Locke began looking for an apartment in Washington long before he left Boston. It was good that he did, for after Wilson’s declaration of war on April 6, 1917, housing was scarce in Washington, as his real estate agent, R. R. Thompson, informed him. Family friend Helen Irvin, now living and teaching in Washington with her husband, put Locke in touch with Thompson. Thompson’s son, a student in her class, informed the elder Thompson that Professor Locke of Howard University was looking for an apartment. Thompson informed Locke that a second-floor apartment in a three-story Victorian building at 1326 R Street had been recently vacated. That would be of negligible historical significance except for what Thompson revealed of the racial protocol of Black housing in the District of Columbia. “This is a three family apartment building each containing five rooms, bath, rear porches, hot water heat, janitor service and which have been renting to whites at $32.50 but [which are now] for rent to colored at $30.50 for the first two and $29 for the top one.”1 Black tenants paid less than Whites, apparently a reversal of the practice in New York. Even more interesting was Thompson’s explanation for why the second-floor apartment was still empty, a month after the owner had moved out and the real estate agent had received several applications to rent it. A “white tenant is still in the first [floor] flat and will be there till about the 1st of Aug., and therefore my other tenants cannot go in, to avoid friction, until Aug. 1.”2 While the block was integrated, individual buildings had to remain all White or all “Colored,” and Thompson was not about to buck protocol in a southern city.
As soon as the first-floor tenant vacated, Thompson would be able to turn the apartment building over to the Lockes if they moved fast. As Thompson informed Locke, “Owing to the war a large number of people are now beginning to come into Washington, the work of the departments having doubled in some instances. This, I understand is expected to make the houses and apartments scarce. Even though most of these are Whites the average abandonment of houses and apartments by them to colored will cease which cause quarters for colored to be equally as scarce.”3 Unlike such industrial cites as Chicago and Pittsburgh, whose wartime population increases were due to the avalanche of southern Black migrants, Washington’s population expanded because of the in-migration of White professionals to staff the bureaucratic war machine. Thompson’s strategy worked: Locke took the apartment, even though he had to rent it from August 15, rather than his preferred date of September 1, to ensure he would have a comfortable place for him and his mother near Howard University.
Bringing his mother with him meant a loss of freedom in Locke’s life in Washington but also a number of gains. He would not have to worry about how she was being cared for; he would take complete control of her affairs; and by husbanding her find a degree of fulfillment as the man of the house. At the same time, she would give him the structure to finish his dissertation and obtain his PhD. Living together with all of their things in one city and in one house, Mary Locke was able to sustain the kind of stable, nurturing environment that she had created for him in Boston. Setting up household with his mother in northwest Washington also improved his sociability. Locke not only had someone to come home to from teaching at Howard University but also someone who accompanied him to teas, dinners, and walks with his close friends. Cohabitation with her seemed to improve his mood as well, in large part, because of her personality. She represented the best qualities of Locke’s nature, and being around her amplified his friendliness, openness, and gentlemanly bearing. He seemed at peace devoting himself to caring for the one person who had devoted her life to caring for him.
Mary Locke’s presence in Washington also allowed Locke to introduce her to his developing religious interest in the Baha’i faith. While the exact details remain sketchy, Locke apparently became interested in the Baha’i after being recruited by Louis Gregory. The Baha’is were attractive to Locke as to other middle-class Black communities in Chicago, New York, and Philadelphia for their quiet nondenominational religion, their notion of the oneness of humanity, and the call for believers to be tolerant of other religions and devote themselves to service for the betterment of humanity. The Baha’is also possessed a progressive social agenda that fit well with Locke’s mildly progressive goals of world peace and humanitarian tolerance for all peoples, especially their advocacy of the equality of the sexes and tolerance of homosexuality. Not long after they arrived in Washington, the Lockes became regulars at the services of this Persian faith.
Having his mother with him in Washington also increased Locke’s social acceptability. Those prying people who needed an explanation for why this attractive thirty-two-year-old man had never married now had a ready answer: he was devoted to his mother. The social invitations Locke received increased between 1917 and 1922, as Black Victorian Washington invited Locke and his mother over for tea, for dinner, or even for those “at home” drop-in hours that were so favored by upper-crust Washingtonians. Of course, Locke had received his fair share of invitations when he lived in Washington alone, but these increased dramatically, a sign perhaps that Locke was perceived as safer with his mother around. Even official celebrations, such as class reunions, invited them both. At dinners, Mary Locke supplied the easygoing ballast to her son’s often prickly personality, while Locke added fame and sparkling, witty conversation to an evening. Locke liked such gatherings more than he admitted.
One escape from his almost all-consuming mother relationship was Locke’s involvement in the war mobilization effort. Students and faculty at Howard had reacted enthusiastically to NAACP chairperson Joel Spingarn’s March 1917 speech on campus that called on the War Department to establish a separate camp to train Black officers. Historically, White officers had always commanded African American troops, as the army saw African Americans as followers, not “officer material.” Spingarn’s proposal met resistance not only from the army but also from some elements in the Black community, specifically some newspapermen, who believed the separate camp was acquiescence to segregation. Encouraged by Montgomery Gregory and other faculty members, Howard’s students drafted petitions, interviewed congressmen, and created a groundswell of support for the camp. With the national support of W. E. B. Du Bois in the Crisis, the lobbying effort forced Secretary of War Newton Baker, who worried that the denial of officer training might hurt the morale of Black servicemen, established a camp for Black officer training in Des Moines, Iowa, in May 1917. Although Howard missed out on the opportunity to have the camp there, the university was selected by the Federal Board of Vocational Education that September to help train radio operators for the Army Signal Corps. In response, Howard’s School of Manual Arts and Applied Sciences set up a technical training course that began on November 19. By May 16, 1918, it was training three hundred Black “draftees from the District of Columbia.” Indeed, Howard was virtually “taken over by the government” in the spring of 1918 to train soldiers in radio and technical Signal Corps work. Locke knew that if he wanted to fit in with wartime Howard, he must define a role for himself in the mobilization movement on its campus.
