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The American Scholar
In “The American Scholar” in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared the American Mind ought to separate from European models of excellence and immerse itself in the daily life of the common people of America, the true source of its unique culture.1 In 1928, Alain Locke struggled to find in the “common” culture of the Black folk a source for his modernist reinterpretation of American culture. Shortly after New Year’s, he departed Washington on the Southern Railway for Nashville, Tennessee, where he would be teaching at Fisk for the winter quarter. Unlike Emerson, the African American scholar taking such a journey could not but help coming into contact with “the common,” as accommodations below the Mason-Dixon line were always segregated. Riding in the dirty coach set aside for Negroes was a reminder to Locke that he was entering a southern world that still regarded Negroes as scum. As the train snaked around the West Virginia mountains, and he settled into the greasy seat shown him by the conductor, Locke may have remembered that a similar trip south had sparked W. E. B. Du Bois and Jean Toomer to write Souls of Black Folk and Cane, respectively. But Emerson never considered that the White “common,” working- and lower-middle-class White Americans saw any elevation of the Black “common” as a threat. Locke must have recalled his earlier trip into the South in 1912 with Booker T. Washington, when angry Whites met him and the “great conciliator” at train stations with violence and even death toward anyone who tried to lift the lot of the Negro over theirs. As Locke settled into “Negro mode,” that conditioning of himself to the segregated American life, he may have reflected on the series of events that had forced him so deep into the southern “common” once again—not by philosophical choice, as Emerson suggested, but by professional necessity. With no base in Harlem, no control of a Negro public institution, and no access to elite White institutions of higher education in America, Locke, like Emerson after the Divinity School address, was going to have to make his future on speaking, writing, and secular preaching to a “common,” but one divided by hate, rivalry, and threats of death to any who tried to change the racial status quo in America. As Locke grimaced inside at the many little insults he endured as he entered the segregated South, he must have wondered at that future. Emerson never confronted the racial division in the American “common” or the racial sickness of the American Mind. But Locke was going to have to confront both in Nashville. Feelings of dread began to grow.
Locke’s mood lifted temporarily upon his arrival in Nashville. He was welcomed like a king. Fisk’s president invited him to dinner, provided him excellent faculty rooms on campus, and funded a stenographer to transcribe his lectures. The president actually hoped to persuade Locke to stay at Fisk, despite the recently tendered offer from Howard to return. The president’s entreaties were flattering to Locke, but he could not seriously consider moving to Fisk permanently. It would force him to make a monthly trek between Nashville and New York if he wanted to keep anything like a national literary life or a love life alive. Moving to Fisk would push him further into a clandestine homosexual life, since Black Victorian strictures were even more dominant at Fisk than at Howard. Though he had been glad to escape New York and Mrs. Mason, Locke began to feel more vulnerable as an isolated Black northerner in Nashville. Suddenly, after two weeks at Fisk, he succumbed to a mysterious illness that sent him to bed. Soon, he wired Mrs. Mason about his condition. Sick, lonely, and second-guessing his decision to come, Locke stifled the urge to return immediately to the East with a catastrophic medical collapse as his excuse. Unwilling to give into the illness, Locke righted himself and sent a second telegram. “Do not worry. Nothing more serious it seems than Southern hookworm”—an apt metaphor, perhaps, for his reaction to the South—and to her.2 He often rationalized about never vacationing in the South due to its heavily spiced food. Now, his ailment became a way for him to ensure that Mason’s love was still focused on him. Her concerned replies convinced him that he was still her “little boy,” while also convincing himself that he could survive the South at such distance from her.
