Ocean values—what Herman Melville called the consciousness freed from earthbound concerns to explore what is liminal and transcendent in human life—were Locke’s values as he made his way home. Such values explained why he was so attracted to ocean travel—it was freeing. Of course, when he talked about his transatlantic travel to his friends, he spoke of needing to get away to “shake off the academic dust.” But the real dust was his Black Victorianism, heightened in the United States, transported with him when he went abroad, but loosened in Europe and in Africa. It was loosest on board, where he could put intellectual pretensions aside and wallow in the purely social status that came from traveling on luxury liners. There, in 1924 between Europe and America, he could relax, gaze out over the white froth churning behind the HMS Tyrrhenia, and allow his mind to go. Slowly, however, as he approached New York, he began to lower the mask—the racial mask that hid his multifarious personality of professor, diplomat, and homosexual aesthete behind the persona of the race man. That transformation happened every fall when he returned from a summer abroad and occurred this January as well.
But there was something else this time. After six months abroad, presumably on a racial mission—to Africa, no less—people would want to know what his errand into European and African civilizations had yielded him, and them. He must try and relate what had happened to him during these last six months on sabbatical to a discourse on race that was only part of his motivation and part of his experience on the trip. What would he say to Charles S. Johnson, Eugene Kinckle Jones, Arthur Schomburg, his colleagues at Howard, friends like Cullen and Hughes, about Africa and what it meant to the American Negro? What did his trip to Africa mean to him? Why had he spent so much of the trip in Europe, rather than in the Motherland? He didn’t really know. He had no firm answers. He must try and discover a way to turn this recent “sabbatical,” another expatriated absence from the cultural and political scene in America, into some kind of personal capital or fall further behind.
So far, despite his outsized ambition, Locke was a shadowy figure in African American affairs, a person of unquestionable academic pedigree, but with little of a scholarly public production to show for it. Locke had not been a bold pioneer either in scholarly or public discourse in the years from 1918 to 1922, largely because of his husbandry of his mother. That defined a key aspect of Locke’s personality: one side of him longed for the kind of intimacy, nurture, and supportive environment—a kind of nurturing medium—he had experienced with his mother. And so far, that side of him, that Locke had been transferred from the receiving end, with his mother, to the delivering end with his private encouragement—mothering of the artists he knew personally. But this was all hidden, behind the scenes, in the back room, so to speak: the burgeoning writers movement to blossom needed a larger than life leader.
Locke at thirty-eight was on the verge of middle age and a decision: what was he going to make of his life? He needed to effect a kind of self-integration in the coming months that would tap into that emotional side of his personality, that would allow the ocean values of his life, the circulation of art, literature, and culture that he had indulged as a transnational man abroad, to integrate with the more aggressive, propulsive, domineering side of his personality, if he were to become a leader in America. Locke had to write himself into the history of the present by creating a bolder, conversation-changing voice, and make others read him to understand themselves. He had to change how people talked about the Negro if he wanted to change how people talked about him.
To achieve that, he had to direct the aggressive, outward-leaning, competitive, scheming side of his personality toward a larger cause—the notion that art and culture could revolutionize not only what it meant to be a Negro, but also what it meant to be an American. Despite his ironic detachment from, indeed, profound distaste for, most African Americans, Locke would have to create a public persona for himself as the voice of Black art and culture, and further, create the intellectual argument for what that meant and why it mattered. He had to invent a Negro corporate identity and believe in it himself, and make others believe it as well—that as the proselytizer of art and culture, he could convince America, indeed the world, that through art, the Negro could be free.
The key question was whether his audience would accept him as the messenger of that grand idea. As McKay’s reference to Locke in Berlin shows, there were considerable doubts about him as a leader of Black literary modernism even among those most likely to be his lieutenants. Was he their best hope for turning the Negro into an aesthetic powerhouse in the postwar world? Even his closest friends in January 1924 would have doubted that after yet another year of his escaping the American Negro. But however doubting others were, Locke came home in 1924 with a conviction—that if given a chance, he could use Black aesthetics to teach the Negro how to be relevant, interesting, and international, but most of all, modern.
