Less than four months after the spectacular Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic appeared, Locke, its guest editor, was out of a job. On June 16, 1925, Emmett Scott, Secretary-Treasurer of Howard University’s Board of Trustees, wrote to Locke: “Voted: That, Alain LeRoy Locke, Professor of Philosophy, be not reemployed for the school year 1925–26.” By way of explanation, Scott continued: “After very full discussion of the matter, in all its phases, your place, among others, it was decided, could be vacated and the work of the University not unduly suffer.” That might seem surprising, for during the winter quarter, 1925, Locke had carried a heavy load of teaching, including Philosophy 2 Ethics, Philosophy 126 Modern Philosophy: Renaissance to the Present, Philosophy 129 Race Contacts (for graduate students), and Philosophy 130 Aesthetics and Literary Criticism.1 Of course, on another level, Scott’s comment reflected the low value placed on the teaching of philosophy, rather than religion, at Negro colleges and universities in the mid-1920s. As if to ensure that Locke did not feel unappreciated, Scott concluded: “I am directed to add an expression of the Executive Committee’s appreciation on the behalf of the Board of Trustees of the services you have rendered since you have been connected with the University.”2
How could the premier Negro institution of higher education in the United States fire its most-educated faculty member, especially after he had made history, again, by editing arguably the most important statement of Negro efficacy in 1925? The answer, while complex, came down to this: the New Negro was not a welcome attitude in all quarters of Negro America, especially among administrators of institutional Negro America who viewed the New Negro and its criticality of racial hegemony as a nuisance to be dismissed or, if that did not suffice, to be crushed.
Locke’s problem was simple. He was not only the principal chronicler of the New Negro—he was a New Negro himself, an upstart rebel against the kind of paternalist control that had become the staple of Negro higher education. For years he had served as the secretary of the faculty committee peppering the board of trustees at Howard University with memoranda demanding better salaries for the faculty. As recently as January 1925, Locke, as secretary of the faculty committee on salaries, had penned a caustic letter to Jesse Moorland, chairman of the Budget Committee of the Howard Board of Trustees, challenging the board’s statement in the press that most of the recent increase in salaries went to the teachers and not the staff.3 Locke was the face of faculty rebellion against the board’s obfuscations about faculty salaries. Locke had been able to keep his distance from this caldron of faculty rebellion against the board of trustees and Howard’s White president by being away almost every other year and every summer since his mother’s death in 1922; but that absenteeism inadvertently confirmed the university’s judgment, coldly expressed by Scott, his campus nemesis, when he wrote that Locke’s “place, among others, it was decided, could be vacated and the work of the University not unduly suffer.” Locke’s sexuality, his need to be away to live and love openly, his need to be abroad to find inspiration to reenter Black America with fresh ideas—all of that combined to make him expendable despite that he was again a household name in educated Negro America.
The tension between Locke and Howard revolved around different conceptions of the meaning of education. Declaring a Negro Renaissance in the Survey Graphic he edited, Locke neglected to mention that a broad transition in the notion of education had also accompanied the emergence of new art during the Italian Renaissance. Educated at Harvard under Irving Babbitt and Barrett Wendell, Locke imbibed the notion that the fifteenth century in Italy ushered in an educational revolution that consigned scholasticism to historical dustbins and launched humanism as the foundation of modern liberal arts and scientific education. This new education was as important as the new art in launching the new subjectivity of the Italian Renaissance and it was no different in the Negro Renaissance five hundred years later. Having struggled throughout his teaching career at Howard against what he believed was an outmoded form of education that suppressed the subjectivity of Negro students as well as Negro professors, Locke saw himself on the side of a renaissance generation, as was exemplified in his freshmen lecture, “The Ethics of Culture,” making self-directed humanism the key to education at Howard. But Locke also did not mention in the Survey Graphic or The New Negro: An Interpretation that the earlier renaissance was also a period of intrigue, murder of leaders, abuse of power by patrons, and the fractured dismemberment of the city, Florence, that had birthed it. Silenced in Locke’s utopic vision of renaissance was a dark side—colonialism, violence, exploitation, and the need to control the masses of the people so that the few, the gifted, and the anointed could pursue the life of art and humanities. The more contemporary Mexican Renaissance had as its wider goal destroying the vestiges of colonial thinking in its citizens through a revolutionary education system that would enable the “New Man” to emerge. But Locke had not wanted to announce publicly that for a real spiritual awakening to occur among American Negroes, there needed to be a fundamental change in the Negro world of education and the power relations that kept it conservative. His dismissal showed there were those intent on keeping such change from happening.
Most important, by downplaying the protest element in New Negro consciousness in the Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic, Locke silenced the strongest expressions of New Negro subjectivity in the mid-1920s—that of the Black student protest occurring on Negro university campuses! Just one month before the Harlem issue appeared, Fisk University, one of the oldest and most respected Negro universities in the United States, had erupted in a student rebellion against its White president, Fayette McKenzie, and his strict student codes of dress and conduct, and his suppression of student voices on campus. Stoked by the graduation speech a year earlier by none other than W. E. B. Du Bois criticizing the president for his dictatorial rule and questionable use of Black women students to sing at White men’s clubs for money, students disrupted the campus on February 4, 1925. In response, McKenzie sent White Nashville police onto campus to arrest students in their dormitories. Formerly divided over McKenzie’s tenure, because of his success in raising money, the Black community unified in its criticism of the president, forcing him to resign. Rebellion was endemic on the streets of Harlem, in working-class unions among the newly migrated, and in women’s organizations to fight for the rights of laundresses. While Locke acknowledged such rebellion in “Youth Speaks,” he downplayed its political significance in favor of the spiritual catharsis he favored. But the coming storm in his life would test both his spiritual poise and his avoidance of protest, since art could not save him.
Despite the popularity of the Harlem issue, various aspects of its new approach to Negro subjectivity angered some in the Black community. Clashes over how the Survey Graphic represented Black people and Harlem erupted immediately after its publication. James Weldon Johnson wrote to Locke on March 10 to complain about how Winthrop Lane’s article, “The Grim Side of Harlem,” had provided ammunition for unfavorable commentary about Harlem in the New York World and the Savannah Morning News. Johnson harangued that more White newspapers would use Lane’s article to condemn the Negro in Harlem, judging it “a serious slip” to have published Lane’s litany of Harlem’s ills—the pervasiveness of policy-playing among poor Blacks, the exorbitant rents charged by Black real estate agents of poor Black migrants, the dozens of quack doctors, incompetent pharmacists, and various hustlers that took advantage, in Lane’s language, of the “childlike” gullibility of the poor Negro migrant from the South—in the Harlem number. This was precisely the kind of mistake that the protest tradition’s tendency to focus on White racism avoided—blaming the victim for the ills of the American social order.4 Johnson, it seemed, wanted Negro beauty without Negro truth.
Locke handed the letter over to Kellogg, who responded with a serious rebuttal. He asserted that an objective view of Harlem had to include coverage of real problems, and that the right response was not to blame the messenger, but organize to help social workers and others on the scene eradicate the evils Lane documented. Kellogg welcomed Johnson and John Nail, the Black real estate developer, also incensed by the article, to help social workers deal with these problems, and even welcomed them to submit replies to Lane’s assertions. Neither did, in part, perhaps, because Nail’s real estate operation was accused of charging exorbitant rents, which some said fueled the need for unlawful sources of income. Neither took up Kellogg’s suggestion to clean up Harlem. They were simply angry that Lane had outed Harlem and that progressive organizations like the NAACP were doing nothing to combat the day-to-day problems experienced by the masses of Black people in Harlem. Of course, such exposés as Lane’s helped southern media suggest Blacks stay in the South, rather than risk the “immorality” of northern cities. New Negro “openness” was causing problems.5
Luckily, there was no rush of newspapers to join the Savannah Morning News in its indictment. But the deeper question remained: how true was Locke’s forecast of a renaissance of a people in Harlem if the story of success was marred by serious social, economic, and moral failures? Even a Black New York newspaper questioned Locke’s rosy view of Harlem’s prospects. The New York Age argued Harlem was not a site of economic self-determination. Under the headline: “Survey of Business Development on Seventh Avenue,” the Age reported, “colored men own 40 percent of business but whites operate the places that net the largest profits.”6 That challenged Locke’s assertion that Harlem represented a new phase in Black-White power relations, since from a Marxian perspective, a cultural advance had to reflect a change in economic relations. It also undermined the renaissance analogy, since the Age’s statistics suggested that a true bourgeoisie had not emerged in Harlem. How could an economically marginal people produce beauty on a service worker’s salary? Locke never accepted the defeatism implicit in the anomalies reported by Lane or the Age, but the arguments exposed the economic problem of Black cultural and educational advancement: part of why colleges and universities like Fisk had to have men like McKenzie as president was to beg enough money from philanthropic Whites to keep them afloat. Soon, this would also become an issue for Locke’s aesthetic agenda as well.