First priority from January to March at Fisk were his two lecture courses—one on the Negro in American Literature and the other on Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations. On January 6, 1928, he gave his first lecture at Fisk on the image of the Negro in American Literature. Atrocious transcripts of this and other lectures given at Fisk do not do justice to the lectures. The transcription work was probably the onerous responsibility of a Fisk student, who seemed unable to hear Locke clearly, a sign, perhaps, too, that Locke had not yet emancipated himself from his whispering Bostonian accent. Mason hounded him to get rid of it. Still, what comes through was surprising—Locke saw racism as malleable, changeable, indeed, already changing under their very noses. Locke must have jolted his young audience in Nashville when he asserted that the African was originally a heroic figure in early English literature, only to be transformed by the emergence of Puritanism as the dominant force in American literature.
Locke used these literary lectures, along with another delivery of his 1916 Race Contacts lectures, to inspire Black students, to give them a sense that even the horrific negative stereotypes of the Negro in later American literature were not fixed, but able to change with the changing social and political prospects of the Negro. American race relations followed an arc he outlined in his lectures that reflected the changing calculus of power in American life. The inspirational part came with this issue of power. If race was nothing more than a symbol of a group’s power and reputation, Locke hoped the generation maturing in college in the late 1920s would change the assessment of the race by becoming more powerful, by seizing the resources at hand to create art, culture, and social innovations that were still available to Negroes acting with free will even in the segregated South. A new subjectivity for Negroes was possible in the emerging present of the 1920s that could shape the foreseeable future if they approached their present with creative action and agency.
These lectures reminded Locke that he was an American scholar, not just an errand boy for a powerful benefactor. He wrote Montgomery Gregory that these lectures would “soon become books.” Unfortunately, they did not. His schedule really did not permit it. With Nashville as a base, he traveled and lectured widely in the South. He also used his time in Nashville to make intellectual contacts his segregated appointment at Howard had not fostered. He was able, for example, to meet and speak with Edwin Mims, the celebrated southern literary historian of Vanderbilt University, although he was prevented by southern “custom” from actually visiting with him at Vanderbilt. Perhaps the still-rigid race lines in Tennessee played a role in his decision to return to teach in Washington, despite a lucrative offer that exceeded what Howard could pay him. But he did not have time to turn these lectures into books while he was negotiating the etiquette of segregation and of kowtowing to Mrs. Mason.
Even at Fisk, Locke maintained his obligations as the coordinator of a vast effort to realize projects he and Mason had agreed on. These latter projects often required much secret communication and maneuvering, leaving him little time for serious, scholarly study. On February 24, he wrote Hurston: “You have already heard I know from Godmother about the possible crossing of your lines by influences which she and I both agree should be kept entirely away not only from the project at hand but from this entire movement for the rediscovery of our folk material.” Who the offending decadent was, the letter does not say. “The main thing … is to have C.L. [Cudjoe Lewis, a Hurston folk informant] entirely silenced. If the person undertakes to visit Mobile during my visit here, which unfortunately ends March 19, I will accompany him. If [it] looks as if it were best for me to cover the situation here, [I will] forego the pleasure I anticipated in spending some few days with you in your field work.”3
In reality, Black research was suddenly hot and there was plenty of competition from White anthropologists who also saw the value of publishing “their” discoveries of “untarnished” Blackness. Mason was also protecting her investment, since she was paying for the research and owned the results as her “property.” On a psychological level, Mason was a paranoid, often fearing that another, usually White person, would not only steal the information from under them, but prostitute it by turning it into popular culture. Mason and Locke shared a bias against popular culture, and she intensified his hatred of it, telling him to make sure not to let Max Reinhardt “get his hands on this material.” In that sense, working with Mason accentuated his suspiciousness, his deviousness, and his manipulation of other people’s access to what was not really “our folk material.” In this particular instance—since he did not go down to Mobile—the need for him to play this role cost him an opportunity to spend time with Hurston in fieldwork that might have opened his eyes to what “the folk” really were like and advanced him intellectually. But as a Black Victorian gay male, Locke was not that interested in visiting Hurston in Mobile for “field work.”