That message was embodied in the ship that brought him home. The Tyrrhenia, the newest member of the Cunard line, having just been commissioned in 1923, was a symbol of adaptation to change. Lighter, slimmer, more efficient than the Lusitania, sunk by German submarines in 1915, the Tyrrhenia was a sign that the prewar trend toward huge, luxurious, but inefficient ocean liners had ended. The financial costs of the World War, the decline in the number of immigrants traveling to America, the postwar economic depression that gripped Britain and America, all imposed on British companies like Cunard Line the need to create leaner, more svelte vessels to keep business profitable. Not only shipping but also intellectual life was changing in the post–World War world, and Locke sensed that Negroes needed to change with it. Negro leadership must streamline and update its approach to racial politics in America. No longer would simple economic uplift galvanize White support as it had in Booker T. Washington’s days. No longer would pointing out the racial injustices of America build political leverage for the Negro, as W. E. B. Du Bois had believed. Maybe a lighter, nimbler, more svelte Negro could cut through the turbulent waters of the conservative 1920s and actually be heard.
Hurrying down the gangplank upon reaching New York on January 3, 1924, Locke went directly to the offices of the National Urban League to meet with Charles S. Johnson, clearly his most important ally in effecting his renaissance as a writer and public intellectual. At their meeting, Locke reported on his trip, Johnson summarized developments in America, and together they planned the articles Locke would publish in Opportunity magazine. Either in the office or just after leaving it, Locke jotted down an intellectual inventory of what he must do to act upon what was most important from his journey.
I. 5 copies of Kerlin’s Book & 1 personal (Woodson)
II. Write Culin (suggest Dunbar Art Exhibit)
III. Rush article on Barnes Foundation +
IV. Crisis + Johnson Anthology
+special piece on 3 vols.
/Andre Demaison + (Kerlin)
/Jean Tharud
/Paul Guillaume + (Kerlin)
\Dr. Barnes
\Appolonaire [sic] (Kerlin)
V. \Finot1
Robert Kerlin’s book Negro Poets and Their Poems had just appeared, published by Woodson’s Associated Publishers. Johnson brought this and other publications to Locke’s attention to enlist him more closely in his plan to transform Opportunity from being the journal of the prosaic National Urban League into the leader of a new cultural awakening of American Negroes. Kerlin, a well-educated English literature scholar known for Voice of the Negro, a collection of letters by northern, working-class Black migrants during the World War, anthologized in his second book the writings of young Negro poets, including a detailed interpretation of their work as evidence of a “present renaissance.” The Kerlin book got Locke’s attention: events were picking up steam, others were now seeing what he was seeing, that the moment was propitious for him to assert his vision of what Negro literature could be, and do, before others stole his thunder.
But the list also recorded a synergy altogether absent to Kerlin’s anthological efforts. For the list linked literature and art in a new way. Johnson informed Locke of what should be his first order of writing on his return—“Rush article on Barnes Foundation”—and helped Locke recognize that his most important intellectual influences from the trip were those July days in Paris, silenced in his other correspondence, when he had met Dr. Barnes and Paul Guillaume, and learned about Guillaume Apollinaire, the man who had introduced French modernist artists to African art. Barnes, Guillaume, and the whole Parisian fascination with African art highlighted that French and British interest in African art and culture was peaking in 1923–1924 and that American Negroes needed to find a way to exploit that new interest for their own agenda. That Locke had met Barnes and represented himself as competent enough to discuss Barnes’s obsession—West African art—made him enormously valuable to Johnson. An article by Locke on Barnes’s newly created museum to promote transformative arts education with African and modern art might flatter Barnes into opening his coffers for contemporary Black artistic expression—and Opportunity. Here was an alternative engagement with Africa from the death chambers of Egypt—it was alive, and modern. Locke and Johnson linked European modernism with the indigenous flowering of African American talent in poetry in provocative ways, such as the mention on the list of an art exhibit on Dunbar to the Brooklyn Museum under the auspices of Stewart Culin, the noted collector of indigenous peoples and African art. Here was the staging of Black culture as spectacle that Locke needed to make Negro literate traditions—and himself—visible.
The meeting epitomized that Locke’s greatest accomplishment on his trip abroad was to have consolidated his relationship with Charles S. Johnson, who took the risk to publish Locke’s articles on abstruse subjects, and thoroughly enjoyed what Locke had already produced. And Johnson held up his side of the bargain, putting Locke in connection with other publishers who might pay him for his articles. Johnson put Locke in touch with Paul Kellogg that February as such a possible paying outlet, since Opportunity was not. And it was Johnson who had promoted Locke and his European research with Eugene Kinckle Jones, the executive director of the Urban League, who had provided Locke with $100 checks to defray the costs of his recent trip. Johnson and Locke shared a desire to dominate African American opinion in the 1920s and a fierce rivalry with W. E. B. Du Bois and his preeminence among educated African Americans. Together, they would knock Du Bois from his perch as the most listened-to-voice on Black culture in America.