More stinging critiques of Locke’s leadership emerged, however, when at a meeting in Harlem, Paul Kellogg was asked by some residents why Locke, a nonresident, had been chosen as guest editor. Kellogg answered that question and received an ovation; but the implication lingered—Locke was barely known in Harlem. Other African Americans criticized some of Reiss’s portraits, especially “Two Public Schoolteachers,” which also appeared in the exhibition of Reiss’s portraits organized by Ernestine Rose, the librarian at the Harlem branch of the New York Public Library. At a meeting, Elise McDougald wrote Locke, “One Mr. Williams wondered if the whole art side of the issue were a ‘piece of subtle propaganda to prejudice the white reader.’ He told us that ‘Should he meet those two schoolteachers in the street, he would be afraid of them.’ It happened that one of them, Miss Price had come in late with me from another meeting. When an opportune moment arrived, she stood to express her regret that she would frighten him but claimed the portrait as a ‘pretty good likeness.’ ”7
Locke reacted swiftly to the challenge made to his editorial authority in selecting Reiss to portray Harlem. Published in the May 1925 issue of Opportunity, “To Certain of Our Philistines,” Locke called Reiss’s critics “Philistines,” who were not reacting out of an aesthetic judgment, but out of their own prejudice against the dark-skinned figures in the portraits. Their internal race prejudice “distorts all true artistic values,” he wrote, “with the irrelevant social values of ‘representative’ and ‘unrepresentative,’ ‘favorable’ and ‘unfavorable’—and threatens a truly racial art with the psychological bleach of ‘lily-whitism.’ This Philistinism cannot be tolerated.” Defending Reiss’s portrait of the teachers, he wrote: “It happens to be my particular choice among a group of thirty more or less divergently mannered sketches; and not for the reason that it is one of the most realistic but for the sheer poetry and intense symbolism back of it. I believe this drawing reflects in addition to good type portraiture of its sort, a professional ideal, that peculiar seriousness, that race redemption spirit, that professional earnestness and even sense of burden which I would be glad to think representative of both my profession and especially its racial aspects.”8 It did: both teachers clearly wore Phi Beta Kappa keys with an open magazine, perhaps Opportunity, in front of them. As usual, it was their skin color and their unassimilated Negro features that caused the bourgeoisie to recoil.
Being gay, Locke could see the bankruptcy of the Black bourgeoisie’s conception of what and who is “representative” in a different light. A Black middle-class viewer of Reiss’s portraits might perceive “A College Lad” as representative, because the very light-skinned, Anglo-looking man wearing a suit, and a serious pose, epitomized a Black Victorian ideal. But if this bourgeoisie knew that he was also sometimes a lover of Countee Cullen, then for most of them Harold Jackman would cease to be “representative.” By contrast, the teachers, with their dark skin color, tired-looking faces, and relaxed clothing, were perhaps more “representative,” on the basis of conventional heterosexual morality, than “A College Lad.” Locke saw the irony of such categories and the inability of those who might seem representative in one set of values to live up to all of the criteria the aggressively assimilated imposed on those who “represented” them. The irony of the New Negro movement was that it was led by those like Locke, Cullen, Jackman, Hughes, and Walrond, to name only a few, who were “representative” only because they lived an open secret. Locke, who always hated skin color prejudice among Negroes, knew it was just another indication of the pressing need for a new vision of the ideal society for Black people.
Locke also dismissed the notion that a Negro American artist would have produced better portraits of the Negro. Since American society characterized Black people as lacking in beauty, “Negro artists, themselves victims of the academy-tradition,” they tended to avoid serious artistic study of them. Instead, modern European artists, such as Reiss and Auguste Mambour, had developed “a new style or at least a fresh technique” in order to adequately portray a “new subject”—Africans and people of African descent. As a transnationalist, Locke realized that the outsider had something profound to contribute, especially to highly provincial societies. For Locke, that justified his decision to go with Reiss, for being from Europe and having grown up outside of American racial iconography gave him a unique perspective and access to European modernist traditions with which to depict a New Negro, one that transcended even American Negro aesthetic notions of “representativeness.”
Beyond simply defending a particular drawing or his choice of Reiss, Locke made an ethical argument. He claimed that the emergence of the New Negro meant the birth of a new set of ideas. One of those was that African American life had moved away from aggressive emulation of White American values toward the search for an alternative, healthy, more self-accepting value system. Another was that the quest for a better life among Blacks was not exclusively racial, that Whites were part of this process, and that progressively minded allies existed among Whites who were critical to the unfolding of a new way of being Black in the world. Perhaps most profoundly, Locke was asserting that Black life and values themselves were going to have to change. The focus on the pigmentation of those who represented the Negro bourgeoisie (or whether they lived in their neighborhoods) had to give way to focus on whether their consciousness enhanced Negro identity and culture. What Locke was attempting with the New Negro was very subtle and perceived by some as dangerous—to stimulate an awakening among Black Americans to their unique cultural particularity, but also demand that that particularity lead to a broader universality and acceptance of internal and external difference than was common in provincial Black communities. National awakening could not be allowed to become knee-jerk essentialism.
The central philosophical dilemma was this: could an oppressed, or at least beleaguered, Black bourgeoisie adopt as its primary way of looking at itself and its community a revolutionary aesthetic perspective that foregrounded youth, rebellion, and the breaking down of self-protective defense mechanisms? Reiss had made an aesthetic breakthrough, but the Black middle class continued to view his work as a social document. Locke’s position was that “Art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have obscured and overlaid.”9 But it could only do so when the aesthetic value of the work was put first. Philistinism was not only a class ideology, but an epistemological predilection built up over years of dealing with White supremacy. While Locke might decry the criticism, the facts of the criticism, that the community felt entitled to critique and challenge its representation in an issue directed at Black people, was a positive. Locke had their attention. The question, as he said faced the New Negro generally, was what was he going to do with it?
The one thing Locke did not have to concern himself with too much was the criticism of Reiss. Reiss’s portrait style, with their strong color delineation of Black faces against a white background, was almost immediately emulated by young African American artists, while his African-art inspired abstractions, called “imaginatives,” became the design signature, really the visual brand, of the Negro Renaissance. Reiss expressed repeatedly in his interviews that the purpose of his portrait study was to interest a Negro artist in doing similar work. But there was no patron class in Harlem with the money and self-consciousness to keep alive a painter who rendered its image. Almost all of the outlets of African American publishing quickly commissioned Reiss to produce cover images and logos for them after the Harlem number appeared. For what the network of financially strapped, but exciting African American magazines, little journals, newspapers, and cultural events needed was easily reproduced images that communicated a modernist New Negro message. Reiss supplied it, even though he was White. Race was everywhere, even when Locke argued it did not matter.