His letters to Zora Neale Hurston show the power Locke gained from his relationship with Mason. Despite Hurston’s pioneering scholarship and her courage, she still had to kowtow to Locke, especially when Mason backed up his opinion. “The more I think of it,” he continued, “the more work becomes important, especially from the point of view of the possible survivals of African traits in the performance and action side of the games and stories. Do not let this side of the matter escape your attention.” Here, his knowledge of Boasian anthropology and his exchanges in the mid-1920s with Melville Herskovits gave him some knowledge in the area of African survivals. Hurston must have gritted her teeth when she read this paean to Locke’s authority. Did she need him to tell her the importance of her work? Locke treats Hurston here as a student and naif in folklore research, when just the opposite was the case. He concluded, “I know your work must be making you very happy and I am happy in the thought that it has come to you in the beautiful way that it has.”4 Hurston had to defer to those who have put her “in the field,” though Locke’s letter belies she is his intellectual superior in the arena of African American folk culture.
Beyond managing Hurston’s and Mason’s espionage work, Locke served as an agent for Rene Maran. Maran desperately needed funds and used Locke to represent his various manuscripts to American publishers in hopes of landing a lucrative contract. While not sanguine about the willingness of the Black middle class to purchase the exclusive edition of Maran’s books, Locke remained enthusiastic about the White audience for book. “Our colored American friends … are more interested in dollars than in books.” Unfortunately, Maran’s latest more naturalistic contribution, Kongo, had not found a publisher. “The Boni’s like it very much—but they feel that they cannot make it what we call a ‘best seller’ in its present form. … They feel that a longer work on the Kongo with still more African material can be made a grand success. Do not think this is a characteristic American point of view towards your work. It is really their excessive interest that your novel should have even greater success than Batouala.”
Locke’s own work found a ready outlet in the literary and opinion magazines. With funds from Mason to buy a Dictaphone, and with a stenographer provided to him by Fisk University, Locke turned out a vast amount of quick writing—essays, reviews, and shorter expository pieces that he could finish off between classes. Locke completed an assessment of the “Newest Negroes” for poet Lewis Alexander’s special Negro number of the Carolina Magazine, which carried his sparkling article on the “newest negro” poets to emerge since 1925. He argued that New Negro writers were beginning to document an alternative world of beauty already existing in the folk Black experience, laying the groundwork for a cosmopolitan transnational literature of beauty. In addition to “Beauty Instead of Ashes” in the Nation, he published a stinging review of Mary White Ovington’s Portraits in Color, explaining that her book, like others written in reaction to racism, exaggerated its subjects. At the same time, he was encouraging Rene Maran to get out a popular novel of African culture and pressuring his publisher to follow up an earlier advance of $500 for Maran (which Locke had wrung from them) with more money for the fledgling French writer.
Once settled at Fisk, Locke exuded a kind of energy for lecturing, speaking, and proselytizing that would have humbled a less driven man. On February 10, 1928, he was in Jefferson City, Missouri, lecturing on “The African Background” to students at the “other” Lincoln University; two days later, he was speaking at an “Interracial Sunday” at Roberts Park Methodist Episcopal Church about “Recent Gains in Race Relations.” In demand as a speaker before White audiences because of his upbeat message and his diminutive, non-threatening physique and manner, Locke grew in his ability to use Black culture to convert the fence-sitting liberals into outright supporters of race progress. “I had an invitation to give a talk at the Chapel Service of Scarret [sic] College. I got through the speech very well which was not easy—considering that it was a frank talk on The New Negro and the New South to an audience of 250 Southerners, mostly young women. I hope some of Langston’s poetry (I too Sing America) and Lewis Alexander’s Dark Brother did them good. At any rate they flocked around afterwards to shake hands, and did not say the usual thing about loving Negroes and knowing them better than anybody. Incidentally I told them they didn’t know the Negro and never would until they opened up both their minds and hearts so that their eyes could really see and their ears really hear.”5 Locke found in the language of the Black church a means to advance himself as a Black ambassador to the White conscience. But such frenetic running from classroom to chapel service distracted Locke from a deeper fear that he was not any closer to producing his own major book that would be an intellectual sequel to The New Negro: An Interpretation.