Locke had scant opportunity to linger and listen more to Johnson, because Howard University’s winter term had already begun. Rushing from his meeting, Locke boarded the train south and taught his class in social philosophy the next day. He probably began writing an article for Johnson not mentioned on his list—“Apropos of Africa”—which appeared the following month. Johnson wanted an article critiquing the recent flurry of activity on the question of Africa and the competition between W. E. B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey on who represented the most progressive Negro vision of the continent. While in Paris, Locke had tried to get Isaac Beton to write an article critical of Du Bois’s handling of the Third Pan African Congress, but Beton was reluctant to take on Du Bois in print. Johnson pressed for an article that would clear an intellectual space for Opportunity’s emergence as a voice in African affairs. Locke decided to write it himself. With Du Bois still in Europe trying to rescue the Third Pan African Congress from failure and Garvey in jail for mail fraud, Locke had the ear of his American audience of educated Black thinkers to himself early in 1924. Locke used the article to construct an image of himself as the more reliable arbiter of racial policy on Africa than either of them.
Locke used the article to say something he had wanted to say for some time, that American Negroes needed to connect with Africa if they were to become a world historical people. Here we see Locke’s willingness to take on the shibboleths of his own race, specifically the reluctance of American Negroes to identify with the continent of their origin. “Except from the point of view of religious missionarism, it has been until recently almost impossible to cultivate generally in the mind of the American Negro an abiding and serious interest in Africa.” Instead, the racial embarrassment was that “politically, economically, scientifically, culturally, the great concerns of this great continent have engaged the Caucasian and primarily the European mind. The sooner we recognize as a fact this painful paradox, that those who have naturally the greatest interests in Africa have of all other peoples been least interested, the sooner will it be corrected.”2 The authority with which he delivered this blow to the pride of Negro Americans was new—he seemed to have strengthened his sense that a TransAfrican identity was the only appropriate one for the American Negro and that he had the right to shame the recalcitrant among the race into adopting that view. This was, of course, deeply ironic, since Locke barely had been able to force himself to go to Africa. But that struggle gave him the authority, the strength of voice, to speak out against a problem his own reluctance to go to Africa had made visible to him—and to some others, like Woodson.
Locke was beginning to find a way to use his autobiographically grounded conflicts to make telling public statements about the psychic health of the Negro. Each of Locke’s new major essays involved subject matter or argument that was drawn from his own life or his struggle with a particular issue in his life, and the essays gave him the opportunity to externalize and critique the problem as if it were not his. Since the critiques were almost always phrased in terms of “our problem” or “our predicament,” as a race, which included him, he subconsciously included himself in the problem he examined. In “Apropos of Africa,” he addressed his own running away from things too Black, like Africa, throughout his life. Despite his brief visit, he had come around to Africa, but he was still as detached from the land of his ancestors as he was before 1923. Even in this article, he spends a good deal of time arguing that all of Africa is the American Negroes’ homeland. That argument functions here to justify that almost all of Locke’s references to Africa are from non–West Africa, the part of Africa—Christian and northern—that he was most compatible with culturally. Out of a kind of racial opportunism, he embraces Africa as a discourse and chastises other Black bourgeoisie who haven’t “seen the light.” His attack on the Negro bourgeoisie becomes in essence a self-flagellation. Yet the article is a kind of parable of what the Negro intellectual must confront, his or her past in and out of Africa, in order to fuse the split selves of a dismembered identity together and find a being with something to say to the rest of the world.
Locke continued the critique, suggesting that the avoidance of Africa reflected the brainwashing of the Negro by slavery and post slavery apologetics. But a new generation was maturing that knew “slavery only as history,” and thus it was time “to cast off this spell, and see Africa at least with the interest of the rest of the world, if not indeed with a keener, more favored, regard.” A renewed interest in Africa had an analogy in the new self-awareness of European immigrants, who after being taught to disavow their homelands, now embraced their transatlantic identities. “From the thirties to the nineties, the average Irishman was half-ashamed of Erin in spite of lapses into occasional fervent sentimentalism; and even with the sturdy Jewish sense of patrimony, Zionism has had its difficulties in rekindling the concrete regard for the abandoned fatherland. Only prosperity looks backward. Adversity is afraid to look over its own shoulder. But eventually all peoples exhibit the homing instinct and turn back physically or mentally. And we American Negroes in this respect cannot, will not be an exception.”3 Locke was bringing to the surface something in his writing that had been dormant ever since his speech before the church in Cambridge about Dunbar, a biblical rhythm and style to create the sense that he was a Moses speaking to the deliverance of his people.