But race was working for Locke, too. For even before the Survey Graphic hit the newsstands, Albert Boni had written to Paul Kellogg to express his interest in publishing a book based on the subject matter covered in the Harlem number. But as Kellogg conveyed to Locke, Boni did not want to “bring out the Harlem number in book form; but to use the materials as perhaps half of the contents of a much more formidable volume which would sell for $4.50 and which he hopes would be taken by every college and library in the country.” Kellogg believed that “a volume such as Mr. Boni suggests … by its sheer handsomeness would be a pretty convincing exhibit of the caliber of the Negro Renaissance.”10 Boni’s plan would “involve cutting down what would come from the Survey,” which was fine with Kellogg, but which meant that there would be considerable more work editing the new material. Since he insisted that Locke be the sole editor, Kellogg encouraged him to think over the proposal carefully as it would involve considerable more work. Its benefits would be obvious. By transposing the Harlem issue into a nationally pivoted book, he would elude the criticism that he was not the most appropriate representative of Harlem. And in a book version, he would have the opportunity to include the work of several artists, perhaps “the work of a Negro artist in the new book,” as Mrs. McDougald would later suggest to Kellogg.11
Locke leaped at the opportunity, because Boni’s conception of the book matched his. “I am inclined to think,” he wrote back to Kellogg, “that we have already so to speak had the popular edition with the Survey issues—and that the effective thing to do now is document even to a de luxe extent if Mr. Boni is willing to take the chances, The New Negro. And I quite agree with his desire for considerable new material:—I can immediately suggest the following:—enlarging Johnson’s sketch to a full discussion of the economic situation in the larger city centers, 2. A chapter on The Negro in American Literature (I have the material already at hand for this) 3. A companion essay on The Spirituals to the Jazz article (material also in hand), 4. a chapter on Negro Leadership with a discussion of policies projected through personalities,—using the Reiss sketches … 5. a chapter on Negro Education, and 6. enlarging Haynes article to discuss The Negro and Christianity.”12 While Locke did his thinking, the Survey Graphic sounded out other publishers and discovered that all of them turned down the project. Only Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s said he would be interested, but only if a single author wrote the book.13 Boni was the only publisher who wanted to bring out a multi-authored anthology of the “cultural revival as a whole” and tap the same market primed by the Survey Graphic. That suited Locke just fine, and he encouraged Kellogg to finalize arrangements with Boni. With any luck, he opined, he could get the volume out soon, perhaps “before the middle of June, when I hope to get abroad again.”14
Given that Locke assumed the book would be out in the summer, he made plans once again to fund his travel abroad with a Kahn Traveling Fellowship. Here again was the pattern that Howard University had observed but Locke had ignored. At every chance, he made plans to be away from the university, from Washington, either editing manuscripts in Harlem or planning yet another scheme to live off his journalistic writings globally. Of course, Locke was a master at rationalizing such schemes. The racial consciousness he had documented in Harlem was part of a transnational phenomenon, such that travel by a man of color to India, Japan, China, and the continent of Africa would open up their “representative leaders” to talk openly about race, nationalism, and the view of the West. Locke was aware that a broader, anti-European, anti-colonialist “renaissance” was taking place in Africa and Asia, hopefully with the same aspirations to find in art and culture an ethics for self-determination. Indeed, one could argue that Egypt, India, and Japan were constructing their own hyper-nationalist movements for liberation. Locke wanted to assess whether such movements were reactions to or attempts to transcend the racializing narratives of their oppressors. Locke also trotted out his notion of the “passport of color,” that is, that “the mind of representative people in the Eastern continents is on the whole more open to a person obviously non-Nordic these days.”15
Building on his successful working relationship with Kellogg, Locke asked him to write the letter nominating him for the fellowship. But Kellogg, exhibiting his usual perspicacious resourcefulness, also sent around a copy of his letter and Locke’s proposal, to Elise McDougald, George Foster Peabody, and Albert Shaw—people whom Kellogg said might be better known to the Kahn people than he was. Though Kellogg recommended Locke enthusiastically, he also wrote Locke that it was a mistake for him to be abroad with so much going on in the United States. It was an odd decision, on Locke’s part, to desert America, and especially “Harlem,” which, he had said himself was the most important Negro community in the world. With work on The New Negro at hand, and with the numerous other domestic opportunities to exploit it sure to follow its publication, why leave for India? Locke was establishing a pattern that his patron would later critique of escaping from the work he had begun. Most likely it was sex: he could better live the life of the homosexual gentleman of culture abroad than in New York. The Kahn people, however, turned down his fellowship. Documenting the “rising tide of color” of anti-Western consciousness was beyond what they wanted to be associated with, especially should it reach print.
As with the Harlem number, work on the book anthology went slower than expected. Apparently, by the second week of April, Boni had not made a definitive commitment to Reiss. Kellogg relayed to Locke that Reiss “had had some experiences with Mr. Boni and felt that one was not certain of him unless things were in black and white: he was a difficult man to deal with and rather inclined to gouge.” This insight was particularly important, since Reiss had begun to feel a “bit disconsolate” over the lack of attention his work had garnered in the art establishment.16 Reiss would receive a nice notice in the New York Times, but the major art reviews, galleries, and patrons ignored his work. The lack of a patron class in Harlem meant that there was no rush of sales; Reiss had sold only the portrait of Robert Moton, which had been purchased by George Foster Peabody, who intended to donate it to Hampton Institute. Locke did not want to lose the interest of Reiss at this crucial date, for he was committed to having Reiss’s “sketches” in the volume. Fortunately, by the end of April, a firm contract with Locke, Reiss, and the Survey Graphic had been executed by Boni to produce The New Negro: An Interpretation.
Locke also responded favorably to Mrs. MacDougald’s suggestion that he include the work of Negro visual artists in the book. Fortunately, in St. Louis, the young African American artist and future muralist Aaron Douglas had been so moved by the cover design of the Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic that he moved to New York to become one of Reiss’s students. Douglas began to master the technique of using African design as the basis for an African American interpretive design based on African motifs. Douglas produced a half-dozen sketches for the book, showcasing the emergence of a fine artist from the race. Here was Locke again performing his signature role—taking criticism and turning it into a modus vivendi between contending camps—his that Reiss should illustrate the volume because he was the best artist to do it, others that a Negro renaissance ought to feature a Negro visual artist as well. Locke’s approach made good political and commercial sense.
Including Douglas was only one of the moves Locke made to distinguish The New Negro from the Survey Graphic. He asked younger scholars to research new essays to document the wider context of the New Negro. Budding sociologist E. Franklin Frazier gladly agreed to do an essay on the Black middle class in Durham, North Carolina, even though he knew little about the subject, because the request was one of the few opportunities for “self-expression” he had as a scholar “in the South.”17 Locke tapped Arthur Fauset to contribute an essay on one of the newest areas of research, Negro folklore, the subject of his doctorate at the University of Pennsylvania. And Locke asked his former colleague Montgomery Gregory to contribute on the “drama of Negro Life.” Perhaps most interesting, Locke asked the sharp-witted critic, Heywood Broun, a regular of the Algonquin Round Table, to contribute an essay, though Broun begged off, because of a recent nervous breakdown. Documenting that the New Negro was a national phenomenon led Locke to attempt to suggest that it was a cosmopolitan one, as well. And Locke asked creative writers and poets like Eric Walrond, who had been left out of the Survey Graphic, to give him some of their latest writings. Given his desire for such new work, the inevitable resulted, and by the end of May, few of the new commissioned works had come in.
