An indelible scene defined Locke’s life that fall of 1925. When Eric Walrond trudged up the three flights of stairs that led to the apartment on 144th Street in Harlem where Locke was living, finishing edits of materials for The New Negro: An Interpretation, he found a cheery Locke in a Victorian armchair, dozens of manuscripts sprawled on the low coffee table in front of him—reputedly with his feet in a tub of hot water beneath him. By October, unlike Washington, D.C., it was already cold in New York. Locke was huddled under a shawl but happy, as he was in Harlem to be closer to the writers whose contribution he sought for the anthology. While being fired might have made others forlorn, Locke appeared ebullient and full of energy. He waved Walrond over to the sideboard to pour the two of them small glasses of wine. Walrond was nervous because he was bringing his latest draft of “The Palm Porch,” which Locke had requested for The New Negro but had forced him to revise repeatedly. Walrond hoped that Locke would accept this version and an additional short story by a gay friend of his. Walrond knew that Locke wanted to include writings from as many of the young Black gay community in Harlem; but he also knew that Locke demanded that that writing had to be the best. After about an hour filled with discussion about the writing, but also probably gossip about Jessie Fauset’s demand that she be included in The New Negro, or rumors that Countee Cullen was considering marrying Yolanda Du Bois, Locke abruptly informed Walrond that he had another appointment.
Given that Walrond had written the most critical review of Fauset’s There Is Confusion, he probably sided with Locke in the nastiest controversy of his editing of the anthology that had ensued that spring when Locke commissioned Arthur Fauset to contribute to the volume. Jessie informed Du Bois that she had not been asked to contribute to a book all of Black literary New York suspected would be a blockbuster. When Locke walked into the Crisis offices to pick up its editor’s contribution to the book, Du Bois informed Locke that he would not participate in The New Negro unless Fauset was included. Unwilling to risk leaving out Du Bois, Locke agreed, but seethed at the imposition on his authority. That tense meeting reminded Locke of an earlier visit to Du Bois to get his article for the Harlem number. Locke recalled that on that occasion Du Bois tossed a group of essays at Locke to edit into a single essay for his contribution. Now that Locke’s interpretation of the New Negro had become a success, Du Bois was using his clout to force Fauset’s inclusion, yet another example from Locke’s perspective of how Du Bois treated him condescendingly. Locke probably also believed that Du Bois’s demand that Jessie be included was less a matter of critical judgment and more a need to placate his long-standing mistress. The most influential Black homosexual of the 1920s had to yield to the most influential Black heterosexist of the decade—and Locke did not like it. Tragically, Fauset’s role in a movement she had helped start was by 1925 relegated to a conflict between two men.
When Jessie Fauset turned in her submission, “The Gift of Laughter,” that summer, Locke waited until her summer idyll with Du Bois was concluded and then sent back her manuscript with an acerbic letter. “The ‘Gift of Laughter’ arrived and almost brought tears,” he began. Surely, he asked, could she not see the genius in the work of such Black comedians as Bert Williams, whose mastery of pantomime, gesture, and body movement stood at the cutting edge of the modern theater? “Even DuBois—and I use ‘even’ because it is only his outward reputation, not his inner soul, that is regarded as ‘stiff’—has written persuasively of the genius of black vaudeville. I shall never forget my first experience of seeing Bert Williams dance, and the ecstasy I experienced, and I consider myself an expert on European dance. Moreover, can’t you see that humor has been a kind of saving grace for the Negro, and not simply a performance for whites?” Jessie, Locke was implying, was stiff, and typical of the Black bourgeoisie who condemned Black musical comedies for their performance of the laughing stereotype. Locke wanted a volume that celebrated the genius of Negro performance culture, even within its limitations, not a putdown of that culture by a Black Victorian. He was also aghast at her using her essay to critique Reiss. “I must object to your criticism of the Reiss portraits, but not over their substance. All of us have our opinions. But to publish such criticisms in a book for which Reiss’s work provides the principal illustrations would be in terribly bad taste. Moreover, the point has no relation to the essay at hand. So let’s just drop that, shall we, and reserve it for the review of the book.” Interestingly, Jessie Fauset’s objections did not extend to Reiss personally, since she appeared at parties he hosted in Greenwich Village.1
Locke’s perspective is best apprehended in the foreword to The New Negro that he penned around the same time. “Of all the voluminous literature on the Negro … nine-tenths of it is about the Negro rather than of him, so that it is the Negro problem rather than the Negro that is known.” To see “the Negro in his essential traits, in the full perspective of his achievement and possibilities,” Locke continued, required the analyst to “seek the enlightenment of that self-portraiture which the present developments of Negro culture are offering.” Locke wanted Fauset to trace out the agency of “self-portraiture” that allowed even oppressed and overdetermined Black actors—and by inference any artist—to snatch bits and pieces of “self-expression from the jaws of unsympathetic patrons.” Williams no less than Michelangelo had inscribed his genius within a traditional form that otherwise was banal. In that sense, Locke’s struggle in The New Negro was to portray Negro art not as a concession to White power but as the struggle for self-determination through self-expression. “Without ignoring … that there are important interactions between the national and the race life, or that the attitude of America toward the Negro is as important a factor as the attitude of the Negro toward America, we have nevertheless concentrated upon self-expression and the forces and motives of self-determination.” Locke appropriated self-determination, a rhetoric of national autonomy popularized by Woodrow Wilson, as well as Vladimir Lenin, as a rhetoric of individual and collective subjectivity for Negroes—and by implication all peoples. Bert Williams had the choice not to act; but if he did, he bore the responsibility to inscribe something of himself and his people’s genius in his performance. And the responsibility of the New Negro cultural historian was to see the subjectivity, the individual self-determination, even in otherwise compromised performances that transcended, if only in a gesture, victimization. Not only did Locke want to transform how Whites looked at Negroes in the mass and as individuals but also how Black people viewed themselves. By insisting that being Negro did contribute to how the Black people, whether actor or artist or mechanic, saw themselves, Locke wanted Black researchers in The New Negro to investigate Black culture as a struggle for freedom, even through caricatured humor.