Locke’s disadvantage was his late arrival in the war mobilization at Howard. By September 1917, two hundred students and professors, including Gregory, had already left for the Des Moines, Iowa, camp. As early as August, Gregory had written to Locke, “I’m going to carry out our ideas in active service in the field—you must handle situation at home—at Howard!! Howard is in critical and precarious condition, needs strong & tactful strategist to guide her course. … Will turn material over to you … you can manage it.”4 Gregory needed a man on the inside at Howard to create leverage on the War Department, and Locke was perfect for such behind-the-scenes maneuvering. Gregory’s reference to “our ideas” suggests that Locke shared Gregory’s view that war was an opportunity to demonstrate Black leadership ability. Black Progressives such as Locke, Gregory, and Kelly Miller held the view that tolerance for African Americans improved during wartime, because the threat from an external enemy raised the value of Black manpower in White eyes. Despite such aberrations as the East St. Louis riot in which Whites attacked and burned the Black community in response to wartime migration and increase of the Black population, Black Progressives believed that Black support of the American involvement in the war ultimately would translate into greater recognition for Blacks after the war. That belief was particularly serviceable for Locke, as it allowed him to silence his 1914 condemnation of the war as a White man’s war and embrace the mood of patriotic loyalty that had swept the country.
As always, Locke wanted to capitalize on opportunities to advance his career and increase his salary, especially now that he was caring for two in expensive Washington, D.C. Others were profiting more from the war. Shortly after Locke arrived in Washington, another African American received the most important job for a Negro in the War Department. That man was Tuskegee Institute secretary Emmett J. Scott, who became Special Assistant on Negro Affairs to Secretary of War Baker. While Locke would certainly have preferred that job for himself, he also viewed Scott’s appointment as a blessing: he and Scott had had cordial relations when Locke had visited Tuskegee, and Locke hoped to turn his unofficial role as a liaison at Howard into an official position on Scott’s staff. Immediately after the announcement of Scott’s appointment, Locke wired Scott to offer to meet and talk things over. Scott’s reply—that he was still “waiting certain definite instructions from War Department before I can wire hour of arrival”—set the tone of their relationship: Scott kept Locke at a distance. He was suspicious of Locke—and other Blacks—whom he believed might be trying to usurp his power or limit his maneuverability. While Locke and Scott would meet from time to time during the next two years of war work, nothing like the official appointment Locke longed for materialized.
But Gregory kept the pressure on Locke to serve as a liaison and continued to provide him with information about the conditions and mindset of Howard recruits at the Des Moines Camp. Early in October he reported that African American recruits in Des Moines were “blue” over the “Houston affair,” the case of Black soldiers who attacked White southerners who had taunted them on the night of August 23, 1917, in Houston. In the riot that resulted twenty persons died—four soldiers and sixteen civilians. The soldiers were to be court-martialed and condemned, without a serious investigation of the causes of the disturbance. So eager was the army for a quick conviction that the army had conscripted several of the Black officers at Des Moines to secure a “confession” from the Houston men. Gregory, like many African Americans, felt that the affair was another sign of the unfair treatment of Black soldiers by the army. “Be sure to keep in touch with Scott and situation generally,” Gregory pleaded. “[We] look chiefly to you as our representative there.”5 Ultimately, Locke had no influence and thirteen of the Black soldiers were hanged on December 11 without any opportunity to appeal their convictions.
Locke’s only significant role may have come in April 1918, when Gregory asked him to block the army’s attempt to break up the artillery unit for training African American officers at Camp Dix, where Gregory was stationed. Most African American officers had been assigned to infantry training, at best, and to labor battalions, at worst, so the loss of this artillery unit symbolized the betrayal of the army’s commitment to treat African American officers equally. “Hell is loose!” he informed Locke:
They are breaking up our artillery as fast as they can. 450 of our men are packed ready to be transferred on order from Washington. Then this morning the 3 most important field officers here, the men who have conducted the instruction, etc.—are removed to other places. … We have nothing but skeletons of 2 regiments left. Col. ______ tells me that these moves spell the doom of our artillery arm of the division. For God’s sake get those men down there to do something at once! They should go to Baker at once and demand that the War Dept. act frankly—either [drop] the whole business or treat it fairly.6
Locke may have had some impact, for on April 23, Gregory thanked him for interceding with Scott, who had “gotten order, transferring the enlisted men, cancelled. I couldn’t reach him in Phila[delphia] but talked with him over phone. Hope you saw Baker. He should know that the leading men of the race are awake to conditions and that the colored division must get fair considerations at all times & in all matters. This one order is merely one isolated incident.”7 Certainly, that was true. Black soldiers trained at southern bases were bombarded with racist insults from the surrounding communities and treated with contempt by White officers. Even in the northern camps, African American intellectuals like Gregory recognized the lack of seriousness in their training and preparation. “So far we haven’t done a damn thing but sleep,” he reported from Camp Dix. It’s time for the younger generation to assert itself. … I believe in true loyalty and patriotism, but a positive patriotism, not a slavish one.”8 Gregory was beginning to see through the veil of African American officer participation that second-class treatment remained for Blacks in the armed services despite the token of the officer training camp. Gregory’s experience warned that little substantial changes in domestic race relations were likely to result from Black mobilization during the war.