Not surprisingly, work on the new book gave Locke ample reason to spend more time up in Harlem that spring, which brought him considerable recognition there for the work he had done and continued to do. Ernestine Rose honored him with a reception at the library during the second week of April. Guests were a veritable who’s who of the New York Black elite, and Locke was the featured speaker on an occasion that also prominently displayed Reiss’s recent portrait of Locke. The next week Locke was again up in Harlem to deliver a speech on “The New Negro” at the “Big Meeting” at the YMCA Auditorium at 181 W. 135th Street. He was also a prominent participant on a program again at the library to mark the creation of the Department of Negro Literature and History based on the personal collection of Arthur Schomburg. But his greatest reward must have come when he attended the dinner for the Opportunity Awards, which he judged along with prominent White writers and cultural custodians Carl Van Doren, Zona Gale, Fannie Hurst, and Dorothy Scarborough. Locke had done something no other Black man had done: he had taken over a White publication and made it speak a Black message. Doing so, Locke showed Charles S. Johnson what he was capable of if he was paid for his work.18
Just as Locke was receiving all of this New York attention, events at Howard University returned his attention to Washington, D.C.—more than a month before he was fired. On May 7, students at Howard struck in protest against a rule by which “when a student has accumulated a total of twenty unexcused absences in physical education and ROTC combined, he shall be dropped from the college.”19 When the university suspended five students on May 5 for violation of the twenty-cut rule, the students organized a mass meeting and refused to attend classes until the students were reinstated and the rule changed. Students were already angry about the arbitrary system, supported by President Durkee, of recording and punishing students who did not attend chapel. But the May strike was less directed at the president and more at the faculty, especially the faculty of the Physical Education Department and the ROTC, who kept inadequate records of absences, sometimes suspended students who missed only a few classes, and wielded more power over the students than other academic faculty. Moreover, many students saw mandatory ROTC training as an anomaly in the aftermath of Black participation in the World War. Coupled with that sentiment against worthless military training was a rising desire for less demeaning treatment of students and the specific request that several “unproductive” White teachers be removed from the faculty and replaced with younger, “New Negro” Black teachers. The strike, therefore, embodied the themes of self-determination and racial leadership Locke had elucidated in the Survey Graphic, and not surprisingly, he was supportive of the student action.
Students brought education to a halt at Howard. A tumultuous meeting on May 10 outlined a path of reconciliation. Representing the students, a committee including Glenn Carrington, a former student and lifelong friend of Locke’s, presented a list of demands, which included that no student participating in the strike be penalized, that no “cuts” be counted against students, and that no student be suspended over the twenty-cut rule. More broadly, students demanded that the administration review the policy of cuts for non-attendance at ROTC classes, reduce the number of years of physical education, in accord with other more “academic” requirements, and review the autumn schedule of physical education classes to make sure it did not prevent students from taking required academic classes to graduate. More fundamentally, students wanted a bigger role in planning and scheduling social and academic activities at Howard.20
Locke sympathized with the students’ generational demand for more self-determination in their education. But strikingly, his was not the prevailing view among the faculty. Some, like finance professor Orlando Thompson, vehemently opposed the student position as a threat to faculty rights. Locke understood that the faculty, which was already feeling dominated by the administration, might not want to lose any remaining authority to the students. But Locke felt the faculty would gain more respect from students by trying to find a compromise, especially since he believed that such duties as ROTC training had to be self-imposed to be meaningful. At the meetings, Locke used his status as secretary of the faculty salaries committee, on the one hand, and his clout among students, on the other, to try to harmonize the values of faculty authority and student self-determination. Locke helped get the faculty to accept the principle that students should not be penalized for participating in the strike, and that the faculty would work with the administration to try and revise the rules on penalizing students for failure to participate in physical education classes. Meanwhile, students would be expected to continue to attend those classes without incident until the review was completed.
Despite Locke’s role in resolving the strike, some in the administration felt that he was too sympathetic with the students and that, combined with his controversial advocacy for faculty raises, he was becoming a problem. Of the two issues, it appears that his role as committee secretary brought him the most negative attention from the board of trustees, who concluded that their continuing struggle with the faculty over salaries would be eased somewhat if he was not around. That same May 1924, Locke, along with several other faculty, signed a letter of petition to the board of trustees expressing that the faculty was regretful “that there is little resulting relief” from the board, which had refused to take action on their pleas to increase salaries to bring them in line with professors at similar institutions and the result was outmigration of talented faculty. The faculty acted because the administration had increased the academic incidental fee charged to students, and the faculty wanted a portion of that increase to go to their salary increase. The administration had other ideas and announced that all of the additional sum would go to removing the debt, which many of the faculty believed had accrued at least in part because of increases in the expenses of the administration. The faculty issued another memorandum criticizing the decision to spend all of the money on the debt. The board was getting tired of this constant haranguing, and Jesse E. Moorland, Locke’s nemesis, hit upon a way to stop it.
At the board’s June meeting, the board voted to appoint a special committee to study the issue of faculty salaries and make recommendations in October. At that October meeting, the committee, which included Moorland, recommended that the board allocate $15,100 to raising salaries, including those of the clerical staff. Also, the committee “recommends the employment of an Educational Expert to make a survey of the University operation of the Administrative and Academic Departments” to ascertain where cost-saving changes could be instituted. One of the members of the board raised the question as to whether the clerical staff raises were within the “construction of the vote taken … authorizing the Special Budget Committee.” It was not, but the board decided that such a move was in the spirit of the earlier decision.
Needless to say, that decision left the faculty angry. Indeed, those on Locke’s committee saw this as a deliberate attempt to humiliate the faculty. After meeting on the issue, the board received a “Communication dated January 8, 1925, from Dr. Locke, as Secretary of the Faculty Committee on Salaries, transmitting a request” to meet with the board. Instead, the board referred the matter to the budget committee. The board had effectively rid itself of having to deal with the faculty over salaries by referring all of its challenges to the budget committee, headed by Moorland. What the faculty did not see in this scenario was that Moorland and company had found in the “survey of the University operation” a means to get rid of the faculty it regarded as troublemakers.
Early in June, rumors of impending dismissals began to appear in the local Black newspaper, the Washington Bee. Locke confronted President Durkee about the rumors. He denied the rumors, then contradicted himself by saying that all such decisions were out of his hands. When the board met on June 15, 1925, the budget committee presented the results of the survey conducted by Dr. R. J. Leonard, of the Teachers College at Columbia University. It appears that the survey’s only substantive recommendation was to eliminate the jobs of a few faculty who were associated with the salary effort. Kelly Miller was removed as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; Dean Cook of the Finance Department was forced into retirement; and three professors, including Locke, were “discontinued.” Emmett Scott, long an adversary of Locke’s, must have enjoyed writing the June 14 letter that sent Locke packing.
Locke was furious. Suddenly, after thirteen years at Howard, he was fired for being a New Negro—standing up for the rights of Black scholars and intellectuals at Howard University. Here was the premier African American university in the nation firing its most educated faculty member, because he was too outspoken in a legitimate labor issue. Of course, such philosophical considerations were far from Locke’s thoughts as he contemplated his next move. But Locke must have realized that he really had few options. Despite the plethora of institutions for the education of the race, where was a professor labeled as a troublemaker going to find work in the conservative world of Black higher education? Hampton and Tuskegee were not live options, given that Locke had rather high-handedly left them out of the Survey Graphic. Fisk was nearly under house arrest in the wake of its White president’s forced resignation after months of student protests. While Fisk’s Board of Trustees knew they had to go in a new direction, they were certainly not going to take a chance on a malcontent whose services were labeled as expendable.
Spending the last three years on sabbaticals to Europe did not help his case. Even when he was teaching, Locke was frequently off campus. In February 1924, President Durkee had written Locke inquiring how he had met his classes given that he had been observed giving a speech in Chicago during the middle of the week. Clearly, that was a warning sign, but Locke failed to heed it. He also failed to realize that Moorland was a powerful enemy. Moorland had developed a dislike for Locke in 1923 when he requested funding for his European-Africa research trip, which Moorland had turned down on the grounds that it was less important than the building of the medical school. Moorland was also a confidant of William Leo Hansberry, whom Locke had mistreated the previous year. Believing that Locke would undermine his attempt to get a course, “Negro Civilizations of Ancient Africa,” adopted at the university, Hansberry carried out a campaign that lobbied Moorland to support his course and peppered Moorland with innuendo about the disloyalty and selfish interests of other members of the faculty. Hansberry even suggested that some faculty were eager to bring the various controversies over salaries and policies at Howard University to the press. Hansberry made it clear that he was on the side of the university in this matter, and work behind the scenes paid off. Ten days before Locke received his letter of dismissal, Howard announced that it would host Hansberry’s “Symposium on Ancient African History.” Locke had not just been blindsided, but cuckolded as well.21
But Locke’s dismissal was also part of a larger maneuver by the Howard Board of Trustees to eliminate those professors who embodied and exemplified the New Negro criticality that Locke had announced in the Survey Graphic—a criticality that stemmed from a belief in their own intellectual independence. In addition to Locke, three other instructors were fired: Professor Alonzo H. Brown, Assistant Professor Metz T. P. Lochard, and Instructor Orlando C. Thornton. While Locke’s dismissal was as unfair as it was unanticipated, it was also part of a broader challenge the New Negro had overcome to prove that philosophy as a course of study stood for something. Now he like the others was being tested as to whether his New Negro was merely rhetoric or a serious project that could win in a head-on confrontation with old Negro education’s hegemony.