Once Locke read William Stanley Braithwaite’s essay “The Negro in American Literature” and realized it made a similar point to Fauset’s—that White authors had turned “the happy, care-free, humorous Negro” into “a fad”—Locke worried his book was becoming more an indictment of White misrepresentation than a statement of Black self-expression—the latter theme being the one that distinguished his book from other chronicles.2 Tellingly, Locke would publish Braithwaite’s essay almost as is, whereas he would not accept a similar argument from Fauset.
Nevertheless, Locke’s editorial pressure seemed to pay off. Although earlier drafts of Jessie Fauset’s essay have not survived to prove the point, it appears that the story of Black artistic agency surfaces in the published version of “The Gift of Laughter” in the book. “No matter how keenly he [the Negro] felt the insincerity of the presentation of his kind,” she noted, “no matter how ridiculous and palpable a caricature such a presentation might be, the Negro auditor … was powerless to demand something better and truer. … It was at this point in the eighteen-nineties that Ernest Hogan, pioneer comedian of the better type, changed the tradition of the merely funny, rather silly ‘end-man’ into a character with a definite plot in a rather loosely constructed but none the less well-outlined story. The method was still humorous, but less broadly, less exclusively.”3 Her essay was a more powerful statement of Black performativity than Montgomery Gregory’s rather lackluster contribution, “The Drama of Negro Life,” which merely restated the goals of the Howard University theater movement. Locke was achieving something distinctive after all—a book whose essays made visible how Blacks had assimilated even demeaning practices and revolutionized them to express something new through the mask of Negro laughter. Locke was applying what he had learned a year ago from Max Reinhardt—to focus on the genius of Black invention at the level of form as the basis for a new view of America; and where possible, as in his editing of the Survey Graphic, he forced contributors to advance his “interpretation” in their essays in The New Negro.
The Fauset incident highlights, though, the problem Locke faced in using a book anthology to advance the concept of the New Negro. Once the Harlem issue had exploded in popularity, everyone with a literary bent or Negro program wanted to be in the book. Feeling that he had to be representative of the collective progressive intelligence in the anthology, he yielded somewhat to the pressure to be inclusive, rather than exclusive. He could have dropped Du Bois’s essay and thus saved himself from having to include Fauset’s—although hers ended up being one of the better submissions to the book. Locke should have rejected other work, such as Albert Barnes’s embarrassing “The Negro and Art” and Robert Moton’s lifeless recapitulation of Hampton Institute’s virtues. But Locke couldn’t bring himself to do that. Locke was without a job. To antagonize potential allies—especially patrons and potential employers—was too risky. Plus, there were practical considerations. Including Barnes gave Locke access to the Barnes Foundation photographs of African art, while the Hampton essay allowed him to reproduce the stunning Reiss portrait of Moton in the volume. As time went on, the book ballooned toward a catalog. Locke knew that major Negroes would never forgive him if he excluded one of them from something as big as The New Negro promised to be. He couldn’t afford their ire.
Despite its compromises, Locke found work on the book invigorating. No longer having his Howard post increased his investment in The New Negro as his book, even if he had to make concessions to ensure its success. Indeed, he spent his time in his Harlem garret shaping the book form along the lines Kellogg had shown him in work on the Survey Graphic, that of putting a variety of media—essays, photographs, broadsides—side by side in conversation with one another. The anthology strove to be even more multimedia than the Survey Graphic issue. Drawings by Winold Reiss, Aaron Douglas, and Miguel Covarrubias combined with photographs of African sculpture from the Barnes and other collections to make it a striking and unique volume in American literature. It was a graphic book. He also included a play, commentaries on African American music, and essays on Black institutions and local culture. The range in content was matched by more expansive claims about the “movement”: New Negro artists were now to be found throughout the nation. As Locke wrote in the foreword:
Enlarging this stage we are now presenting the New Negro in a national and even international scope. Although there are few centers that can be pointed out approximating Harlem’s significance, the full significance of that even is a racial awakening on a national and perhaps even a world stage.4
Locke’s enthusiasm and confidence is all the more remarkable when one remembers that Locke was compiling the book while he continued his struggle to regain his job at Howard. Locke’s reverie of work on the book was interrupted by demands he be present in Washington to participate in strategy sessions as the leader of the group of professors fired by the board of trustees. The fight for his job, as he confided to Kellogg that fall, kept his life in turmoil.