Locke’s involvement in the war effort did solidify his relationship with Professor Perry, for it provided Locke with a convenient excuse for his lack of progress on his dissertation. Although “The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value” was dated September 1, 1917, the entire dissertation was not completed until the end of the fall semester, considerably after its promised date of completion. Sometime during the fall Locke wrote to Perry to explain “my apparent dissertation from my philosophy work; and I feel especially so now that I am the unwilling means of crowding your last days at Cambridge, this semester with thesis reading and possibly a topical exam. Since mid-August, I have been terribly caught up in political affairs: a trip of investigation to East St. Louis for the NAACP, a visit to the Des Moines Camp, and since October quite a deal of work as an assistant to Mr. Scott, advisory aide to the War Department on the colored personnel of the army.”9 Locke was not above appealing directly to Perry’s interest in military preparedness: “In fact the possibility of some more definite connection with our guard Division when it is organized is one of my motives for wanting to get the degree matter over if possible. … Though rewritten in large part the thesis is I fear more patched than retailored. However I shall stand by it and all my other shortcomings.”10 Locke stretched the truth considerably. He was not an official assistant to Scott. No evidence exists that the NAACP sent him to East St. Louis or that the naturally timid Locke would have gone if he had been asked. His reference to a place in Felix Frankfurter’s office was perhaps closer to reality: he may have occupied a desk in Frankfurter’s office, for it is unlikely that Locke would have dared lie outright to Perry about that. But Locke was adept at maximizing the sense of commonality with the military-minded Perry and suggesting that Locke, like Perry, was an academic in arms. This martial bonding, combined with the hard work he put in that fall semester on the dissertation, paid off for Locke. Perry, along with his other readers Hoernle and Sheffer, was pleased with Locke’s dissertation. When the doctorates were awarded in June 1918, Alain Le Roy Locke became Dr. Locke, the first African American to secure a PhD in philosophy from Harvard University.
Completing his PhD did not end Locke’s relationship with Perry. That summer, Perry contacted Locke with a surprising request. He was about to receive page proofs of his forthcoming book, The Present Conflict of Ideals during World War I, and Perry had no time to check the voluminous references. He needed someone with access to the Library of Congress to check them for him and wondered if Locke knew any responsible person who would do it for pay. Immediately, Locke volunteered his services and did the work promptly, not only checking the sources, but also writing other professors, such as Sheffer and Hoernle, for leads on books he could not locate in Washington. That Perry selected Locke shows something of his confidence in his student. At the same time, checking references was the kind of work graduate students were asked to do by their professors, often without attribution or acknowledgment. Something of Perry’s character is revealed by the fact that on the first page of his book, he thanked “Alain Le Roy Locke for his assistance.”11
Locke undertook this work not only because he viewed it as an opportunity to repay Perry for his PhD support but also as a way to gain Perry’s support for his plan to establish a Student Army Training Camp at Howard University. As Secretary of Military Training for the War Department, Perry was responsible for ensuring that institutions of higher education supplied their percentage of officers to the war effort. It seems likely that Perry was a sympathetic voice in the War Department’s Committee on Education and Special Training for Locke’s plan to establish at Howard University the first ROTC (or its wartime name, SATC or Student Army Training Corps) training camp at a Black university. Beginning in the 1918–1919 school year, the War Department planned to establish SATC units at colleges with one hundred or more male students and to train specialist instructors for those individual college units at three regional training camps during the summer of 1918. Black college students would not be welcome at these camps, and considerable criticism erupted in the Black press about the lack of any provision for Black college students. Some Blacks even went so far as to suggest that the military training at Fort Des Moines was exactly the kind of inculcation of discipline that the Negro needed. Herein lay Locke’s opportunity. Though the particulars remain unclear, Locke secured on July 17 the War Department’s approval to hold a summer training camp for Negroes at Howard University from August 1 to September 16. Even though the army did not plan to commission any more Black officers, Locke (and others) wanted to keep the pressure on the War Department by showing that qualified officer material existed in the Black college community. By setting up the training camp at Howard, Locke drew attention to its premier role in the Black officer training effort and secured esteem for himself as the chairman of the Negro Student Army Association.
In that role, Locke traveled to Camp Mead to observe how a regular army camp was run and helped select the trainees from the hundreds of college students who applied from Fisk, Wilberforce, Atlanta, Lincoln, Hampton, and Tuskegee. Locke also recruited Lieutenant Russell Smith to be commanding officer, and several other officers, including Montgomery Gregory, from the 349th and 350th Field Artillery at Camp Dix to serve as Smith’s assistants at the Howard camp. Apparently, these efforts met with success. More than 457 Black college students enlisted in the army for sixty days, attended the camp, and were discharged with most receiving certificates as graduates entitled to serve as instructors at the colleges to which they returned. Locke also spoke at a September 14 ceremony that honored the graduates. Standing before Major Ralph Barton Perry, Emmett J. Scott, and J. Stanley Durkee, Howard University’s new president, Locke claimed:
[The camp’s graduates were] in Mr. Braithwaite’s fine phrase, part of “the reserves of Peace.” They commemorate, therefore, not themselves, but the spirit which actuated them and the nation at the same time. This spirit is still the hope of this nation … and no less, the hope of our race. All our institutions must conform themselves to it, but most especially our universities. For theirs must be the policies of the future, not the policies of the present: and their proper wisdom is not the expediencies of middle-age, but the hopeful ideals of youth [and] the vision of a new social order.12
In “The Role of the Talented Tenth,” published after the war, Locke reiterated his call for a “new social order” and his belief that new leadership opportunities awaited talented African Americans in the postwar world. Locke forecasted that future leaders would be selected more democratically, on the basis of merit rather than privilege or race, and this camp, however limited in scope, was part of the effort to prove Negro worth and merit.
The camp had been a significant racial experience as Locke noted in an article on the camp in the Howard University Record. “In addition to the military training, there was the beneficial association for the first time of so large and representative a body of Negro schoolmen; and this affiliation of the colored schools, acknowledged by the formation of the Negro Student Army Association by the members of the camp,—has revealed to Howard a new mission in educational leadership.”13 The military program had furthered what Locke had called for in “The Negro and a Race Tradition”—a heightened sense of collective race consciousness among Black youth. The success of the camp might also convince Howard to awaken to its “new mission in educational leadership” of serving as a race center, something Locke had advocated at Howard for years.