Constant traveling did assuage Locke’s loneliness and longing for romantic intimacy. A few new interesting young men had entered his life, principally from his trip in December to Chicago—Richmond Barthé, the young Art Institute painter, with his chiseled good looks—and Albert Dunham, the brilliant philosophy undergraduate at the University of Chicago, who opened a thoughtful, encouraging, and philosophically rich correspondence with Locke that spring. But neither had declared any willingness to be Locke’s lover, and both were still in Chicago, although Barthé planned to move to New York to jump-start his professional career. Locke was becoming desperate. How else to explain that in June he kept open the possibility of accepting a position at the Alexander Hamilton High School in Brooklyn?6 New York continued to beckon as a place where he could live more openly as a gay man. Clearly, Locke longed for a permanent young love to fight off what was beginning to loom as a potential mid-life crisis.
Locke was not so busy that February that he could not check in with Hughes, whom he wrote from Lincoln. “I have not been as free from pressure as I had hoped. Lectures and still more lectures. However the two extension courses here promise to be the rough material of two books, one on the Negro in American Literature (not Negro literature, but the Negro in Literature) and the other on Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations, awfully academic but necessary. Godmother mighn’t altogether approve—but certain subjects have to be treated to prevent them being worse treated,” he confided, suggesting though, perhaps exaggerating, his independence from Mason’s control. He then offered that he would be returning to “the Land of Freedom, March 20th—and hope to see you soon thereafter.” Realizing that the hint might not be enough to compel Hughes to see him, Locke followed up the invitation to get together to report on the newest challenges to Hughes’s supremacy—“You ought to read the proofs of McKay’s new novel Home to Harlem. It is humanity stripped not to its underclothes but down to its underskin. It is powerfully done though. Its realism even staggered Bud Fisher—so you know”—and his visiting with the young poet Sterling Brown, who was teaching English at Lincoln. “I would love to meet you, Langston,” Brown penned at the bottom of Locke’s postcard. But the implication was clear; others were on the move in the very fields—Black novel writing and folk poetry composition—that were supposed to be Hughes’s. At the end, Locke could not help including an almost pathetic beg: “Have you heard from Zora? Do write.”7 Hughes did not.
Perhaps the emptiness in Locke’s personal life pushed him to focus on his professional activities, especially his activities as manager of the complex “empire” he had built with Mason. Even while at Fisk, he took almost full responsibility as “secretary” of the Harlem Museum of African Art for almost all aspects of operation, likely because it was becoming a major headache. Early in February, Mrs. Isaacs, the purchaser of the Blondiau-Theatre Arts Collection, and now a board member of the Harlem Museum of African Art, wrote him enraged because the Rochester Museum of Art had notified her that some items listed in the traveling exhibition, valued roughly at $1,000, were missing from the collection as delivered. While Isaacs and Locke had been close in the past, they had grown more distant as Locke’s loyalties had shifted to Mason and her larger endowment of the museum. The loss in the traveling exhibition, therefore, opened a door for Isaacs to critique, indirectly, Locke’s leadership of the museum, especially since some of the items missing still belonged to her. Locke engineered the recovery of the pieces, propped up the insurance for the show (about to lapse for nonpayment of the premium), and turned the incident to his advantage by removing most of her objects from the traveling collection—at her request—and then assuming full control over the remaining exhibit pieces. All the while, he was contracting for more sites for the exhibit (turning down a possible visit to Philadelphia because it would not be at the new Philadelphia Museum of Art), soliciting support from a Black group associated with the Karamu Theatre and the Cleveland Museum of Art, and negotiating the complicated terms of shipping, final payment, and insurance in transit to acquire more African art from European collectors for his museum. He took no chances after the debacle at Rochester: he pulled the strings, curated and even installed the shows, and built the collection, all with little money of his own.