Buoying his hopes of eventual return to Howard was an increasing army of activists who sought him out to assist them in their campaigns against the board. One of the most effective was George Parker, a Howard alumnus, who wrote Charles R. Brown, dean of the School of Divinity at Yale in September 1925, to ask whether the board of trustees had met or planned to meet before its next regularly scheduled meeting in February to deal with the turmoil at Howard. Parker’s letter, a copy of which had been sent to Locke for his comments, was designed to trap Brown into declaring what action the board was planning to take to resolve the various controversies, and when Brown wrote back that no meeting had been held since June, Parker published the correspondence and suggested that the refusal to schedule a meeting before February showed that the board “evidently considers Negroes too ignorant to effect any serious trouble. Any agitation started, the Board seemingly thinks, can be easily stopped by the mere statement that the future existence of Howard is threaten[ed]. But if it [Howard] ceases to serve well the function for which it is entended[sic], we no longer need her and, therefore, do not want her. She is dedicated to a service from which she can not shirk and retain the support of the masses.”5
In fact, the administration’s propaganda campaign in Black newspapers was effective in convincing many African Americans that continued protest would destroy the university. White opponents of Congressional Appropriations for Howard were already issuing demands that the funding be held up until a full investigation could be completed, a threat that might close the institution. This argument found sympathetic ears not only among such African American educators as Dr. J. E. Shepard, the president of North Carolina College for Negroes (later North Carolina A&T) but also the militant New York Age, which in September was still not persuaded by the alumni’s arguments against the Durkee administration. The Age conceded that the one thing that still needed to be explained by the administration was “the abrupt dismissal of four of its ablest and most efficient professors.”
But the board refused to act. The Howard Alumni Association of St. Louis opened a new line of attack in October when it formed a “Committee to Investigate Conditions at Howard,” chaired by L. S. Curtis, one of Locke’s former students. That committee wrote Durkee demanding an explanation of his role in the dismissals. Realizing, belatedly, that his position as president was endangered by the continuing response to the dismissals, Durkee claimed that he was not responsible for them. Curtis forwarded the correspondence to Locke for his review and comment. Locke replied: “I am enclosing an official answer to your inquiries … which … you can use or follow as your judgment seems best. Dr. Durkee’s avoidance of the responsibility for this action plays ultimately into our hands. How would the Budget and Executive Committee know whom to pick. I have the word of two members of that Committee that they acted only upon the President’s recommendation, and one made inquiries as to whether we had had any intimation that our work was unsatisfactory, to which affirmative answer was given. This is contrary to fact in three of the four instances.”6 Locke worked with Curtis on how to frame the attack. Psychologically and politically, it was best that Durkee be the target of the attack about dismissals, since, as Locke revealed to Kellogg later on, “we really hope to remove the President whereas Boards of Trustees go on forever.”7 As Durkee probably realized too late, the board had set him up to take the fall, if somehow the attempt to remove the professors backfired.
Locke continued to press his case with his allies, such as Roscoe Conkling Bruce, to whom he suggested Durkee deliberately attacked Harvard men. “I think it will be effective to point out that one Harvard man after another has been allowed to leave the University, in fact urged to leave. There has been a break with the administration in every instance—Houston, Woodson, Gregory, Waring and Locke.”8 He also contacted Franz Boas, who wrote a letter to Professor A. O. Leuschner, president of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), asking him to investigate the dismissals as violations of academic freedom. In Boas’s letter, he noted that he had obtained his information “from the personal statement of one of the gentlemen concerned.”9 Action on the request was slow to materialize, in part because Leuschner was in Europe all fall.
That the administration stuck to its story that the dismissals were not based on teacher conduct or performance but on economic strictures kept Locke and other critics from being able to charge the administration with bias. Too strong an attack on Howard might damage Locke’s chances of returning to alternative schools, should he not get his Howard job back. Psychologically and philosophically, Locke also had an aversion to being a firebrand. Thus, in all of his correspondence with the board and the public, Locke maintained that cultured demeanor his mother and her class had taught him should be maintained at all times in public, regardless of circumstances. It worked on one level: Brown replied to one of Locke’s letters, for example, and thanked him for how cordial he had been. But the strategy cost Locke in that it kept him from releasing his anger and hurt, and the long-standing sense of shame and rejection he carried with him from his childhood, with anyone. Instead, he poured that anger into strategies behind the scenes designed to bring down the university.