Locke’s enthusiasm for war preparation stopped short of actually joining the army. When his Camden, New Jersey, draft board contacted him in October 1918 to inform him of its plan to reclassify him as eligible for the draft, Locke quickly sent his board a report about his medical condition—it was poor—and instructed Major Smith, the SATC commanding officer, to write the Camden board that Locke was “a graduate of the Students’ Army Training Corps” and an “Assistant Personnel clerk of this Unit.” Of course, Locke may have been an “assistant personnel clerk” of the defunct camp, but more likely he merely utilized this title to strengthen his claim for “deferred classification.” The camp had been a way for a non-soldier to participate in the war effort without actually serving.
That Ralph Barton Perry would be supportive of Locke’s separate camp idea, even to the point of speaking at the September 14 ceremony commemorating the camp, deserves comment. In a strange way, Perry and Locke were drawn together by this military proposal into an intimacy that they would never share afterward as fellow philosophers. After the armistice was declared and Perry returned to Cambridge, they had little further contact. Perry never took on Locke as a philosophical protégé. In part, this was due to the overwhelmingly segregated character of higher education in America, particularly where the teaching of philosophy was concerned. It would have been impossible for Perry to call Locke back to Harvard as James had called back Perry years before, and both Locke and Perry knew that. Indeed, the only real relationship that Locke would have to his former graduate department in the coming years would structurally resemble that of the segregated war effort: Howard emerged in the 1920s and 1930s as the feeder school for young Black Harvard philosophy graduates who would be recommended to Locke. Albert Dunham was perhaps the most important Harvard philosophy protégé who would come to Howard to teach under Locke’s tutelage. In that sense, the wartime collaboration between Perry and Locke symbolized the limits of their progressivism: even those who were liberal in their racial sentiments ultimately perpetuated the system of segregation by accommodating it.
Racism, of course, was not the whole reason that Locke’s PhD in philosophy from Harvard led him to a disciplinary dead end. Locke had the misfortune to write his dissertation when the kind of speculative, broadly appealing philosophy that had flourished during Harvard’s Golden Age no longer prevailed. Like Perry, philosophy in America in the 1920s and 1930s became “scientific,” logical, and professional and lost its popular audience of the 1890s and 1900s. Had Dewey been at Harvard, and Locke been able to work with him, Locke might have been mentored to develop a broader philosophy of experience out of his study of aesthetic valuation. Both Locke and Dewey saw the root of aesthetic consciousness in the emotions rather than logical, reflective knowledge, and called for empathetic openness to our experience to realize the aesthetic dimension in our lives. More than any specific philosophy influence, Dewey would have offered Locke the opportunity to work with a social philosopher of the first rank and share in Dewey’s success as a public social philosopher. By contrast, Perry could not guide Locke into a successful social role as a powerful social philosopher because Perry was not one himself.
Dewey would not, however, have saved Locke from the pitfall of naively believing that the war would bring meaningful democratic change to America. Even W. E. B. Du Bois had advocated that Blacks “close ranks” during the war, because he too believed the world would be better for African peoples after the Allies won. Du Bois also attended the Versailles Peace Conference and the Pan African Congress in 1919 with the belief that the Allies would liberate Germany’s African colonies as the logical consequence of a war to make the world safe for democracy. But after the armistice, the Allies quickly parceled Germany’s remaining colonies among themselves and ignored pleas from Africans and African Americans to grant such colonies sovereignty or even outline anything more than a token nod to future self-determination in the African Mandates established by Article 22 of the League of Nations Covenant.
At home, urban White Americans sent an even clearer signal that the war would not result in better treatment for African Americans. In several northern cities, gangs of young Whites attacked Black neighborhoods during the summer of 1919. In Chicago, the attacks seemed to be a response to Black encroachment on working-class White neighborhoods as a result of the wartime migration of southern Blacks. The Washington Post essentially started a riot by running an announcement on the morning of July 21 that servicemen would assemble that evening to respond to a recent trend of attacks on White women in the city. That evening a roving band of youths and servicemen attacked isolated African Americans, pulled them off of street trolleys, and invaded the southwest and northwest sections of the Washington Black community. The police stood by and refused to restrain the Whites, but unlike in East St. Louis, Blacks fought back with unexpected ferocity and killed several Whites. Eugene Holmes, later Locke’s colleague in the Philosophy Department, claimed that Locke served as a go-between for Black and White neighborhoods during the riot. But this seems as unlikely as Locke’s reputed trip to East St. Louis shortly after its 1917 riot. The Washington riot did not create armed camps, as was the case in the two-week-long Chicago riot, but took the form of sudden violent attacks on innocent bystanders, regardless of their social standing. Another Howard University professor, Carter G. Woodson, recalled that he narrowly avoided a marauding band of White servicemen by ducking quickly into an alleyway between houses. Woodson, who had recently been appointed dean of Liberal Studies at Howard, would later become a member of the Central Advisory Council organized by Emmett J. Scott to research the causes of the riot. Locke’s name was absent from the list of members. More likely, Locke’s first concern was to protect and calm his elderly mother, who must have been greatly frightened by the rioting, some of the worst of which occurred not less than five blocks from their home.
Yet the story of Locke’s mediation, evidently told to Holmes by Locke, is significant in this respect: it tells us something about Locke’s vision of himself and the society around him. Locke saw himself as a harmonizer between Black and White civilizations, and at a moment when both groups seemed their least civilized, Locke dreamed of a larger, harmonizing role for himself. But little mediation was possible in Wilson’s Washington. After the rioting, feelings on both sides hardened. No citywide interracial fellowship organization emerged, and no sustained interaction emerged between the “talented tenths” of either group. In the early 1920s, segregation spread in Washington, culminating in the 1922 insult of the segregated bleachers for those wishing to view ceremonies at the installation of the Lincoln Memorial. Such patent segregation must have been particularly difficult for Locke, who thrived in cities where access to all cultural and social institutions could be taken for granted. It must have also been difficult for Mary Locke, who was used to going to such prestigious downtown department stores as Wanamakers in Philadelphia without fear of discrimination. In Washington, D.C., she’d be barred from entering Garfinkels. For Locke and his mother, therefore, the riot defined the cramped racial space they lived and moved in in Washington. And for a philosopher of race relations, the riot showed war had not opened new opportunities for Negro leadership.