When it came to commenting on Du Bois and Garvey, Locke was more measured, but praised Garvey for opening the way to a transatlantic alliance with enlightened African leaders. That was modern. The popularity of Garvey’s “Back to Africa” campaign showed that “the feeling of the masses [is] more ready and ripe for action than the minds of the leaders and the educated few.” That was the “chief service and mission” of the Garvey movement, which “stirred the race mind to the depths with the idea of large scale cooperation between the variously separated branches of the Negro peoples. This is without doubt the great constructive idea in the race life during the last decade and must become the center of constructive endeavor for this and the next generation.”4 Here was a class analysis that the Black masses were more alive with the new subjectivity of acting and thinking in the race’s self-interest, of having an agenda, and operating out of it as a world historical people should, than the bourgeoisie from which he came. Why did the oppressed, isolated, segregated, and undereducated Black masses have more of a Black transnational consciousness than Du Bois’s Talented Tenth? The obvious conclusion was that the latter were still hoping to make it in America on the White man’s terms. Garvey had seen through that more than Du Bois, Locke implied. Garvey had created a new market for race ideas. To broaden his own market, Locke republished this and a couple of other similarly praiseworthy articles about Garvey in the Negro World. While acknowledging the failure of the “Back to Africa” business venture, Locke argued “Back to Africa” was a metaphor of a healthy transnational identity for American Negroes that allowed them to overcome the negative brainwashing they received about Africa from Western culture. The challenge of what to do with that metaphor fell squarely on the shoulders of Negroes themselves. “Wholly self-initiated and self-supported trade intercourse with Africa would have been in itself a wonderful demonstration of the practical economic ability on the part of American Negroes as well as of a modern and constructive interest in their African brethren.”5
Locke judged Du Bois as even less successful than Garvey because Du Bois was up against a greater obstacle—the reality of European colonial control in Africa.
The greatest difficulty is in bringing African interests together; that task once achieved, it will be comparatively easy to link up with the American groups. This is especially the problem of the Third Pan-African Congress, which has just concluded its sessions. In the present situation when national feeling, especially that of the French and Belgian contingents, threatens to disrupt the feeble unity of action already achieved, it is very necessary that the American Negro, the most disinterested party, should assume very direct leadership and responsibility for the movement, insisting upon keeping dominant the Pan-African character of the scheme.6
African leaders’ “national feeling” was a colonial loyalty they could not dispense with or risk losing their positions as leaders of colonized nations. Strangely, the Negro in the United States had the freer hand. Rather than blame Du Bois as he had recommended Breton do in his article, Locke argued that, “if the movement should lag,” it would be “an indictment of the intelligence, perspicacity, and race-mindedness of the American Negro,” not Du Bois per se.7
How was someone like Locke, without the histrionic personality of a Garvey or the backing of the NAACP like Du Bois going to be able to enhance African consciousness among Negro Americans? Locke’s third way was to make the study of Africa the foundation of African American education. Locke called on the institutional structure of Negro higher education to take up this work. As he had written to Dean Kelly Miller, in 1914, Locke wanted to turn Negro American colleges and universities into world-renowned centers for the “study of African art and archeology” along with African history, politics, and culture. Now, he brought that idea out as a part of the strategy of TransAfrican awakening. “Instead of being reluctant, our Negro colleges should be eager to develop special scholarship in these directions; in the cultural field, here is their special and peculiar chance to enter the academic arena and justify themselves.”8 Unfortunately, Carter G. Woodson and Leo Hansberry had lacked adequate “financial support of the people and the active participation of the talented tenth” at institutions like Howard. Such institutions ought to seize this “very psychological moment in African studies” to launch a “well-planned and well-supported research investigation in Africa.” Locke wanted to train a new generation of humanists and social scientists that would be prepared to take research and other positions of authority in the new and expanding areas of African Studies. Locke even volunteered that a White Egyptologist had approved of Locke’s suggestion of having research in Africa done by African Americans. The prospect of “an African mind applying itself to ancient African manners and customs” was both attractive and perhaps productive of insights that Europeans might miss.9
Here was the first statement of what Locke would call the “passport of color,” that is, that the subject called the Negro brought with it a set of knowledges Whites did not have, knowledges tied to the experience of growing up in and living Black life. Such a Negro American researcher would find reciprocity with the kind of Africans who were similarly sophisticated, such as cultured and race-minded Coptics and Abyssinians, such as the Abyssinian envoy to Egypt, Belata Heroui, who encouraged the idea of closer cooperation between Abyssinia and Black America among intellectuals and scholars. Locke included a picture of Heroui in the article to show that this regal, Black gentleman epitomized the learned African elite African Americans could ally with through higher education. Coptics and Abyssinians also had an economic reputation as some of the most entrepreneurial people in Africa. Here was the Booker T. Washington dimension of the TransAfrican connection Locke foregrounded along with the cultural: African Americans’ economic destiny could be enhanced by less fantastical commercial ventures than those started by Garvey. Those things apropos of Africa were also apropos of the Negro, since the latter needed economic leverage to survive in America.