Locke’s first response was to write back to Scott, saying that he had received the notice, but that his formal response would come later. He needed time to think, to consult with others, including Paul Kellogg, George Foster Peabody, and Jesse Jones—the latter two key players in the Fisk controversy—and compose a more comprehensive argument against the “discontinuance.” He then wrote a more formal letter to Charles Brown, president of the board of trustees, protesting the action primarily on the grounds of procedures. The board of trustees had justified his “discontinuance” on the necessity of economic consolidation. But Locke argued that selecting who should be let go should be made in terms of “academic seniority, relative scholastic qualifications.” Since he was a full professor and one of the most published faculty, Locke argued that others less senior should have been selected for dismissal. Moreover, this selection should have come “from my immediate academic superiors, the Deans,” who historically had wielded considerable power at Howard. Locke also asserted that his dismissal violated his academic tenure and the normal expectation that an employee would be granted a personal hearing before the board.22 As Locke would learn from lawyers he hired to examine his case, his contract with the university did not grant him tenure, even if he had been renewed yearly without evaluation. And the university was under no obligation to grant him a hearing, because the dismissal had not been based on any “specific” charges against him, but simply for economy, a rationale that took away redress.
Locke argued, further, that he should have been given the opportunity to propose other solutions to the demand to economize, such as his doubling up and teaching psychology or education, which he had done in the past. Here Locke hinted that he realized that William Nelson, a graduate of the Yale School of Divinity, was being used to cover Locke’s classes and render him unnecessary. An underlying thread of the action against Locke was to restore religion as the focal point of spiritual inquiry at Howard and erase what was an anomaly that Howard was the only Black college to teach philosophy, let alone to keep a full-time full professor of philosophy on its teaching staff. That Locke was a philosopher was also part of a larger perception that the board and Durkee may have had when deciding to fire him. The key phrase in the “discontinuance” letter was that “your place, among others, it was decided, could be vacated and the work of the University not unduly suffer.” Locke, however, kept the focus of his letter on procedure: as a long-standing teacher, he ought to have been given an opportunity to challenge his dismissal. He ended his letter by petitioning for a “review and reconsideration of his case, with a personal hearing” before the board.
Brown responded that “as a university man, you” should know that all such decisions were the university president’s and recommended that Locke see Durkee “regarding matters discussed.” It was untrue. As Locke would point out in his reply, his decision to write Brown was based on his conference with Durkee, who had informed him that “these matters were ‘entirely out of his hands’ and had been placed by the Board in the hands of the Budget and Executive Committees, whose action would be issued by the Secretary-Treasurer.” Locke had detected already that both the board and Durkee were trying to avoid responsibility for the decision to fire him.
Certainly, Durkee was an obvious suspect. He was a member of the board and had participated in its decision about Locke. And some of the other actions approved by the board when it dismissed Locke suggested that Durkee was at the least using the consolidation rationale to settle old scores and remove from leadership positions faculty who represented New Negro attitudes. Durkee had previously approved the creation of the College of Liberal Arts, which removed Kelly Miller as its dean, and had also supported closing the School of Finance, thereby forcing into retirement its dean, George William Cook, another of Locke’s friends. When the Howard University Club of New York City adopted a resolution in June calling for Durkee’s removal, it accused the president of demoting two faculty members from directing the Howard University Glee Club and Choral Society “for no other palpable reason than that at a recent convention in Washington, under conditions that were discriminatory, insulting and humiliating, the students of the Glee Club and Choral Society refused to sing, (and rightly so), and were supported in their praiseworthy stand by Professors Tibbs and Childers to the utter displeasure of the President of the University.”23 Durkee failed to understand the New Negro sentiment among African American students in the 1920s that opposed the singing of the spirituals before White folks to raise money for Black schools. Some Black students also felt that such performances made a spectacle of Black culture and fed White desires for a return to the rituals of deference developed under slavery. The Glee Club made the case that the president punished those who were New Negroes and who supported Black students’ refusal to endure racial abuse from paternalistic Whites. The club concluded that Durkee used the dismissals and reassignments “to discipline those who” exemplified this New Negro spirit of racial pride, and that for that reason he had “outlived his usefulness at the University.”
But Locke and Durkee’s relationship had not been particularly contentious. Durkee had been quite forthcoming in granting Locke many leaves of absence, some of which included partial salary. He had also supported Locke’s effort to establish a faculty and student research program in Africa and had written letters endorsing Locke’s efforts to foreign scholars. It was true that Durkee had reprimanded Locke in 1920–1921 for failure to attend chapel; but that was four years earlier and a relatively minor infraction, committed by numerous other professors. By 1924, Durkee had conceded the rule was unenforceable. Interestingly, the incident about the students’ singing of the spirituals was one of the few real conflicts between Locke and Durkee. On one occasion, Locke had discussed with students in his classroom the issue of whether singing the spirituals was objectionable, for which Durkee had reprimanded him. Neither of these incidents was enough to explain the decision to fire him.
On the other hand, Locke’s constant challenging of the board over more money for the professors, along with his perceived sympathy for the student strike, did rise to the level of annoyance that would bring retaliation by the university. Locke’s talent was also a problem for the board. His writing and expository skills helped make the faculty case over money issues against the administration more powerful and biting than it would have been otherwise. Unlike his cordial correspondence with Durkee, Locke’s correspondence with Moorland was filled with tension. Durkee had supported the overall move against the professors, because it gave him an opportunity to punish noncompliants. But the action originated with a board member with considerable animus toward Locke, and was a board decision.
Regardless of who was most responsible for his dismissal, it was a crisis in Locke’s life that forced him to change his approach to his public persona, to become, in a word, political in a way he had avoided in the past. To get his job back, he would have to make himself a public figure and project his struggle as more significant than his reinstatement. Only a campaign that brought a fundamental change in the administration, and the quality of life at Howard, would rationalize his retaliation against the administration as something higher than mere self-interest. Only then would his struggle become heroic. But the search for the hero in Locke would have to begin with a search for the villain who could be blamed not just for his dismissal, but for the general degradation of the educational mission of Howard.
Charles Brown gave Locke and his allies the villain they needed when he shifted onto Durkee the onus for the decision to dismiss Locke and the other professors. That act of bad faith on Brown’s part created an opportunity for Locke to link his personal loss to the desire of many other Negroes to use this conflict to bring New Negro leadership to Howard University. To make that connection, Locke would have to publicly identify his cause with the radical campaign of the Washington-based Howard alumni associations that had wanted to remove Durkee for some time. The dismissals and demotions gave these groups a cause célèbre around which to rally against Durkee. In their propaganda effort, the dismissals became evidence, as the historian Raymond Wolters points out, that Durkee was “punishing independent scholars” and had created an environment at Howard in which “servility has displaced scholarship and manhood.” That rhetoric aroused the Black population.24 The Student Council also characterized the dismissals as a campaign to remove those instructors who “refused to go along with the administration … [and] as a warning to other members of the faculty that unless they think less of academic freedom and more of the administration’s program, they, too, will be dismissed.”25 Such a narrative of disciplining and punishing academic freedom would have been difficult to explain away at a White college; but at a Black university, administered by a White president, the regime of domination translated into racial paternalism. The board’s early unwillingness to take full responsibility for the dismissals effectively singled out a White man, Durkee, to be the scapegoat for a decision that had emanated from an interracial board of trustees. In effect, the board made the issue of the dismissals more racial than it really was and handed the enemies of the administration just the kind of justification they needed to fuel continued resistance to the decision. The moral challenge for Locke and the other opponents of the administration was how much to wage the battle overtly on racial grounds. If the opposition was made to Durkee purely on racial grounds, then Locke would lose the high moral ground of the openness of the New Negro movement to White participation that he had painstakingly argued.