Work on The New Negro, however, balanced Locke. There was the enticement of new poetry coming in, such as Lewis Alexander’s haiku, “Enchantment.” There was the strong short fiction, “Spunk,” by Zora Neale Hurston, which had been awarded second prize in the Opportunity contest he had presided over, and which he was publishing for the first time in The New Negro. He already sensed that her work promised great things, because it linked so powerfully with another theme of the book: the folk inheritance. Here Arthur Fauset’s “American Negro Folk Literature,” but even more his collected stories “T’appin” and “Brer Buzzard” from interviews with Cugo Lewis, reputedly an African who had been brought to American in 1859, nailed Locke’s point that the New Negro was part of a hidden cultural tradition in the folk heritage of Negroes. It also reinforced the narrative that the solution to the problem of the Black middle-class intellectual was to undertake an archaeological mission into the soul of his or her race, there to find a new vein of artistry and a new crop of artists who thought folk were nevertheless fine. This work made The New Negro a significant step forward in Black self-consciousness, far ahead of what he had achieved in the Harlem number.
But the delay in publication worried Locke, as he knew that every month that slipped by made it possible for another “mid-wife” to step forward and possibly steal his thunder. Always competitive, Locke realized that others were beginning to enter the field with statements that rivaled his own. In the Los Angeles Times, Du Bois had penned an article titled “A Negro Art Renaissance” that had appeared in June, lauding the work of Roland Hayes under a title that reminded Locke and a few other insiders that Du Bois had been the first to announce that a renaissance of Negro letters was on the horizon.10 Locke knew from his contacts that V. F. Calverton’s Modern Quarterly was slated to publish the Crisis editor’s article, “The Social Origins of American Negro Art.” Behind the curve of the burgeoning Negro art movement for some time, Du Bois was catching up. There were rumors as well that Charles Johnson was planning another special edition, or even a book on the movement he had created, but so far had not been adequately credited for. By October, Locke not only felt the heat of competitors on his back but also the increasing demand to be in Washington to coordinate with those leading the battle against the administration. Faced with this split personality, Locke spent more time—and more of his increasingly dwindling bank account—on the train.
Yet Locke had no alternative but to commit all of his creative resources to designing a cutting-edge anthology that in form and content would best its Negro competitors and set a new standard for American creative writing. The breakthrough quality of The New Negro: An Interpretation becomes apparent when compared to that other landmark 1920s literary anthology, Harold Stearns’s Civilization in the United States (1922). There, Stearns was content to let experts comment on an American culture, but did not include contemporary imaginative literature speaking directly to the reader. By contrast, Locke designed his anthology to provide cogent, authoritative analysis, but also excerpts from the most arresting literature of the day—for example, “Carma” and “Fern” from Jean Toomer’s Cane, excerpts of unimpeachable beauty that otherwise had been read by very few readers of the original publication. By varying fiction, poetry, essays, and broadsides of such historical milestones as Jupiter Hammon’s “Address to the Negroes” and Madison Washington’s slave narrative, Locke created a rhythm of interest that avoided tiring the reader. And all of that was held together by Reiss’s artwork, not only the spectacular first-time publication of color photographs of portraits in an American book of literature but also his design signature throughout, on and inside the cover, such that the volume became as much a work of art as a commentary on the possibilities of art for group expression in America.
When The New Negro appeared in December 1925, it too benefited from excellent timing. It burst into American consciousness in the middle of the vogue of the Negro, just as urban Whites, breaking out of Victorian bounds in the roaring twenties were open to a new definition of what it meant to be urban in America. Unlike James Weldon Johnson’s moribund Book of American Negro Poetry published just three years earlier, Locke could write as if the Black literary movement had entered advanced stages of development and launched a new identity, the New Negro, whose implications were broader and ran deeper than simply a new kind of literature on the American horizon. The term “New Negro” branded the new movement in a way that “book of American poetry” never would, for it suggested that new identity, a new way of being American, had emerged at the height of the Jazz Age, an alternative to the White-bread middle-class American who was not only Negro but a stylish originator of jazz, urbanity, and the poetry of modern life.
Plus, critical response to The New Negro: An Interpretation was also favorable. The New York Times Book Review saw it as “a book of surprises. No matter how well informed the reader, he will find here facts that he has not known about the progress of the Negro in America.”11 H. L. Mencken believed the book was evidence of “the American Negro’s final emancipation from his inferiority complex, his bold decision to go it alone. … The Negroes who contribute to this dignified and impressive volume have very little to say about their race’s wrongs: their attention is all upon its merits. They show no sign of being sorry that they are Negroes. For the first time one hears clearly the imposing doctrine that, in more than one way, the Negro is superior to the white man.”12
The striking color portraits by Reiss made that argument more persuasively than anything else in the volume. The writing in The New Negro almost became one long caption to the photographs of a new kind of American. Reiss painted striking brown faces and hands of his sitters while leaving their clothing white, as signifying how Black people who were proud of who they were and wore White culture as little more than a suit of clothes. Here were portraits of Black moderns, not primitives, who flourished in their vital aliveness, especially two—the portrait of Robert Moton, which showed he was a man with style, movement, and swagger altogether absent from thumbnail biographical sketches of him, and the portrait of Charles Johnson, leaning to the side, a brother maneuvering his way through life, despite having to negotiate with White power. There was consistent performativity to the Reiss portraits in The New Negro, which Locke sorted through the volume as single eruptions of color that broke the anthology into a series of visual wonders. While Locke dropped some of the Survey Graphic portraits Reiss had drawn of those from the streets of Harlem, he retained the most controversial portrait, “Two Public Schoolteachers,” in The New Negro, thumbing his nose at its critics.13 Its inclusion along with others of dark-skinned African Americans made a powerful visual statement. The New Negro decentered Whiteness by showing how Black people had absorbed all that America had thrown at them and become something more complex and interesting because of it.14
The book was also a paean to a new Black masculinity. The portraits were overwhelmingly of Black men and not Black women, in contrast to the Crisis, which featured photographs of Black women prominently. In The New Negro, while there were significant portraits of Black women, especially the hauntingly beautiful portrait of Elise Johnson McDougald, these were mainly interruptions to a narratology of Black male bodies that formed the homoerotic message of the book. The frontispiece, Brown Madonna, Locke’s silent homage to his mother that opens the book, made the case even more powerfully: as in the Italian Renaissance paintings, the only way for women to enter the renaissance was as the mother of Christ, in this case, a Brown Madonna with a Brown baby put in this Black woman’s arms by Reiss. The New Negro was always male in Locke’s imaginary—the “changeling in their laps,” in the lap of a Brown mother whose role was to birth and nurture but not epitomize the New Negro. The portraits reveal as well that other shift in emphasis from the Survey Graphic to The New Negro—a shift from the masses as the bearers and transformers of American culture to the homoerotic educated artists as the quintessential New Negroes of the American century. The deletion of the portraits from later editions of The New Negro to save production costs removes this essential component of Locke’s innovation in volume.