Where was Locke or any other African American going to find the institutional support to carry out this transnational educational partnership with Africa? Unfortunately, most Negro institutions of higher education had not advanced beyond their Reconstruction-Era beginnings: teaching basic reading and writing skills, and training professionals in law, medicine, and education remained the raison d’être of Black education. Creating a core of pioneering African-minded Negro American scholars was antithetical to the imaginations of most White administrators who ran such colleges and universities. The one possible exception was at Howard, where President J. Stanley Durkee had been very supportive of Locke’s suggestion that Howard make African anthropological research a part of the university’s commitment. Durkee responded favorably when George Foucart, the senior researcher of the French archaeological mission at Cairo, wrote Durkee to propose that Howard students become part of the archaeological project. The interest of Foucart enabled Locke to apply for a leave of absence during the fall of 1924 to pursue the plan to educate Howard students in archaeological work in Africa. Durkee wrote enthusiastically to Foucart, “This is work that I am very pleased for Howard to be involved in for it is something I have dreamed of for years. We will endeavor to send at least one student with Alain Locke this fall, with others to follow according as the university can raise funds for that purpose.”10 Such correspondence belies the idea that Durkee, Howard’s last White president, was unalterably opposed to African American scholars’ efforts in this area or that Locke turned to other institutional sources because Howard was fundamentally opposed to this kind of work.
Nonetheless, the energy for a transnational African movement emerged from another source in 1924, an art awakening occurring in Europe and America. For Locke’s most important experience of modernism had taken place in Paris, where he had met Albert Barnes and listened to his lectures on how Paul Guillaume and Guillaume Apollinaire had brought European aesthetic recognition to the genius of West African art. Locke had resisted Barnes’s argument initially, because Locke had been educated in that representational system that extended from the Italian Renaissance up to the great British artists of the late nineteenth century, and he loved all that. He saw himself in the mirror of a Western representational art tradition with one huge problem—he was Black, and it was White; and Western culture served the agency of Europeans and White Americans, not Negroes. To become modern, Locke had to find a way to acknowledge to his audience that his indulgence of things African and Negro in Paris had affected him more than Africa had.
That came in the most remarkable article he wrote in 1924, “Max Rheinhardt Reads the Negro’s Dramatic Horoscope,” where Locke portrayed in print Johnson and himself as a team whose Negro middle-class attitudes were challenged and transformed by their interview with Max Reinhardt, the German director and impresario, whose lavish production, The Miracle, had opened in New York in January 1924. Locke and Johnson had sought an interview with the great director, because Locke had heard in Europe that Reinhardt had spoken highly of the possibilities of working with Black Americans in the theater. Reinhardt even wanted to do an all-Black production of The Miracle, a pageant to the life of Jesus Christ praised in the American mainstream press. Of course, Locke and Johnson knew that part of the praise derived from the fact that Reinhardt was a famous European director, and if they could get him to sanction their efforts to promote African American drama, it would legitimate their agenda.
When Locke and Johnson sat down with Reinhardt in his New York hotel suite, Reinhardt shocked them by saying he wanted to mount a production built around the artistry of Black vaudevillian actors.