Beneath Locke’s optimistic postwar predictions lay a deep and abiding skepticism about the prospects for Negro progress. In that sense, Locke was not too surprised by the riot, almost predicted by the author of Race Contacts when he observed, “Adjustment in society, coming about, as it has so very often, by legal enactment, in itself generates violent changes. And a violent change in one direction is apt to be followed by a reaction, so that a sort of series of waves, on the one hand, of moral reform, and on the other hand, of social reaction, seem inevitable under most conditions.”14 Although the progressive adjustment he had predicted was not the result of “legal enactment,” the Great Migration, the distinguished service of Negroes in the war, and the renewed clamor for democratic rights by such groups as the NAACP constituted a progressive step forward that inevitably met a counter “social reaction.” Locke knew the Black Victorian ideology that Black merit would be rewarded was deeply flawed. Oxford had taught him that. Hence, when Locke stood before those SATC graduates on September 14 and pronounced the way open for Negro advancement after the war, he only half believed his own words. He knew that being responsible, serving one’s country, and joining in the idealistic struggle for democracy did not guarantee justice for Black folk. Like so many others of his generation, however, Locke had no alternative to professing the standard faith in Black Progressivism and Black Victorianism on such public vocations.
Locke’s skepticism ran even deeper. He believed, privately of course, that Black people fell short of having earned the respect of Whites. Was it true, as the Black newspaper the Washington Bee asserted during the riots, that Black people in Washington had proven by their public behavior that they deserved to be treated as equals by the White population? Although never expressed publicly, Locke was a racial conservative about such issues and skeptical about whether the Black masses behaved in a consistently civilized manner and appreciated the finer things in life that he valued. Such ambivalences about Black people and the prospects of Black progress made it difficult for him to assume the leadership role he imagined for himself when he claimed that he had helped resolve the riot.
Like many of his peers in the aftermath of the riot, Locke retreated into the pursuit of culture—at Howard, at the Bethel Literary and Historical Society, and at the “at home” get-togethers of middle-class Black Washingtonians who lived in the northwest quadrant of this segregated city. The Lockes resided in its Black intellectual and cultural center: just across the street was the District Branch of the NAACP, the home of Shelby and Mrs. Davidson, who were close friends of W. E. B. Du Bois, and a host of other dignitaries in the NAACP. Nearby lived Roscoe Conkling and Mrs. Bruce, Georgia Douglas and Lincoln Johnson, Edmonia Taylor and Harriett Butcher, and a host of other influential Black Washingtonians. Within this world of fine homes, the Lockes carved out an insular social life. Unfortunately for Alain Locke, it was more his mother’s world than his. He came to feel that the cultivated Black world of such places as Washington—and Philadelphia—was suffocating after London, Paris, Berlin, and even Boston and New York.
It was a life William Stanley Braithwaite seemed to value from a distance even more than Locke. “How is Mrs. [Georgia Douglas] Johnson?” Braithwaite wrote to Locke on the last day of the riots. “Her last letter I’ve not had a chance to answer. And Harriett—how is she? I saw some star dust scattered at the N.A.A.C.P. meeting here in April—and twas she [in] fact—star dust!”15 Here Braithwaite expresses a joy in the women of Washington that Locke could never muster, perhaps because of his sexual orientation and his feeling that he never fit into that society. Braithwaite seems to have understood, though, that Locke needed to get away from that world. “Emma and I have discussed the possibility of you and your mother coming up here in August to visit us. We’ve got a pleasant and roomy … for both [of you] to come and enjoy. There’s a deal of things I want to talk over with you too: you must get into writing.”16
Braithwaite sensed Locke was drifting intellectually. Thirty months had elapsed since his last serious literary effort was published: the Poetry Review article on Verhaeren. Braithwaite also sensed that such unproductiveness derived from his filial loyalty. “Come up with your mother and we’ll talk about the many things I haven’t time to write about just now.” Then, Braithwaite teasingly mentioned “the anthology of prose and verse from colored authors [James Weldon] Johnson’s been after me for over a year to join him in making. I half way promised. But there are infinitely better things to do. Come and I’ll tell you.”17 Finally, “Locke bring your mother up here!” It is not clear what was really stifling Locke—his mother, the riots, the Washington social world, the lack of a sexual outlet or lover, or his own reticence about becoming a public intellectual. But what is clear is that others, Braithwaite and James Weldon Johnson, were beginning to chronicle Locke’s natural subject—the new developments in African American poetry.
Unlike Braithwaite and Johnson, of course, Locke had recently completed a PhD dissertation, set up the SATC camp, and returned to full-time teaching. He would not have been remiss in wanting to give public criticism a rest. Moreover, in 1919, with his PhD in hand and the war over, it was time for him to consolidate his position in the university. That process began that fall of 1919 at a time of great optimism at Howard. A new president, J. Stanley Durkee, had started what promised to be a progressive reorganization of the university system. He did away with the old College of Arts and Sciences, substituted a more humanities-based School of Liberal Studies, and replaced Dean Kelly Miller with the Harvard-trained PhD historian Carter G. Woodson, who had already pioneered his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and his Journal of Negro History. Locke’s new degree, therefore, put him in step with the increased emphasis on professionalism at the school. Accordingly, that fall, he became an assistant professor of philosophy in the new School of Liberal Arts and was freed of teaching such courses as English Speech and Usage in the Teachers College. He could offer a comprehensive program of courses in philosophy: Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Modern Philosophy, Logic, Present Philosophical Tendencies (with special focus on the work of his mentors, William James, Josiah Royce, and Henri Bergson), two courses in Aesthetics, and most important, Social Philosophy. The last was an “advanced course in theories of society and social culture, with special consideration of the racial interpretation of history, and the role of races and nations as types of social culture”—essentially the sociological “survey of race contacts and interracial relations” that he had wanted to teach at Howard University since 1914. Though Locke must have felt some regret that his ally, Kelly Miller, had been demoted to the deanship of the less significant Junior College, he must have read the reorganization and the approval of his sociological course on race as signs that the administration was willing to adopt Locke’s recommendation that Howard become the center for African American research and scholarship in America. More significant, Locke’s undergraduate program in philosophy was the only one in the nation to make sociological theory an integral part of its curriculum.