The portraits also complicated the notion of race, for looking at them confused the reader as to who and what was Negro. While most of the artists, such as Paul Robeson, were dark-skinned men dressed in whited-out suits, others, such as Jean Toomer, appeared to be White, dressed in a black suit, with a ghost-like shroud seemingly pulsating around his body. Reproduced here as well was “Type Sketch: Ancestral,” a portrait of an unnamed woman who looked more East Indian than Negro American, and whose draped body was posed against a background pattern more Native American than African. While Aaron Douglas’s woodcut nicely suggested that a vibrant musical, dance, and religious culture anchored African American identity, Miguel Covarrubias’s caricatures of contemporary urban Black culture offered a more ironic interpretation. That Locke added his to The New Negro’s growing list of illustrations showed his willingness to risk further Black bourgeois condemnation in his pursuit of modernism, since Covarrubias’s drawings were more scandalous than anything else in the book. Moreover, by including the work of a Mexican artist, Locke acknowledged not only the Mexican Renaissance but also reinforced the message that the American Negro possessed a multicultural inheritance. In that sense, Locke said that Covarrubias was also a New Negro.
The book was especially invigorating for young Negro thinkers and writers, who found inspiration in its pages. Decades later, Doxey Wilkerson, who would become a young communist in the 1930s, recalled the effect that reading The New Negro in the 1920s had on him. “The first thing I wrote for the University of Kansas newspaper, WAD I think was the newspaper’s name, was a review of The New Negro. The book opened my eyes—excited me. [It showed] black folk doing things both in art and in terms of radicalism that I didn’t know about.”15 It was not how the writing compared with that by Sinclair Lewis, for example, but that Negroes were writing poetry, fiction, and belles-lettres at all during the height of the Jim Crow era. The New Negro thus announced something that went beyond literature—that the Negro was capable to doing a number of spectacular things that most whites believed were impossible. The book thus expanded the range of the possible even for those who never contemplated picking up a pen to write a poem or a song.
But Locke scarcely had time to enjoy the publication or gauge its impact, because just as it was published he was informed that he was due back at Howard University on December 10 for a meeting that promised to determine whether he would get his job back. Earlier, in October, Locke and his allies had discovered a chink in the board of trustees’ armor. Technically, the dismissals were not final, because the budget committee had inadvertently violated Howard’s charter in its rush to get rid of the professors. “The Charter invests the power of employment and dismissal of teachers with the Board as such, the action of June 16th by a committee of said body can reasonably be regarded as not final, but as subject to either review and reconsideration or ratification.” Without published minutes of the June 7 meeting to document that the entire board had voted to approve the budget committee recommendation, another meeting would be required for the entire board to certify the committee’s recommendations.16 Late in October, Locke was able to reach some of the trustees and pressure the board to consider the petitions for a reconsideration of the decision—and a vote publicly authorizing the budget committee’s recommendation. The first to author and sign a letter requesting a meeting by the board were AME bishop John Hurst and Judge Stanton J. Peelle. Hurst left it up to Locke to try and obtain signatures from as many of the board members who lived in Washington, D.C., as possible before sending it off to Brown. Race was a part of the effort. As Hurst wrote to Locke: “I trust that you will try especially, to get Dr. Pierce and Thomas Jesse Jones (though he does not live there) also, to sign it. What I have in mind is, that the more of the white members we have to sign it, the less adverse criticism the movement will receive.”17 Ironically, even Black members of the board of trustees of a Negro university needed the support of White members to legitimate the “movement” to have the decision reconsidered by the full board.
