1915 on the impact of the world war on race relations. Miller sympathized with Locke’s advocacy of increased race consciousness and respected the scholarship Locke had reviewed in compiling the lectures. After the lectures, Miller approached Locke about lecturing in Miller’s course on sociology in the College of Arts and Sciences that was planned for the fall. That course would feature lectures by Robert Park, the Chicago sociologist and Booker T. Washington amanuensis, whose work Locke had reviewed in his lectures.⁴⁴ But Locke declined the invitation.

Locke’s reference to “the matter of my leave of absence” in his letter acknowledged that he had applied for and been admitted to Harvard’s graduate school in philosophy with an Austin Teaching Fellowship to help with expenses. Once his leave of absence was approved, Locke’s mind pleasantly turned to Harvard, especially after he learned that he would be exempted from the preliminary graduate school examinations. It would not be long before he would begin graduate coursework in philosophy at Harvard, under the special direction of Josiah Royce, he hoped, and begin consolidating his academic position in Howard University in the only way that he could—by obtaining a PhD.

Rainy days had bookended the four years Locke had spent at Howard University in one of the most productive periods of original thinking in his career. At thirty years of age, he had found a working formula—a job teaching in the major Black university in America, a fawned-over lecturer on the Black historical society circuit, and an indulgent mother three hours away by train from his home in Washington, D.C. While he had chafed at having an entry-level job in the Teachers College at Howard, he was nevertheless functioning as one of the most propulsive thinkers on campus.

Yet this dynamic period of original thinking and working as a public intellectual was coming to a close. Harvard beckoned and a new set of challenges loomed.

Francis Gregory, Locke, and William Stanley Braithwaite (seated), ca. 1916. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.