Although Locke was glad to have solidified things at Howard, his heart was not in it. In a letter written in 1923 to Langston Hughes, Locke characterized Howard as “a cultural backwater, even though at the nation’s capital.” Locke longed to be the center of a “literary and art coterie,” but believed that “it cannot be here. And yet—I have always been attracted to Howard and in spite of much disillusionment am still intrigued with its possibilities.”18 Something of Locke’s paralyzing equivocation, the back and forth of being alienated from and yet “intrigued with” Howard’s “possibilities,” is revealed here. Despite his involvement in broader faculty issues—he resumed his role as secretary of the faculty in 1919—Locke did not form relationships with any of the new professors appointed to Howard. He was only distantly connected with Woodson, despite Locke’s respect for Woodson’s Journal of Negro History and his program of African American historical research. He was not especially close to Benjamin Brawley, who arrived as a rising star in English literature. The relationships Locke sustained at Howard—with Ernest Just in biology, with Kelly Miller in sociology, and with Montgomery Gregory in drama—all derived from before he had returned to Harvard. Despite all the good things that were occurring at Howard, Locke remained an aloof and distant figure.
The one important exception was Locke’s relationship with Montgomery Gregory and the Howard Players that they helped to launch in the early 1920s. Both Locke and Gregory had been faculty supporters of what was called the “Howard University Dramatic Club” until 1921. But under the direction of department chairman Professor G. David Houston, the “Dramatic Club” had produced mainly light popular drama and comedy, written by White playwrights, and put on for an entertainment-minded Black public at the Howard Theatre, located just below the campus at 7th and T Streets. This type of dramatic entertainment fulfilled Howard’s obligation to generate bourgeois diversion for Black people. Montgomery Gregory rose to become chairman of the Drama Department and gave it a more modern and racially self-conscious raison d’être. Gregory remodeled the department along the lines of George Pierce Baker’s Harvard Dramatic Workshop to be a laboratory to train a generation of actors, playwrights, and set designers who would pioneer a realist drama of the American people. Gregory was a cultural pluralist, who believed Black talent and the Black experience had something distinctive to contribute to the American Drama; and he believed that that contribution was best nurtured in a Negro theater that drew upon plays by Black and White playwrights to portray the Black experience. The key was to produce plays that focused on the life of Black people, or developed the artistic possibilities of the Black theme, without succumbing to a purely propagandist attack on White racism. Hence, after assembling a talented staff of local director Marie Moore Forrest, Provincetown Players set designer Cleon Throckmorton, Howard University student artist and costume designer Alma Thomas, and Alain Locke, as head of dramatic composition, Gregory created the Howard Players to disseminate this Negro drama to a wider audience.
Locke’s official role in this movement was conceivably the most important—the training of a generation of Black playwrights. He tried to foster that first by teaching Dramatic Composition in the English Department, a course he continued to teach even after he became chair of the Philosophy Department. But Locke and Gregory also explored new ways to generate enthusiasm for playwriting. In the spring of 1920, they announced “a contest for the writing of original One-Act Plays” by students “in the Junior and Senior Colleges.” Suggestions could be “had from Professors Locke, Johnson, and Gregory” for suitable topics for the plays, and the winning play would bring $25 to its author. Locke may very well have been the originator of the writing contest idea and may have suggested it to Charles S. Johnson, who later used it to stimulate the writing of poetry and short fiction at Opportunity magazine. Eventually, such efforts would yield results. On January 17, 1922, the Howard Players put on “As Strong as the Hills,” a collaboration between a Dunbar High School student, who wrote the story, and a Howard student, who did the dramatization; and in 1923, the first play written by a Howard University student was performed by the Howard Players. In the coming years, the Players would perform “Genifrede” by Helen I. Webb, of the Class of 1923, and “The Yellow Tree,” by DeReath Irene Busey, of the Class of 1918. But Howard students did not write most of the plays performed by the Howard Players in the 1920s. White playwrights, especially Ridgely Torrence and Eugene O’Neill, or Black professional playwrights, such as Willis Richardson, wrote them. In one sense, the fault may have been partially Locke’s. Although he knew a good deal about poetry and fiction, he was not the best person to teach dramatic composition. On the other hand, Howard did not attract the kind of talent needed to produce a new generation of Black playwrights, and this lack of talent would be a continuing problem for the Negro Theater throughout the 1920s.
The production that garnered the greatest attention for the Howard Players was its 1921 production of Eugene O’Neill’s Emperor Jones, a play written by a White playwright, but distinguished by the performance of a Black actor, Charles Gilpin. Indeed, Black talent seemed to be more plentiful on the acting side and the success of Emperor Jones testified to it. Gilpin’s origination of the title role of the demonic, frightening, yet tormented Pullman porter Brutus did as much to launch the fame of O’Neill in New York as O’Neill’s script launched the new Negro drama when the Provincetown Players production opened in November 1920. The New York Times noted that the play “weaves a most potent spell, thanks partly to the force and cunning of its author, thanks partly to the admirable playing of Charles S. Gilpin in a title role so predominant that the play is little more than a dramatic monologue. His is an uncommonly powerful and imaginative performance, in several respects unsurpassed this season in New York. Mr. Gilpin is a negro.”19 While generally praising Gilpin, some Black reviewers of the play criticized O’Neill’s play for choosing as its central character an African American criminal who was “the lowest and most degraded character one would wish to meet.” In fact, the play was more of an American fantasy than a portrait of African American reality, a play that fused in one character all of the complex fears and infatuations with Black power that many in White America believed lurked just beneath the veneer of civilization in most Black men. Gilpin, by playing the role hugely and histrionically, but also with a brooding introspection, transformed what could have been a caricature into an existential meditation on the problem of evil in the West. When Gregory and Locke heard about the play, they secured free tickets to the Provincetown production through Cleon Throckmorton. Awed and astounded by Gilpin’s performance, they approached Gilpin after the show and gained his approval to perform the title role with a cast of the Howard Players in Washington. Gilpin was enthusiastic about the prospect, because of the chance to perform the play with an all-Negro company and the opportunity to add to his meager Provincetown Players salary. Once Gregory secured permission from O’Neill to perform the play after it closed in New York, Gregory enlisted Throckmorton to reproduce the splendor of the Harlem stage in Washington’s downtown Belasco Theater. When Gilpin finally performed the role on March 28, the Howard Players had their first hit.