The process had dragged through November, as Hurst sought but failed to get Jones’s signature on the letter.18 Eventually, the letter signed by five trustees—Justice Stanton J. Peelle, Dr. U. G. B. Pierce, Dr. C. Sumner Wormley, Gen. John H. Sherburne, and Bishop Hurst—forced Brown to hold “A Special Meeting of the Board of Trustees of Howard University” to consider the Alumni Association charges against Durkee and to officially vote on the recommendations of the budget and executive committees. When Emmett Scott informed Locke that such a meeting would be held on December 10, 1925, he did not specify whether Locke would be asked to speak. When he asked, a testy Scott informed him that it would be wise to make himself available in case he was asked to speak, but that Charles Brown had not issued any special invitation.
So pivotal was this upcoming presentation that Locke turned all of his attention toward preparing for his rendezvous with Howard’s oligarchy rather than promoting his new book. He had to prepare himself emotionally to keep his feelings under wrap, while at the same time expressing forthrightly his indignation at the high-handed procedure of his dismissal. Accordingly, at 9 a.m. on a cold Thursday morning, as board members Charles Brown, Sara W. Brown, Role Cobleigh, Victor B. Deyber, Durkee, Albert Bushnell Hart (who directed Du Bois’s PhD dissertation at Harvard), John R. Eawkins, M. O. Dumas, Thomas Jesse Jones (the man behind the Fisk University crisis), Moorland, James C. Napier, C. H. Pope, M. F. Wheatland, Peelle, Pierce, Sherburne, Wormley, and Scott filed into Library Hall, Locke and three other dismissed professors stood outside of Carnegie Library waiting to find out if they would be asked to speak. It was a considerable wait, because the first order of business was for the board members present to hear the eight charges brought by the Alumni Association against Durkee.19
Locke later characterized the meeting as a “court martial” affair, and it certainly was in terms of how the board and the Alumni Association approached it. Benton Booth, dean of the law school, was the presiding judge, and there were attorneys representing the board and the Alumni Association, with a stenographer and witnesses.20 Moreover, the defendants’ presentation was meticulously planned by Thomas Dyett and others, who prepared the case, the witnesses, and the questions they would pose. The critics of the authority in charge did not have an opportunity to cross-examine Durkee, who had to sit through a meeting listening to a litany of criticisms of his presidency.
On one level, this was a performance, since nothing the alumni or professors said would result in a vote of no confidence in Durkee by the trustees. By allowing such a “performance,” the board reassured Congress, White philanthropists, and their allies not only that Negro education was democratic but also that that education would never succeed in an attack on White control itself. But the board meeting was more than just a show for Whites: the board was multiracial and divided, because some of its Black members, except Moorland, felt that the treatment of Locke and the others had been unfair. Perhaps their earlier acquiescence to the dismissals had been purchased by assurances from Durkee that the professors’ superiors had been consulted and had agreed with the decision. Now, however, the board had to deal with the mess that Moorland’s maneuver had created for them—a litany of alumni charges against Durkee, mounting alumni agitation in Congress to hold up Howard’s annual appropriation pending an investigation into the board’s actions, building sentiment in the Black press that Durkee must go, and a clear belief among many that Locke and his colleagues had been dealt a dirty deal. The common front on the board was threatening to crack.
Dyett and his assistants brought forth professors, whose testimony matched the charges in the alumni memorandum and substantiated their claims against Durkee. Kelly Miller testified to being insulted by Durkee who called him a “contemptible cur,” to agreeing not to discuss the incident publicly, and then to seeing Durkee’s denials of the insult printed in Black newspapers. This suggested that Durkee was not only abusive, but a liar. Another witness, Turner, testified that Durkee grabbed him and physically pushed him violently out of his office during one of their conferences. Turner stated that only his concern that a suit against the president would hurt the university had kept him from seeking legal redress. In total, forty-five professors testified during the course of the inquiry, with Locke, Lochard, and Brown most likely being the last to be called.
Locke was the first of the fired professors to testify, coming before the board of trustees arrayed before him like a scene out of Jean Genet’s play The Blacks.21 In front and above him sat a group of men in masks—whether Black or White—men who claimed their only concern was the best interests of the university, who were in fact concerned now mainly with their own survival. Sitting in chairs upon on the stage from which ten years earlier he had given the first installment of lectures on imperialist race theory and practice in America, they were colonized subjects, overlords of Negro education fighting to keep control of a dying oligarchy. Instead of fighting for the right to teach race on campus, Locke was now performing in a farce—a reputed just proceeding to determine whether his dismissal was appropriate, even though he and the men arrayed above him knew nothing he said would reinstate him.
He must have been highly nervous, especially after spending most the morning outside wondering whether he would speak at all. Now, inside, he knew success would depend on his ability to be forthright but also dispassionate in his testimony. If he could remain controlled but persistent in questioning why he was selected for dismissal, he would find the path that would work best for him. He needed to keep the onus on the board to explain why he was let go.