Durkee complicated the racial situation with his bad judgment. In April 1925, he accepted a request from his alma mater to direct the Curry School of Expression in Boston, a school that barred African Americans as students. A firestorm of criticism emerged after the strike as students, faculty, and alumni questioned why a man who headed a university for Black education would consent to run a Whites-only school. Although Durkee resigned a few months after accepting the position, the damage to his reputation had been done. Durkee’s desire for absolute control and his insensitivity to the politics of racial representation in America was read by Blacks as racial. Durkee, in turn, probably reacted to the resistance to his policies as resistance to him because he was White. That led him to be stubborn and monopolistic in his approach to the alumni associations that elected a secretary who represented the alumni’s views to the administration. Durkee, however, decided to reject the secretary that the alumni associations proposed and “force,” in the words of Arthur Mitchell, the president of the Howard Welfare League, “upon the Alumni a secretary of his own personal choice.” That man, Emory Smith, took it upon himself to undermine the legitimacy of the Washington-based alumni associations by arguing that their views were not representative of all of the alumni. In effect, Durkee was attempting to silence his New Negro critics. But that move backfired. By the end of the summer the Washington-based alumni carried out their own campaign and had the support of fifteen different alumni associations for the removal of Durkee as president. In the final analysis, the issue that confronted Howard was not racial, but political: was Howard to be run as a democratic institution, responsible to the will of Black people, who were its most important constituency? Or was Howard to be an institution in which the board and its president dictated policy? That question would be answered in eight months.
Before publicly supporting this campaign to remove Durkee, Locke tried to work individually and privately to get his job back. At the end of his second letter to Brown, he confided that he had refrained from public protest in the newspapers, pending a private reconsideration of his case. As a Black Victorian, he had always prided himself on being on the right side of how things were supposed to be done and had used procedure against his enemies whenever he could. The questions that would inevitably be raised as to why he was chosen for dismissal had the potential of probing into his personal fitness for teaching and his barely cloaked homosexuality. While it is not clear that anyone in the administration knew for certain that he was gay, some at Howard did. It was generally known that he was unmarried, effeminate, and the subject, from time to time, of rumors and innuendos. Locke’s sexual orientation was partly shielded by the plethora of Black scholars, such as Carter G. Woodson, who were confirmed, almost asexual, bachelors. Moreover, gentlemen and ladies on the faculty or in the administration did not discuss homosexuality publicly, although they probably did privately. As Locke planned his next move, he had to consider whether something would surface that could be used by the administration to discredit him if he criticized the university too forcefully. Locke would have tried to find out if the administration had any incriminating information or any disgruntled or accusing student, who might try to justify his dismissal on the grounds of public immorality. No such information surfaced.
Locke could not completely rule out the possibility that questions about his personal relationships with students might have added some extra suspicion to the administration’s view of him as a teacher. The attack on Locke could easily have been a clandestine way of suggesting that his tutelage of young men was morally as well as intellectually unsavory. Yet once it became clear to Locke that the board was not going to give him a private, individual opportunity to get his job back, he did not hesitate to fight, perhaps realizing that any hesitancy might draw attention to the sense that he might have something to hide. Even so, after he decided to fight his dismissal, Locke modulated his public statements early in the process to avoid becoming more of a target than he already was.
First, Locke canceled his trip to Europe. Without a sense of where his next check was to come from, Locke knew he could not waste any money on a vacation abroad. Second, work on The New Negro became even more important than before. He knew that his only chance for survival, especially if he refused to apply for other teaching work in order to keep the pressure on Howard, was to get the book out as quickly as possible, and use it as a basis for a lecture and speaking tour. Fortunately, that was well underway. Early in July, Reiss began work on the color plates for the book, and Locke obtained prints and etchings from Aaron Douglas. Getting the final manuscripts from his contributors was still a struggle. But the prospects for a late fall publication looked good in early July.
Almost as a relief, Locke elected to travel to Green Acre Baha’i School in Eliot, Maine, to attend the Baha’i Retreat meeting, the Seventeenth Annual Convention and Congress of the Baha’is of the United States and Canada. Taking place on a private estate, this large gathering of the faithful buoyed Locke’s spirits. He spoke on July 5 on “The Dawn of Peace.” Going to the Baha’i conference reinforced the side of Locke that was committed to universalism, to fostering a common ground among diverse peoples, despite the conflicts that divide them. But Locke’s speech also reflected his realism. As he told the multiracial, multicultural, international audience assembled before him, “Today on this earth there are many souls who are the spreaders of peace and reconciliation and are longing for the realization of the oneness and unity of the world of man; but his intention needs a dynamic power so that it may become manifest in the world of being.” That statement was almost an autobiographical transcript. Locke had been a harmonizing force in the arts, in the area of race relations, and in campus relations at Howard. But his dismissal was showing him that in order for a man of peace and reconciliation to prevail, he needed to harness his “dynamic power” to force change on those opposing it, when reconciliation and persuasion were not enough to carry the day. Locke was going to have to become much more of a participant in protest than in the past.
Locke returned from the peaceful universalism of Maine to confront his next step in his response to the dismissal. By late July there was no reply from Brown to his petition for a reconsideration and a personal hearing before the board. President Durkee had been studiously absent from Washington for much of the summer. The board and the president could simply ignore Locke, and eventually the public, even the Black public, would forget about him. If he wanted any chance of getting his job back, he would have to join the alumni clubs, especially Arthur Mitchell’s Washington-based organization, and assist their campaign to remove Durkee from his position. Joining that campaign might not get his job back, but at least he would have the satisfaction of getting back at Durkee, whom Locke had identified as responsible for his dismissal. Locke did not know, it seems, that Durkee was not the main person responsible, but it was easier to focus on one individual, a White father figure, than to attack the entire board. Over the next six months, Locke would marshal all of his resources to undermine Durkee. In his mind, Durkee had fired him; now, he would fire Durkee.
Locke began to work aggressively with Arthur Mitchell to use his dismissal as a key indictment against Durkee. On August 8, Mitchell issued a press release that utilized information provided by Locke to blame Durkee for the turmoil at Howard University. Titled “The Case of the Howard Professors Decapitated by the Durkee Regime,” Mitchell’s press release claimed that “President Durkee worked to coerce heads of departments and deans into recommending the dismissal of certain men … and failing this, he presented the recommendation himself. In reply to their inquiries he informed them, it is alleged, that the immediate superiors of these men recommended that they be dropped, and that these men had been forewarned by complaints of their unsatisfactory work. Investigation shows, however, that these men had never received such complaints; and that on the contrary, some of them have been recently complimented on the efficiency of their work.” This allegation against Durkee’s lying about the consent of the deans derived from Locke’s research and questioning of some of the trustees as to how he was selected to be dismissed. Since the Leonard Report had not identified which instructors ought to be let go in the cost-cutting move, the decision as to whom to fire was a board decision. The charge that “some of them have been recently complimented” was confirmed by Orlando Thornton, who had been praised by Durkee during the preceding semester as one of the most efficient professors on campus. Mitchell concluded: “President Durkee stands adjudged a prevaricator, despotically murdering educators because of some suspicion which may have arisen in his diseased mind. It is known that his mind feeds upon rumors, that almost anything will set him in action, and he acts without investigation.”26
Mitchell’s attack is noteworthy, because he avoided a racial attack on Durkee and instead caricatured him as a lunatic administrator. His publication also exposed that the university had made a public relations mistake by firing Locke. As Mitchell pointed out: “This drastic action becomes more apparent when one considers the type of men dismissed. One is a Rhodes Scholar, the only Negro who has ever attained such an honor; and he is a Doctor of Philosophy of Harvard University. … If a man of such ripe scholarships as that of Dr. Locke cannot teach at Howard University, the administration cannot be endeavoring to run Howard as an institution of learning.” The conclusion Mitchell led his readers to make, especially after he listed other Black scholars who had left the university in recent years because of conflicts with Durkee, was that “Howard was established as a university; to-day it is a political machine. It once had an educator at its head; it now has an elocutionary monstrosity.” When Dean Brown issued a statement backing this “elocutionary monstrosity,” the board’s intransigence enraged the alumni and brought more supporters to Mitchell and his campaign.27
Even as Locke became more publicly involved in the attack on Durkee, he tried to remain in the background, coordinating the effort. Locke avoided the public outspokenness that Du Bois had adopted in his campaign against Fisk. On one level, that would not have made sense as a strategy if he wanted to get his job back. On another level, Locke’s strategy reflected a Machiavellian view of conflict, that the high-mindedness of Howard’s goals could only be realized—as he had stated at the Baha’i conference—by those willing to wield real power and force change.