Indeed, so complete was Locke’s control over the museum by June that Isaacs, realizing she had been marginalized for her tirade, allowed objects from her private collection to be included when Locke installed the traveling exhibition at Howard University Gallery of Art. Perhaps his greatest achievement was to install sixty-five African art objects from the permanent collection in the 135th Street New York Public Library in Harlem. Locke was gaining a reputation as an auteur of the presentation of African art, not simply an expert on the artifacts. When Robert Abbott, the editor of the Chicago Defender, learned of a valuable collection of fine art from the Ivory Coast that was available, he contacted Locke, who right away fired off letters to the French owners of that collection, while working to keep Abbott silent about the prospect. In the course of those arrangements, Locke became a bonded importer of African art.
Locke was trying to become an American scholar by arguing that African art and African American literature should become the alternative center of a more authentic American culture. To affect that radical shift, Locke needed the help of others, especially the young writers of the Renaissance, to supply the raw material for his theorizing and produce texts that would legitimate his argument that the Negro artist was creating a renaissance for America. Those needs led to increased conflicts with the very writers whom he had brought into the patronage arrangement. Before meeting Mason, Hurston had written flattering letters to Locke, especially one in 1927 in which Hurston suggested that she, Hughes, and Locke—with the two artists on the bottom and Locke at the apex—would form an intellectual triangle that would transform Negro art. But as 1928 advanced and the lines of power hardened into arrangements, Mason made it clear that she would manage Hughes, who was now deep at work on the novel Mason commissioned him to write, even while he was at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Hurston would spend two years in the South collecting the material Mason had hired her to find. While in the South, her views of Locke, Mason, and Hughes would shift.
Zora began to feel that willingness to go into the rural South as she was doing, commit to close study of the people and their culture, and express that culture without fitting it to White or modernist expectations was the litmus test of who was an authentic interpreter of Negro culture. While at Fisk, Locke and Hurston had discussed and even planned that he would visit her in Mobile, Alabama. But once Locke shrunk back from joining her there, Hurston’s evaluation of him began to dip.
In 1928, Locke became less sure of the road forward in theorizing about Black culture in the future. As he searched around for inspiration and direction, he tried to extract information he needed from Hurston. Resentful of his suggestions for how she should conduct her research, Hurston was reluctant to share her information readily with him and instead began to put her findings before Hughes, who became her confidant and often the real middleman between Mason and her. She distrusted Locke and felt he would steal her ideas if given a chance. “I had written to Dr. Locke at H.U. about March 6th,” she informed Hughes. “I wonder if he ever got it. … I have come to five general laws, but I shall not mention them to Godmother or Locke until I have worked them out. Locke would hustle out a volume right away.” Her willingness to put her body in harm’s way had reaped intellectual dividends.
She shared these six insights with Hughes because she needed his advice and counsel to turn material into finished plays. Locke needed her for anthropological material, but she needed Hughes for literary structure. Her way of getting that was to propose that they produce the new “black theatre” together. “Did I tell you before I left about the new, the real Negro art theatre I plan? Well, I shall or rather we shall act out the folk tales, however short, with the abrupt angularity and naiveté of the primitive ‘bama nigger.’ Just that with naïve settings. What do you think?” In the next letter, she enthused, “I know it is going to be glorious! A really new departure in the drama.”9
Hurston’s insights were a really new departure in Black Cultural Studies, for unlike so many other commentators, she found that “Negro folk-lore is still in the making, a new kind is crowding out the old.” Locke might have been useful to her, for if the two of them had been able to collaborate, they could have produced an article or book that would have redefined the theory of Black culture. Instead, her distrust of him and his insecurity about acknowledging her eminence as a great scholar of Negro folklore doomed the possibilities. As Hurston continued in her letter to Hughes, “I found another one of the original Africans, older than Cudjoe[,] about 200 miles upstate on Tombigbee River. She is most delightful, but no one will ever know about her but us,” and the us did not include Locke.10 Moreover, she also discovered self-taught visual artists on her trip, some of whom were sculptors, others portraitists who “draw better than Douglas.” In an art movement that needed to de-individualize in order to become revolutionary, neither Locke nor his Black “workers” reflected on the way that Mason’s patronage scheme was dividing them against one another.