Probably, Locke began with his surprise that after thirteen years of exemplary service to Howard University, he was let go so summarily. Since he could find no other evidence that he was unfit as a teacher, he was left to wonder whether his firing had anything to do with his previous conflicts with Durkee. Even this, he would have stated, was surprising, as he had copies of letters from Durkee in which he referred to Locke in very flattering language when Durkee promoted him to full professor, when he approved his leave of absences, and when he praised Locke for launching a research and teaching program for Howard faculty and students in Africa. This did not sound like the language of someone who believed that such a professor was inefficient or that his services could be severed from the university without unduly hurting its mission. Locke would also have reported that when he confronted Durkee in June about rumors of his dismissal, the president asserted they were unfounded. Here, Locke would have injected his concern with procedure, that after thirteen years of service, he deserved more advance notice of his impending dismissal, more specific charges of misconduct or inefficiency, and more of an opportunity to respond to either issue than the June decision to fire him had allowed. Probably, Locke would have concluded that if he had been notified earlier that the university did not value his services, he would have responded differently to the offer of a deanship and vice presidency of Wilberforce University.22
After Locke, Metz T. P. Lochard, former professor of French, and Alonzo H. Brown, former professor of Mathematics, had spoken, the board met in “Executive Session.” Not surprisingly, it resolved that the charges against Durkee had not been proved and “ratified the action of the Executive Committee and the Budget Committee … in the matter of the discontinuance of certain teachers on June 15, 1925 as carrying out” the directions of the board of trustees in the matter of elimination, and contractions in conformity with the reorganization program of the university, as adopted June 2, 1925. But in what amounted to an admission to the unfairness of dismissing the professors on such short notice, the board stated in language that was as arcane as it was transparent:
That, inasmuch as the Executive Committee and the Budget Committee had no instructions extending beyond the action that they took with reference to the separation of certain professors on account of the consolidations and reductions incident to the reorganization program of the University, the Trustees hereby grant leave of absence to the following four persons, beginning July 1, 1925, for one year, full salaries to be paid at the same time and on the same terms as the regular academic salaries last received by them: Alain L. Locke, Alonzo H. Brown, Metz T. P. Lochard, and Orlando C. Thornton, Instructor in Finance and Business Organization. At the end of the year, June 20, 1926, all connections of these persons with the University shall cease.23
Locke’s campaign had paid off, at least financially. It must have been particularly gratifying in that his action had also benefited the other professors dismissed, even Orlando C. Thornton, who had been a critic of the student strike and had refused to appear with the others at the board meeting. The question that remained was whether to take the money. Upon writing to Kellogg for advice, Locke stated that he did not want to do so if it appeared to absolve the board of any further responsibility for his dismissal. As one of Locke’s colleagues put it, the offer of a year’s salary was little more than hush money. But as Kellogg suggested, it made sense for Locke to take the money if it would not commit him to sign any such affidavit handing over his rights to continue the struggle against the administration. Caught between the need for the money and his principles, Locke almost cracked up, writing to Kellogg that he was emotionally exhausted from the “nervous strain,” as he described it, of the whole proceeding. Eventually, Locke took the money.24
Returning to New York, Locke could once again settle in to managing the distribution and reception of his magnum opus, The New Negro. By early January, the most significant reviews of the book were in. Not surprisingly, most reviewers read the book in terms of their preconceived ideas about what was best for the Negro. Mary White Ovington, board member of the NAACP, believed the book was proof that the Negro was assimilating American values and lifestyle. “What is the New Negro? Read and see. You will find him, perhaps to your disappointment, very like his white neighbor.”25 But Black opinion on the issue was sharply divided. Whereas the Pittsburgh Courier alluded to the positive impact of The New Negro and Negro culture on Negro American self-esteem, the Messenger criticized the notion that Negro culture as such even existed. From a Black socialist perspective, Black people were merely “a product of machine civilization, just like the other people in the same environment,” with “Negro literature” being a hoax perpetrated by the “two or three literary dictators of Aframerica.”26 Some White reviewers voiced similar reservations about the “New Negro” movement and were skeptical about how good the work was, how much of a “renaissance” the work constituted. According to Ernest Boyd of the Independent, “In ‘The New Negro’ are all the features to which, I, as a specialist in oppressed races, am accustomed. Every goose is a swan, and extravagant efforts are made to provide a tradition and prove America’s indebtedness to it. … But these records do not prove that there is a Beethoven or … a Leonardo da Vinci hiding in Harlem from illiterate Ku-Kluxers.”27 Before this, no one had known that Boyd was such a “specialist.”