Despite his reverence for reminding those in struggle to keep their attention on the higher ideals, Locke was a master tactician, a vicious in-fighter, who was willing to use all effective means at his disposal to bring down Durkee and those who had violated him. He saw educational conflict in America as a regime of power; and he believed that such regimes had to be opposed by alternative sources of power. But since he was relatively weak compared to the administration, he approached this conflict from a safe distance from which he could not be hurt. But he was also successfully using skills he had developed as a gay Black man, who often used hidden, secretive relationships, and a network of undercover alliances, to outmaneuver adversaries, apply pressure, and disseminate damaging information.
Locke’s connections with students were particularly important in this regard, because they gave him another flank in his attack on the university. His student connections were particularly important because they were more focused on the reinstatement of their professors than were the alumni. As one student who wrote Locke put it: “The program of the students would be the restoration of our Professors. As to the removal of the President we are leaving to the alumni + others.” Students also wanted to organize “leading business men” from the community to pressure the administration to restore the “school of finance + commerce” that had been the other significant action of the board at its June meeting. Whereas the alumni focused their attack primarily in the newspapers and public forums, the students and recent graduates privately planned acts of disruption in the fall and asked Locke’s advice on strategy and tactics. Current students planned to picket the university, launch a publicity campaign drawing attention to the dismissals, hold mass meetings on campus in September, and communicate their criticisms to Congress, which largely funded Howard. At the same time, students sent representatives to congressional hearings on the budget to advocate for large appropriations for the school, as a way to combat the administration’s “propaganda” in the newspapers that criticism of the administration was part of a campaign to destroy the university. Students led a fundraising campaign and communicated to Locke that many in the Black intelligentsia, such as Carter G. Woodson, A. Philip Randolph, and others had contributed money because they believed his treatment was fundamentally unjust. Students also asked Locke’s advice on how to approach the faculty about a student strike in the fall, as they did not want to be diverted from their main goal—to get him and other faculty reinstated—by faculty resistance to yet another student-led disruption of classes. Rather than being a weakness, Locke’s close relationships with his students were paying dividends. This sense of commitment to serve the larger community of Howard rather than simply their own self-aggrandizement was especially to be praised, from Locke’s perspective, because it was a self-imposed, internally felt “duty” of young men, brought out by their “loyalty” to Locke.28
Yet, in order to be recognized as a leader in the struggle, Locke would have to publicly address those aspects of the Howard situation that went beyond simply his trying to get his job back. Locke was now a public intellectual, who had committed himself to attacking those elements in his community that stood in the way of the development of New Negro consciousness. But in both the Harlem number and especially in “Philistines,” Locke’s harshest criticism had been of Blacks as impediments to the New Negro consciousness. Now, whether he liked it or not, he had lent his name and reputation to a conflict that led directly to criticizing a White power structure in Negro education. In that sense, the Howard struggle had become a testing ground for the New Negro movement. Were the forces of White paternalist control of Negro institutions and Old Negro lackey-ism going to carry the day at Howard and, by implication, at other Negro colleges? Or were the younger generations of Negro students and faculty strong enough to force the modernization of Black education in the 1920s?
Paul Kellogg had provided Locke with a perfect opportunity to address these issues before he was fired. When the Hampton people had contacted Kellogg to complain that they were left out of the Harlem number of the Survey Graphic, Locke and Kellogg had agreed that Locke would do a separate article on Negro education, with which Reiss’s portraits of Moton and Du Bois might be illustrated. As early as March 11, Kellogg began to pepper Locke with requests to get going on the article, but working on The New Negro had kept this article on the back burner. Sensitive to the need to placate the industrial education wing of Negro education, Locke had accepted an invitation to speak at the commencement exercises of Hampton Institute, where he showcased the posture he had hoped to take in the article itself—that of a referee, again—between contending interpretations of Negro education. As reported in the newspapers, his speech was a model of Locke’s role as a harmonizer of values, as he argued that the old divisiveness between collegiate and industrial education for the Negro had passed. In Locke’s words, there was “a vision of common task behind a difference of program.” This was a welcome message at Hampton, which, like Tuskegee, had received a large proportion of White philanthropy because of White feeling that training Negroes in the work of “the hands,” as Locke put it, was most appropriate for a race of former slaves. But Hampton and Tuskegee were also stung by criticism that their educational systems were part of the Old Negro tradition; and to have the messenger of the New Negro anoint their program as part of the “new movement” was gratifying to say the least.
Locke’s tone of harmonious reconciliation between the liberal arts and the vocational wings of Negro higher education showcased in the Hampton speech became less relevant once he was dismissed from Howard. He was now considered a radical. As Locke began to draft his article, “Negro Education Bids for Par,” to appear in the September “Education” issue of the Survey Graphic, his focus and orientation of the article changed. This was to be more of a statement of the philosophy of New Negro education, the second installment in “Enter the New Negro,” than the conciliatory statement of a “referee.”
Locke’s article, “Negro Education Bids for Par,” was a searching philosophical critique of how higher education in America was lived as a racial formation, a travesty of the democratic responsibility to educate citizens equally. “A recent appeal in the Tuskegee-Hampton endowment campaign estimates that the Negroes, constituting about one-tenth of the total population, receive less than 2 per cent of the billion dollars annually spent here for education; and of $875,000,000 spent annually on public schools, only a little more than one per cent is expended for Negroes.”29 For Locke, the battle was another double enterprise that had to be waged on two fronts—to pressure southern and other school districts to equalize funding and facilities in Negro education and view it as a public responsibility, not a private charity; and to develop a philosophy of Negro education that dealt with the reality that most Negro students were educated under segregated conditions “designed to demoralize the Negro at a particularly sensitive time in his personal and racial adolescence.” Locke argued that Negro education had to be transformed to break the grip of deferential servitude perpetuated by “caste” education and fashion a new image of the Negro student as both competent and assertive. Locke wanted to foster for most college-bound Blacks the education for leadership he had received at Central High, Harvard, and Oxford in American Negro institutions of higher education.