Locke’s greatest failure of this period was his inability to acknowledge Zora Neale Hurston as the preeminent American scholar of the 1920s. He had helped her and was continuing to help her. But it was not enough, for Locke never trusted Hurston as a fashioner of a new American Cultural Studies that transcended political/national borders. Had he made a way for her to enter into Howard University as a scholar, he might have realized his dream of making the school the center of African-based American scholarship. But Hurston was not the kind of woman he resonated with, not being willing to play the mother to him; and because she was a woman, she could not be a kind of object of desire, like Hughes, and lead Locke to move mountains to get her at Howard. So, she suffered gendered, class, and sexual marginality all her own. Thus, if her patron dumped her, she would not have the ability, as the highly middle-class Jessie Fauset would when Du Bois dumped her, to teach French at a Black high school. Indeed, in one of her last letters to Mrs. Mason, Hurston would state she was planning to try to make money by selling chicken soup based on her unique recipe! While many men of the Harlem Renaissance and after would see her as hysterically unbalanced, her class, gender, and racial vulnerability shaped powerfully her behavior. That is why she worked so hard to keep the patron she had despite Mason’s dehumanizing maternalism.
What gave Hurston an advantage in dealing with Mason was that Hurston’s concern and even paranoia about others stealing her material mirrored Mason’s concerns and paranoia. As women, they perhaps shared a sense of how men, whom they believed were less intelligent and less resourceful than they, were taking advantage of them to anoint themselves as “American scholars.” Over time, Mason began to side more and more with Hurston in a protective maternalism that lifted Hurston, eventually above both Locke and Hughes, because to Mason, Hurston was the true spirit—both because of her “primitiveness” and the laser-like insights of her mind. Hughes began to feel left behind in Hurston’s plans. Sensitive to his concerns, Hurston worked hard in her second letter to Hughes to calm his worries.
Adding to Hughes’s pecking order woes was artistic vulnerability: he had not written anything memorable since 1927, poetry based on the blues talk and lyrics of recent southern migrants. Yet critically for Hughes, he could not bring himself to return to ethnographic research to fuel his muse. He canceled his plans to join Hurston in the South that summer of 1928. Struggling to balance a professional writing career and college work, he gave as his excuse the need to finish strongly in his exams, although the real reason may have been his desire to avoid greater, possibly romantic, intimacy with Hurston. Saddened by his rejection, she became depressed. “I have been through one of those terrible periods when I can’t make myself write,” she wrote him by July. “But you understand, since you have ‘em yourself.” To keep herself going, she took to reading aloud Hughes’s poetry at the turpentine camps she visited, to attract the attention of the local storytellers and promote herself as one of a few Black artists appreciative of folk culture. She found that Black workers in the rural South loved his poems, especially those in Fine Clothes for the Jew, filled as it was with raunchy rhymes and transplanted rhythms of the South. So successful was the act that she sold several copies, sent the money back from them to Hughes, and requested more. “I wanted to let your publishers know what a hit you are with the people you write about, but Godmother doesn’t want me to say anything at present. But I shall do it as soon as this is over.”11
Hughes also began to advise Hurston on how to manipulate Mason. Here, he did not so much usurp Locke’s role as displace it, since Locke remained fiercely loyal to Mason. Hughes’s rise as the schemer advising Hurston on how to handle Mason nevertheless undermined Locke’s role as an effective middleman or broker in the patronage scheme. When combined with Locke’s lack of scholarship in the field of Black folklore and his unwillingness to side with Hughes and Hurston against Mason, Locke was vulnerable. By 1929, Hurston would conclude, “Locke is intellectually dishonest. He always wants to be with the winner.” His refusal to stand up to Mason had squeezed him into an unsatisfying role: he did not receive the deference from Hughes and Hurston that they showed Mason, because she had the money; and he did not receive the same respect from Mason they received, because they had the talent.