In a letter to Paul Kellogg, Locke responded to Boyd and other critics by challenging their shared notion that the movement needed to be “ ‘taken down’ an inch or two. Actually I think for what we are trying to put over, a certain self-assurance is necessary. The point I make about it is that it is self-confidence rather than exhibitionism. … Take Boyd’s quibble for instance. He says he doesn’t see that we have discovered a Negro Leonardo da Vinci in Harlem. The best the Irish Renaissance could do was an E.A., a William Butler Yeats and Synge and Lady Gregory—not exactly Quatre cento-calibre—but significant and for these times and folk most invigorating.”28
That renaissance Negro was precisely what some objected to in discussing the book. According to J. P. Whipple, the literary reviewer of the Survey Graphic:
It is the art and gift of the old Negro that America loves. That art is vanishing faster than any other culture in America, even the dying ritualism of the Jew. The Negro came from the earth, Africa via Alabama. He is leaving the soil. He was naïve in passion and soul. He is becoming sophisticated. He lived in a tribe with folkways. He has come to live in a herd, regimented, machine-ridden, sapped of joy, like the rest of the herd. … It would be God’s blessing if the new Negro could sing us awake again. But he seems to me to pursue a paradox: he wants to live like a white man and sing like a Negro. He is talking art and meaning civil rights.29
Whipple said that the New Negro wanted it both ways, wanted to be a White man while at the same time being different and Black. He was right. That was the contradiction the New Negro was living out, a new way of being an American in which one assimilated all that America had to offer from White civilization and then one deployed it for one’s own purposes. What the New Negro announced, therefore, was this new subjectivity that broke the old mold that was created by the European immigrant paradigm, that one either became 100 percent American or persisted in one’s pre-American identity and refused to assimilate. Locke’s New Negro advanced a new paradigm—that one was both assimilated and non-assimilated, culturally American, but psychologically Black; and thus, what that meant was that one was thoroughly modern in a complex way. One was inevitably both a White man and a Black man at one and the same time—and that was a creative space, regardless of what this particular generation of artists and writers did with that space.
Even as Locke returned to the literary battlefield of New York, he did not stop his counter-attack on the university for his dismissal. With Franz Boas’s support, he brought charges against Howard University through the AAUP for violating the accepted procedures of the treatment of tenured professors in America. Although Locke was not directly pressuring Congress to hold up Howard’s annual appropriation, he assisted others who hounded the trustees. Perhaps one of the most interesting was the suit Arthur Mitchell filed against the officers of the Allied Industrial Finance Corporation, of which Emmett Scott was an officer, accusing it of fraud and mismanagement. Mitchell brought that suit to put pressure on the university, by accusing its officers of dishonesty that he claimed was responsible for the corporation filing for bankruptcy. This end run brought a vituperative response in the Black newspapers from Scott, who remarked: “the President of the so-called Howard Welfare League had inspired, aided and abetted the movement to embarrass the Howard University administration in every possible way.” Eventually, early in February, the disagreement was resolved, and eventually Scott said that he would withdraw those remarks, in exchange for his hopes that Mitchell would work to get the suit settled out of court.30 Clearly, the stakes were getting higher every day for Howard, for the counter-attack against the June decision was increasingly costly for the university, its officers, and its subsidiary interests.
Finally, in February 1926, came news to Locke from his lawyer Thomas Dyett that Durkee had decided to leave for another job.31 Various factors were probably involved in the decision, not the least of which was the threat of Congress blocking Howard’s appropriation. But personally Durkee must have known that his tenure at Howard was effectively over after the December meeting. Fully 30 percent of the faculty polled expressed a lack of confidence in the administration. Durkee also must have realized that the easiest way out of this impasse for the board and the university was to assign blame to him and force him to leave.
On March 25, 1926, a special meeting of the board of trustees was held “to consider the resignation of J. Stanley Durkee as President of Howard” and to look for a successor. Such a turn of events was certainly ironic. In granting Locke and the others a leave of absence, the board had stipulated that after June 20, 1926, “all connections of” Locke and the other professors “with the University shall cease.” But now, because of the attack on him, “all connection” of Durkee with Howard would end after June 30, 1926. Locke had not gotten his job back, but in the history of Negro education he had done something more important: he had helped remove the last White man to run Howard University. But Durkee’s resignation was a pyrrhic victory. He wasn’t the man responsible for Locke’s dismissal. It was Moorland. But because of the politics of race in Negro education, it was easier for Durkee to take the fall for a bad decision by the board of trustees, and Durkee realized that there was nothing he could do about it. In this case, Locke’s blindness to the real cause of his dismissal removed a politically inept and educationally anachronistic administrator from stewardship of the institution. But Locke still did not have his job back.
With no assurance that he would ever get his job back, Locke had to reinvent himself and become a full-time promoter of the New Negro Renaissance. With his subsidy of a year’s salary, Locke could afford to invest in this new career—to plunge into lecturing, writing, and spreading the movement’s goals without worrying whether each lecture paid handsomely. Of course, being “excommunicated” from Howard had had the effect of repeating the cycle of isolation and loneliness, coupled with an intense desire for companionship, that he had experienced after his mother’s death. Being cut off, while painful, already had been revitalizing.
But Locke must have felt incredibly alone. Since 1912, Howard had been his home, even if he was often away from it. He had been tethered to its larger mission of educating a new generation of college-prepared youth to take his place when he and others like him from the nineteenth century had passed on. Now, that mission was no longer his. Bereft of that larger sense of purpose, bereft really of the father Howard University had been for him—rigid, reproving, but nevertheless accepting—he was now the rejected son, again. But this time, unlike when he was a child, there was no cushioning mother at hand. He was really alone, an Odysseus headed out to journey on the sea of letters with little more than an oar. But that oar was a strong one—a volume titled The New Negro: An Interpretation. His very survival now depended on whether what he predicted in its pages was true, that a Negro of talent could survive on self-determination and a song—in his case, a song of beauty.