We didn’t enthuse. What Negro who stands for culture with the hectic stress of a social problem weighing on the minds of an over-serious minority would enthuse? Liza, Shuffle Along, Runnin’ Wild! We had come to discuss the possibilities of serious Negro drama, of the art-drama, if you please. Surely Director Reinhardt was a victim of that distortion of perspective to which any one is liable in a foreign land. But then, the stage is not a foreign land to Max Reinhardt. … So we didn’t protest, but raised brows already too elevated perhaps and shrugged the shoulder that carries the proverbial racial chip.11
Instead of suppressing the blindness of the Negro middle class toward modernist Negro theater conflict, Locke publicly mused on it and showed the benefits of dialogue with a European modernist for the future of Negro art. He made it the centerpiece of the article he wrote of the interview. By doing so, he moved the essay away from simple race self-promotion into a surgical exposé of their middle-class self-consciousness.
Herr Reinhardt read the gestures swiftly.
Ah yes, I see—you view these plays for what they are, and you are right; I view them for what they will become, and I am more than right. I see their future. Why? Well, the drama must turn at every fresh period of creative development to an aspect which has been previously subordinated … to the most primitive and the most basic aspect of the drama for a new starting point—and that aspect is pantomime,—the use of the body to portray emotion. And your people have that art—it is their special genius. At present it is prostituted to farce, to trite comedy,—but the technique is there, and I have never seen more wonderful possibilities. Somebody must demonstrate its fresh artistic value.
Now we understood. Baronial hotel armchairs moved as lightly and as instinctively as ouija boards.12
The question remained: “But how, Mr. Reinhardt, are we to develop these,—especially in the face of exploitation?” “Only you can do it, you yourselves. You must not even try to link up to the drama of the past, to the European drama. That is why there is no American drama as yet. And if there is to be one, it will be yours.”13
It would be an Irish playwright who twenty-five years later would make the kind of progression that Reinhardt predicted of Black vaudeville to avant-garde in his breakthrough play about human alienation in Waiting for Godot. As the playbill for a Washington, D.C., production of Waiting for Godot noted: “The performances reflect the varied sources for this particular production: the circus, American Black vaudeville, commedia del arte, and early film. (Beckett’s hat-switching routine is straight out of the Marx Brothers.) From vaudeville in particular, we find: unbuttoned flies, insistent bladders, dropped trousers, broken embraces, unexpected blows, speaking while chewing, juggling hats, body odors, farts, and objects that defy manipulation.”14 Much of American slapstick comedy, not just the Marx Brothers, was built on the antics, the physical dishevelment, clashing, incongruent gestures and patterning of Black vaudeville. But in Waiting for Godot, vaudeville supplies the architecture of the play’s meditation on life and death in a world without God—a connection most effectively embodied by the two Black actors, Thomas W. Jones II and Donald Griffin as Didi and Gogo in the Studio Theatre’s Waiting for Godot.15 Performative jabber becomes existential nonsense in Godot, which is precisely what Reinhardt foresaw as the contribution of Black performance to modernism—a formal innovation that captured the feeling of modern life. “With such control of body,” Reinhardt concluded, “such pantomime, I believe I could portray emotion as it has never been portrayed,—pure emotion, almost independent of words or setting. It is really marvelous. You are perhaps too near to see it.”
“Max Rheinhardt Reads the Negro’s Dramatic Horoscope” brilliantly suggests Locke’s willingness to reveal his class blinders in print. It reminded his readers of something he himself perhaps had forgotten since his speech on Dunbar—that it was form and formal inventiveness that defined Negro genius. But even if he wanted to take up Reinhardt’s challenge—“there is no American drama as yet. And if there is to be one, it will be yours”—Locke lacked the resources to create what in effect would have been an experimental American theater.16 How could he train a generation of Black playwrights to create high art out of Black working-class performativity on a professor’s salary and a National Urban League travel allowance? He could not. Thus, while Locke pressured Howard for more release time to lead this anthropological mission to Africa and continued to publish with Charles Johnson at Opportunity, he opened another cultural front in 1924 with Walter White, the assistant secretary of the NAACP, around Locke’s idea to secure White money to create an independent institute of Black Cultural Studies in America. After launching his classes that winter term at Howard, Locke returned to New York to meet with White.