Without Hurston’s help and intimate contact with African American folk culture, Locke could not really claim to be a scholar of the new Black culture emerging out of the South into northern consciousness. He needed such contact, because in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s, the pioneers in the American search for culture were those digging up what they believed to be a usable past “on native grounds,” to borrow Alfred Kazin’s memorable title. The way of the future lay in collecting the culture produced by poor people, largely poor Black people. When fine art was not the goal, the Black folk were still the focal point, from the folk field recordings of Alan Lomax to the hundreds of Works Progress Administration (WPA) interviewers who would fan out over the South in the 1930s to capture the waning reminiscences of the last who lived under slavery. To keep step Locke had to be willing to do what Hurston did: put his body in the belly of the South, “with blood on its mouth,” as Hughes put it, to speak with authority about the folk. But it was highly unlikely that a cane-toting, three-piece-suit wearing, fedora-hatted Alain Locke would be able descend into phosphate mines and railroad camps of Alabama and find culture.
Marooned in a quickly fading Black modernity, Locke turned down an offer from Eugene Kinckle Jones to take over editing Opportunity, when Charles Johnson resigned in March. Locke remained peeved that he had not been approached earlier, when he was unemployed. With a secure job at Howard, Locke could afford to snub the more demanding job of making Opportunity a go in the waning years of the Renaissance. Instead, he busied himself with his duties as a critic, including reviewing Du Bois’s Dark Princess for the New York Herald Tribune. Locke made clear now how boring reading Du Bois’s novel was when he closed a letter to Langston Hughes with the quip, “Unfortunately I must leave you for her.” Other tasks were pure pleasure, such as unpacking and installing the traveling exhibition of the Harlem Museum of African Art in the art gallery at Howard. Locke still had to endure criticism from Mason about how he documented his use of her money: “I find that you do not touch Langston for rendering account. The difference is between a Negro who has never had anything and a gentleman of the world to the lady who keeps him.” But that was in fact the reality: he was the gentleman of the world, though she wanted him to act like a Negro who never had anything! That he continued to put up with her shows how desperate his situation was emotionally, now that he had his job back.
Increasingly, Locke found the courage to protest. In one particular incident, Mason criticized him for a proposal to make back some of the cost of a traveling exhibition and lecture series by charging vendors expenses. Mason abhorred any scheme to “make money” on African or African American art, especially as she was already fronting him a considerable amount of money to conduct such activities. But this time he reacted angrily. “I have thought back carefully and find I have reported almost exactly and verbatim. There was no mention of ‘making money’ in the conversation. I think you must have misunderstood something as my voice flagged periodically—you know how it does! Perhaps it was this—I was mentioning that McKay, Du Bois and Pickens had all accepted money for their personal expenses.” Mason thought that if she was covering most of his expenses that this should be enough to allow him to relinquish his usual tendency to think advocating Black art should pay.
But Mason was not giving him enough money to make a real go of the Harlem Museum of African Art. In fact, he was being paid for performing three or four jobs for her, without the time and leisure to develop the museum project into a real permanent institution. He bore some of the responsibility for his predicament. He allowed the relationship to be framed in terms of her “gifts” to him, which freed him from having to “earn” the money, as Hurston and Hughes were doing. But as the recipient of gifts, a degree of intimacy entered into their relationship that undermined his ability to request outright the kind of endowment he needed to make the museum sustainable.
Locke escaped to Europe again that summer of 1928. Before leaving, he had to tidy up a number of loose ends—closing down the Howard University Gallery of Art exhibition of the African Art traveling exhibition, writing letters to Frenchmen about visits he planned to examine their collections while in Europe, and communicating with the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations to announce his attendance at their September sessions as an observer. Adding to his frustration were the artists themselves, as he realized that Hughes was even more aloof than before Locke had introduced him to Mason. It must have dawned on him that Hughes was not attracted to him and also not attracted to the prospect of an open-closet public life. To become closer to Locke would have made Hughes homosexual by association. Indeed, few younger Black gay artists in the Renaissance were willing to chance living in any public way as gay men. Just before leaving that July, for example, he learned that Countee Cullen, his former if only occasional bed partner, was, incredibly, marrying Yolanda Du Bois, the daughter of W. E. B. Du Bois!