Locke argued Negro liberal arts education needed to acknowledge its weaknesses and welcome a radical redefinition of its mission and its leadership. Negro liberal arts institutions had fallen behind Black vocational schools in the task to develop a Black leadership class because they were dominated by a conservative ideology of missionarism that strangled attempts at native leadership. It might seem odd that Locke used the term “missionarism” in an article ostensibly about Howard, which, though founded through the efforts of the American Missionary Association, was never under denominational control. But the missionary spirit still dominated at Howard, he argued, and at most other liberal arts institutions of Negro education, even though the need for post slavery tutelage had lapsed. Now, an outdated educational hegemony in the name of Christianity, fused with a politics of racial conservatism, crippled Negro higher education. Without mentioning Durkee, Locke made the point that White ministers often brought conservative racial and religious notions of education to such colleges. In the end, such minister-headed Black colleges and universities had not only failed to allow their constituents to “develop a modern emancipated spirituality of their own” but also had hampered the emergence of an independent-minded Black leadership class.30
No longer would young Negroes tolerate such paternalistic dictatorship of their educational livelihood, Locke declared. Frustrated by the paternalism White presidents had insinuated into campus policies and curricula, many of the students at Howard, Fisk, Morehouse, Atlanta, Wilberforce, Virginia Union, Johnson Smith, and Lincoln now demanded these colleges be governed by Blacks, even though most students believed their faculties should remain integrated. Locke supported this move. Locke did not want to say that only Black administrators could provide leadership in the current situation, but his article implied that that was probably the best choice. Only in a “family-like” atmosphere could the Negro liberal college begin to renew the spirit of race service that had really energized Negro education in the past and been its main rationale. That idealism was needed to stem the tide of rampant self-aggrandizement and escapism that Negro students, confronted with outdated religious proscriptions and disciplining, increasingly adopted. “If there is anything specially traditional and particularly needed in Negro education, it is the motive and ideal of group service. And though the loss of it in the more capably trained Negro of the present generation is partly due to the influence of the prevalent materialistic individualism of middle-class American life, a still larger loss is due to an inevitable and protective reaction against the present atmosphere of his education.”31
Given that Negro education would remain segregated for the foreseeable future, it “ought to be free to develop its own racial interests and special aims for both positive and compensatory reasons.” Locke’s use of “positive reasons” is significant: once again, he signaled his commitment to Black aspirations that went beyond merely a reaction to racism. One such “positive reason” would be if Negro colleges and universities became centers for the study of race and Black culture. Here Locke had numerous analogies, from the Indian universities that made the study of Sanskrit and ancient Aryan texts their research specialty to Jewish universities that made the study of anti-Semitism and Judaism their special contribution. The Negro college should offer what other American colleges offered, but should also give students a course of study that integrated their desire for self-development with the “historic” ideal of “group service.” A self-consciously New Negro administration would foster a different course of study, but also a different way to develop character in its students, such that students would emerge believing that success consisted of personal advancement and the advancement of the race.
“Negro Education Bids for Par” marked Locke’s first public statement of protest against White domination of Negro life, delivered by a man more comfortable with private attacks on Whites. Here Locke was the most political and the most public he could be about White oppression because, in part, it hurt him personally for the second time in his life. That was the other way “Negro Education” was a watershed in signaling that Locke’s fostering of White recognition for the New Negro movement had created opportunities for African Americans to criticize traditional “Negro” institutions (although as Locke’s article suggested, they were not entirely “Negro” institutions). Mainstream Negroes and Negro institutions increasingly would view that aspect of the New Negro movement with profound ambivalence, since access to White publication gave leverage to rebel Negroes they lacked under traditional print segregation.
The article launched a new career for Locke as an educational philosopher with a lecturing campaign as an authority on Negro education and radicalism in the Black community. He used his new visibility to get paid speaking engagements about the new militancy in Black America. On September 22, he spoke before the National Conference on the Education of Colored Americans under the auspices of the National Sociological Society. His speech was titled “The Philosophical Basis of Education.” He was still identified as Professor Alain Le Roy Locke, but instead of mentioning Howard, the lecture announcement referred to him as the “Winner of Rhodes Scholarship, Oxford University.” Locke extended the critical analysis of his article that self-determination was the only logical philosophy of a separate Negro educational system. On November 10, he was giving a speech on “The Negro and Radicalism”—he identified as “Professor Alain Locke, formerly of Howard University”—at the Public Forum Meetings of the League for Industrial Democracy. No longer a harmonizer, he became a spokesperson for educational nationalism and a regular stump speaker in Washington, D.C., and New York to groups sympathetic to his plight.
Locke probably had not thought he would be giving lectures on education after the publication of the aesthetic Harlem issue of the Survey Graphic. As if to return to his first love, and defend his decision to utilize Reiss in the Survey Graphic and upcoming book anthology, Locke published two articles in the early fall of 1925 that documented the progressive portraiture done by European contemporary artists in Opportunity magazine. The articles, “The Art of Auguste Mambour” and “More of the Negro in Art,” marked a reconciliation of sorts with Charles Johnson, whom Locke needed more urgently after being fired. More important, they engaged the space Locke had created for non-Blacks to contribute to the movement based on Negro themes. The articles advanced the notion that what mattered most was the quality of the work of and about the Negro, not simply that it was by a Negro. That the Europeans were advancing a portraiture superior to that of Americans was clearly evidenced in the stunning portrait of an African woman by Auguste Mambour that graced the cover of the issue in which the first article appeared. Mambour’s study epitomized the contribution of the modern European artist to Black portraiture, for he had developed a portrait style that blended the cubist’s fascination with cylindrical volumes with a soft pointillist shading faces and figures that made the figures appear almost three-dimensional. Although this style of depicting the human form was not exclusive to his Negro studies, it seemed to reach its epitome of emotional power with such subjects, perhaps because his style seemed to have derived from his collecting and studying of African sculpture. The portrait study on the cover synthesized best the twin goals of Mambour’s technique—to render human form in terms of its volumes, and to depict Africans, especially women and children, as objects of beauty. Locke’s article not only praised Mambour, but a whole generation of young European artists, presided over by Lucie Costurier, the godmother of the French African portraiture. It was she, he argued in “More of the Negro in Art,” who had helped free contemporary European painting from the primitivist agenda. A new subject required a new form, and in this case, going outside of Europe for subject matter had opened up a new way of seeing and rendering form for these artists. If American artists, both White and Black, were willing to follow this modern European lead, a new American art lay before them.32
As a racial, sexual, and cultural transgressor—not to mention a Europhile—Locke was open to Whites whose transgressions into non-European culture opened up new possibilities for the Black aesthetic. By bringing examples of this new, invigorating European portraiture of the Negro to Opportunity, Locke was nimbly continuing to suggest that race was not the main reason for the limitations of Negro portraiture—it was the American approach to race that was the problem. Such an argument, when seen alongside his call for self-determination in Black education, opened Locke up to the charge of contradiction. How could he demand that Black institutions be headed by Black leaders, and yet welcome a White artist to illustrate a book that represented the aspirations of the Negro? Similarly, how could he eschew protest in the formulation of his New Negro philosophy only to embrace it in his campaign to get his job back at Howard? Despite his empowering nurture in White and European institutions, Locke knew that Howard did not empower the self-concept of Negroes, largely because its system of education was designed to contain Black assertiveness. When that system became abusive, protest—measured, reasoned, but impassioned—was legitimate. But just as important, when Whites made a bold attempt to break out of the paternalism and denigration of Negroes, Blacks should applaud the effort. That did not sit well with some essentialists whose dreams of self-determination allowed little room for the racial or sexual outsider. What saved Locke’s argument—especially among those with no exposure to French or German artists—was the personal example of Reiss.
In the months following the publication of the Survey Graphic, Reiss had accepted criticism of his work graciously, had done numerous covers and broadsides for Black magazines and social events for very low fees, and had welcomed African American artists and intellectuals into his studio which, by the fall of 1925, had become an art crossroads for African American, Asian, and Mexican artists and their friends. Reiss crossed cultural lines without carrying with him the baggage of racial paternalism, while being personally open to the leadership of African Americans like Locke. As Reiss wrote to him after The New Negro was published, “I have to tell you again how much I liked to work with you and I only wish that we will have once an occasion in which we can prove just to all our ideals regardless of commercial people. It would make me very happy if my effort in helping your noble work would really be a small seed in the vast land that still has to be ploughed. Do not forget that you can always find me ready if you need help in your idealistic undertakings.”33
Locke’s idealistic coupling of Black leadership and interracial collaboration broke new ground. In aesthetic and educational politics, what mattered was less the color of one’s skin than whether supporters were willing to allow Black intelligence to lead. While Locke asserted that race warped some Whites in his article on education—and those had to be opposed and removed where possible—his articles on European artists showed he understood that was not true of all. The New Negro had the self-confidence to be a “race man” and assert his or her right to head those institutions that catered predominantly to the race. But in one of the caveats that defined his intellectual career, Locke also asserted that race, while necessary, was not sufficient to determine allies and enemies. Working with Whites was as much a necessity for the New Negro as being able and willing to work alone. Now, for the first time in his adult life, he was really alone. He would be tested, like the New Negro he had declared newly born, to see if he could become an independent man.