Locke’s enthusiasm for the possibility of a new American culture spilled out afterward in a letter to White. “There is every indication,—here and abroad of increasing interest in the artistic possibilities of our race material and of our race temperament. … The demand as far as the artistic material already available in drama, music, painting and the decorative arts is even now outstripping the supply of competent interpreters and producers, and the recent success of Roland Hayes shows that country-wide appreciation and recognition awaits the exceptional type of talent.”17 Locke’s letter fit Walter White’s agenda to get Herman Lieber and George Eastman to fund a foundation to support the training of Negro artists. Lieber had made money in the music business largely by profiting from Black musicians’ songs by purchasing the reproduction rights of written-down versions that were copied by Whites. Lieber expressed his desire to fund an institute to study Black music.
White used Locke’s recent trip to Europe to try and land the deal. “Mr. Alain Leroy Locke, of whom I have spoken to you before,” White wrote to Lieber, “told me many interesting things about the deep interest in Negro art which is now being manifested abroad.”18 White forwarded Locke’s letter to Lieber, telling him that he did so without Locke’s knowledge, although in reality White had asked Locke to write the letter specifically to send to Lieber. This highlights that White was a player as well. Locke, White, and Johnson shared the belief that only through behind-the-scenes manipulations could Black cultural advancement be achieved. They also believed it was fair to seek funding from White patrons, given that Black cultural productions had fattened the wallets of untalented Whites for years. As White wrote to Locke after he drafted the letter for Lieber: “I am glad that you emphasize so splendidly the interest in Negro art which is being manifested in Europe. I, myself, have been tremendously pleased during the past few days by similar indications both in Europe and in America. On[ly] yesterday, I took Miss Rebecca West (the English novelist and critic[,] and Konrad Bercovici to Abyssinian Baptist Church and afterwards we went about a bit visiting some folks in Harlem. Both of them were tremendously impressed and we made plans for other visits which I think will materialize in interesting articles on what the really worth while colored people of New York are doing and are capable of doing.”19 Then, returning to basics, White concluded: “As for the Lieber-Eastman project, I need hardly say again that I am going to keep after it as vigorously as I can without injuring their interest in the scheme.”20
Since White was not grounded enough in Black aesthetics to flesh out a proposal for Lieber’s institute, he contacted Locke a couple of days later to write one. Locke’s proposal for an “American Institute of Negro Letters, Music and Art” took Lieber’s original vision of a conservatory of Black music and turned it into an institute of Black culture with “five departments—Music, Drama, Literature and Folk-Lore, Design and Painting, and Sculpture and African Crafts.” Such an institute would be “organized about a teaching faculty” and a “Conservatory of Musical and Dramatic Art” that would award scholarships, prizes, and awards to talented Negroes, particularly important, Locke argued, because the American Academy of Letters and Art denied recognition to Blacks. With “a small nucleus of selected students in the several lines under its direct supervision” the institute would “be able to stimulate talent all over the country along several desirable lines of new artistic endeavor. This could be done primarily through the awarding of prizes and the holding of competitive exhibitions. Indeed I know of no other way in which productive creative effort can be more effectively or immediately stimulated.”21
Some categories of prizes would not be awarded exclusively to Blacks, but to Whites, as works of the “race drama” could be written by anyone. Such an institute would galvanize the work of the Howard Players and the art movement in Chicago, Locke argued, by rewarding talented students who emerged from other training institutions. Locke promised a race relations payoff: “no foundation could be more stimulated at the present time in the racial effect or more conducive to the promotion on the part of the general American public of a more sympathetic and revised estimate of the capacities of the Negro race as a group than just such a plan adequately endowed and competently administered.”22 That “revised estimate” was the key outcome, for the resulting artistic productions would show the Negro as a creative agent not a passive recipient of American and world culture.
Unfortunately for Locke, the institute never materialized. Lieber was supportive and impressed with the people White lined up for such an institute, for Locke had penned the names of William Stanley Braithwaite, W. E. B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay, Benjamin Brawley, Walter White, Carter G. Woodson, and himself as the initial board of directors. But the project was too ambitious for Lieber and Eastman, who were businessmen first and patrons of the arts as an afterthought. Both were primarily interested in Negro music, whereas the focus of Locke’s proposal was drama, literature, and the visual arts, not profitable arts. Importantly, Locke’s proposal avoided any reference to the blues, jazz, and other working-class music forms that were overtaking American popular music in 1924 and making money for Lieber. Locke’s proposal did not fit Lieber’s narrower intentions, which may have been to create an institute to “study” Black music so as to make it easier to seize its reproduction rights.
Locke had refashioned himself as the renaissance architect of Black culture. He was no longer at sea. But he still lacked what he had always lacked, an enabling patron.