Not only were press reviews favorable, but one of African America’s toughest critics enjoyed the Washington performance as well. On April 4, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote to Locke and Gregory his opinion that “the work was exceedingly well done and most promising for the future.”20 The magisterial editor of the Crisis, who would sharply critique White interest in the Negro theme later in the 1920s, evidently approved of O’Neill’s play and the Howard Players’ performance. Such acknowledgment confirmed the significant progress that the Dramatic Department had made in the year or so that Gregory had been in charge. But Du Bois also acknowledged something else. “I have asked Mr. Locke,” he continued, “to kindly prepare an article for THE CRISIS, which I trust he will.”21
Du Bois’s request provided an opportunity to give national attention to the Howard Players and the drama program at Howard University. In asking Locke to do it, and not Gregory, Du Bois suggested that Locke was the more important person to chronicle the new effort. Locke had something that Gregory lacked: he had fame, because of his Rhodes Scholarship, an achievement that had made him a household name to African American intellectuals. Du Bois, as an elitist, tended to recognize only those like him who had distinguished themselves at the highest levels of achievement. Locke had a PhD, while Gregory only had a BA, though from Harvard. This request may have stimulated Gregory to write his own article, since seven months later, Gregory published “For a Negro Theatre,” in the New Republic, an even bigger national magazine than the Crisis. By contrast, Locke’s article would not appear until December 1922.
The slight to Gregory did not seem to affect their relationship. He and Locke collaborated again later that year to produce Ridgley Torrence’s play, “Simon, the Cyrenian,” which opened at Rankin Chapel on campus on December 12, 1921. This play, another by a White playwright, was the story of the African who, according to the Bible, took up “the cross that he might bear it after Jesus.” Throckmorton transformed the staid Rankin Chapel into a Middle Eastern bazaar, and Howard University students acted all of the parts. Coordinated to open at the same time as the Arms Limitation Conference being held in Washington, the Rankin Chapel not only introduced the delegates to Howard University but also to Black culture through a musical program that included spirituals sung by the Howard Glee Club. This followed the tradition of literary and historical society meetings; but by focusing on the spirituals, the program was intended to convey a fuller interpretation of the “musical development of the Negro.” In language that seems rather Lockean, the program notes informed the uninitiated that “Roll, Jordan Roll, Swing Low and Steal Away are spirituals of the pure folk-song type. Go Down Moses and Deep River are arrangements by the distinguished contemporary composer of the race, Harry T. Burleigh. The Juba Dance is a composition on a Negro folk-dance motive, by Nathaniel Dett, the Musical Director at Hampton Institute and a leading representative of the younger musical school.” Locke may also have been responsible for including a selection from his favorite, the “Anglo-African composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the most representative of our composers, [who] is reprented [sic] by his Scenes from an Imaginary Ballet.”22
The year 1921 ended with as much of a dramatic success for the Howard Players as it had begun, largely due to the collaboration of Locke and Gregory. Gregory was the man out front, managing the department and the Players, securing Howard University administrative support, and creating an advisory board of Eugene O’Neill, Percy Mackaye, Heywood Broun, and other authorities in the American drama for the Players. Locke was the behind-the-scenes coordinator, who performed the less glamorous duties of working with actors, designers, and costumers to make such productions a success. Locke’s name was often mentioned in the correspondence that Gregory received during this period, as visitors to performances praised the Howard Players. But Locke’s involvement also suggests what was the distinctive characteristic of Locke’s role in Black cultural affairs in the early 1920s—he seemed most comfortable when he functioned backstage to more powerful personalities.
Locke may have felt on the margins of the Howard Players’ success, because its playwriting campaign, his primary responsibility, was not very successful. The lack of plays by Black playwrights would become increasingly problematic for the Howard Players. For example, when Gregory sought to perform Ridgeley Torrence’s “Simon, the Cyrenian,” he was told that the Howard Players ought to perform plays by Black playwrights instead. Even Ridgley Torrence declined Gregory’s offer to put on the play. He would not commit to paper the reason for his reluctance, only stating that he would confide in Gregory when they met. But the implication was clear that Torrence may not have wanted to produce the play again, perhaps because of the possibility of Black criticism. The time was rapidly approaching when the claim of the Negro Theater movement to self-conscious recognition in the American Drama movement would depend on generating a corps of accomplished Black playwrights, and they were not to be found at Howard.
The best Negro writing talent of the early 1920s was in poetry, not drama. In New York, the Jamaican-born Claude McKay was holding forth at the Liberator where, as literary editor, he was well positioned to publish young Black poets. With two volumes of dialect poetry published in his native Jamaica, with several poems in Locke’s favorite Lost Generation magazine, Seven Arts, and with a book of poetry, Spring in New Hampshire, McKay was, in the opinion of William Stanley Braithwaite, African America’s most accomplished living poet. Yet, it was a Washington, D.C., poet who was the most important to Locke in this period: his family friend, the tall, sinewy, “New Woman” poet, Georgia Douglas Johnson. An intense, light-skinned, bohemian wife of Washington’s elderly recorder of deeds, Lincoln Johnson, Johnson was well known to the readers of the Crisis, which had published several of her poems in the late 1910s. Her first book of poems, The Heart of a Woman (1918), explored the woman as mother and culture bearer and suggested that through such roles, women achieved a spiritual power that transcended that of men. Johnson then struck out in a new direction to focus more specifically and intensely on racial themes in her work. Interestingly, that is when she turned to Locke and asked him if he would “go over some manuscript with me in a critical way.”23 That she turned to Locke at this juncture in her career is significant. While Braithwaite was unquestionably the premier African American critic of poetry writing in the early 1920s, Locke was younger and more encouraging of Black writers to develop the racial theme in their work. Along with Gregory, again, Locke had started the Stylus, a literary magazine at Howard, to publish the writings of students and encourage them to explore race aesthetically as a doorway to a unique universalism in modern spiritual life. Such a dialectical view of art was consistent with the position Locke had maintained on Emile Verhaeren and contributions to the symbolist movement. Also, like Verhaeren, Johnson’s poetry was not “ultramodernist,” and that also endeared it to Locke. Rather, hers was a deeply mystical search for spiritual fulfillment for the alienated, modern woman.
Shortly after asking Locke for his critical help, Johnson dropped off some of her newest poems to Locke at his home, a practice she continued over the next two years. A dutiful editor, Locke spent several hours making deletions and suggestions, emendations and additions, as he provided sympathetic criticism. These poems would eventually become Georgia Douglas Johnson’s second book, Bronze, which appeared in 1922. Originally, Johnson asked Locke to write the foreword; but then, perhaps in a move designed to give her work greater credibility, she enlisted W. E. B. Du Bois to write it. That she and Du Bois were romantically involved may have also shaped her decision. She may have regretted the change: in his generally appreciative foreword, Du Bois could not refrain from stating that some of Johnson’s words “were simple, some trite.” For Locke, the switch was another reminder of his second-class status whenever Du Bois was available. But Johnson’s debt to Locke was considerable, and she acknowledged it by thanking “Professor Alain Leroy Locke, of Howard University” on the first page of the book, “for helpful criticism.”24
Earlier, on August 20, 1920, Locke had received a different kind of invitation: Georgia Douglas Johnson was having some friends over to her bayfront brick Victorian home at 1461 S Street in northwest Washington that next Saturday, and she wanted Locke to join them. “Please bring your mother. Say to her that [I] hope that she will be with us.” The extra special encouragement was needed, Georgia probably surmised, because this Saturday evening would not be the typical Black bourgeoisie “at home” to which Locke and his mother were regularly invited. This was to be a literary evening, perhaps the first meeting of what would become the regular “Saturday nighter”—get-togethers of Johnson’s Washington Salon for writers, artists, and Black intellectuals who were in town. The star attraction of this Saturday evening was to be none other than Jean Toomer, who was just back from New York where he had been exposed to the readings, artwork, and bohemian pursuits of literary New York. “Mr. Toomer,” Johnson continued in her invitation to Locke, “wishes to show us his books also. He says that he has some very good finds.”25
Of course, Toomer himself was as much on exhibit as his books. Born Nathan Pinchback Toomer in 1894, Black Washington’s thin, frail, sallow-colored poet was a precocious, intense, and mesmerizing young intellectual who was tortured by his ambiguous racial heritage. Toomer was the maternal grandson of P. B. S. Pinchback, the only African American governor during Reconstruction and a man who chose to live as an African American (he was the son of a slaveholder and a mulatto slave) though he was phenotypically White. Toomer would find that choice more difficult to make. Passing for White gained him acceptance to several midwestern colleges, but Toomer never completed a course of study and drifted until 1918, when he began a period of intensive reading and writing that culminated in his first short story, “Bruno and Paul” (an interracial romance), and a nervous breakdown. When Toomer recovered, he changed his name to Jean, rejecting both his father’s and his grandfather’s names for one he chose for himself, a sign not only of his independence, but also his new resolve to become a writer. When Toomer returned to Washington, D.C., in 1919, he began to explore his African American heritage and that apparently led him to Alain Locke. In November, Toomer wrote Locke asking, “Will it be convenient for me to come around this Thursday, Nov. 13?”26 Several other letters followed, all arranging for meetings during which Toomer could discuss his emerging ideas with Locke. Toomer seemed to find in Locke an alternative to the conservative, Black Victorian father figures that dominated social and intellectual life in Black Washington, perhaps because Locke was already beginning to be known as a sympathetic uncle to a younger generation of writers and artists.
Unlike McKay, whose poem “If We Must Die” had captured the feeling of militant protest of the 1910s, Toomer’s poems and short stories launched a romantic search for the self through a meditative engagement with the African American experience. Toomer wrote in a dreamy, impressionistic style that seemed to capture what it felt like to experience life aesthetically. Unlike some in the Black literary establishment who disparaged his work—McKay refused Toomer’s poems for the Liberator criticizing them for lacking of focus—Locke was one of the first to take Toomer’s work seriously, in part, because Locke’s own literary work, especially his short stories written at Harvard and Oxford, manifested a similar impressionism that exuded from Toomer’s work. In the early 1920s, Toomer also was developing an aesthetic view of the African American folk experience in his writing that Locke was sympathetic to as well.
Johnson’s letter of invitation to Locke noted that Toomer “has met some very delightful writers of New York and has improved immensely.” Whether it was his writing or his personality that Johnson is referring to remains unclear, but Toomer seems to have become more sophisticated socially as he became more convinced internally that his true identity was that of a writer. His quirks, such as his extreme excitement over obscure philosophical ideas, would likely be overlooked in the group that Johnson had assembled at her home. Mary Burrill was slated to be there, the lesbian lover of Lucy Slove, the new dean of women at Howard University. Burrill’s presence suggested the sexual and social liberalism of Johnson’s gatherings: here was a community that accepted the diversity in Black bourgeois Washington. During the coming years, Johnson would sustain this oasis of tolerance for the outlaw spirits of the Negro Renaissance. And Locke, despite his Howard University credentials, was one of them. In a very real sense, he could feel comfortable for the first time in Washington when he was at her S Street Salon. He knew that at least there he was not the only one who was queer. In that sense, Johnson’s home became one of the few sites of community for Locke in Washington, D.C. It was not his mother’s Washington, but his own.