Du Bois decided to make a spectacle out of the wedding: at one point, he had planned to release doves in the church during the ceremony. Not only were more than 1,300 guests invited but also Yolanda had sixteen bridesmaids. Afterward, he wrote about his daughter’s wedding in the Crisis. He described it as “the symbolic march of young black America. America, because there was Harvard, Columbia, Smith, Brown, Howard, Chicago, Syracuse, Penn and Cornell. But it was not simply conventional America—it had a dark and shimmering beauty all its own; a calm and high restraint and sense of new power; it was a new race; a new thought; a new thing rejoicing in a ceremony as old as the world.”12 Apparently, Locke had advised Cullen against the marriage, but Cullen went through with it anyway, presumably to remain part of a compromised Black bourgeois world. The marriage was the breaking point in their relationship. As he wrote to Cullen, “I can forgive you for refusing my advice, but I cannot forgive you for transgressing a law of your own nature—because nature herself will not forgive you.”13 Cullen’s wedding would be followed by another irony—the marriage of painfully dark-skinned Wallace Thurman to the ravishingly light-complexioned Louise Thompson in September. Increasingly, it seemed, prominent gay New Negroes opted for the oldest of camouflages—the marriage of convenience—rather than live a transparently gay single life.
Such subterfuges of the “youngest Negroes” helped Locke deflect their criticisms of him. At least he had not tried to “pass” for heterosexual. Of course, Locke had his own masks to manage as he ventured to Europe that summer. He rationalized it as a trip to search for more collections of African art and to attend meetings of the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations of the treatment of Germany’s former colonies in Africa. But what was uppermost on his mind was undertaking a regimen of self-care. Not long after giving an enthusiastic clarion call to brotherhood with Africans at the West African Studies Union in London, Locke hopped over to Paris to meet with collectors and then headed to Germany, where perhaps for the first time, with Mason’s travel gift of usually $100–200, he had the finances to enroll for at least two weeks at the Nanheim Spa and Clinic in Germany and sample its expensive and experimental methods to rejuvenate his “tired heart.”
Taking his rest cure around the restorative baths of the Nanheim resort, Locke could sit bundled up in sumptuous, white towels and gaze for hours at the glistening German bodies of the local well-heeled youths. Here were bodies that fit Locke’s ideal—slender, athletic, disciplined, yet frolicking sinewy youth, whose freedom and energy spoke to Locke’s loins. Safely out of view in Germany, Locke benefited from a kind of invisibility to move silently and unnoticed through the brothels and resorts of gay Germany without notice from Germans or vacationing Brits and Americans. If Hughes, the love of his life, was not going to reward Locke for providing him access to Mason’s money, Locke was going to reward himself by living as a gentleman rake of the world, regardless of what Mason thought about it.
League of Nations meetings in Geneva paled by comparison. Indeed, it is not certain that Locke went to Geneva, since his attendance was not recorded in the official account of the League’s deliberations, although that was not unusual; he was not an appointed member of the council. Certainly, he missed the October meetings of the Permanent Mandates Commission, as he had the preceding year, since to attend those would have made him late for the beginning of fall classes at Howard. A major reason he had had difficulty finishing the report in the year following his first trip to Geneva in 1927 was that he never actually attended the Mandates Commission session, and thus had no hard data on the operation of the Mandate System of oversight on former German and other European colonies in Africa and the Middle East. Most likely he stopped in briefly at the League of Nations meetings in September 1928 and witnessed debate of the League on one of the previous year’s Mandate Report on South Africa. In this debate the League, while praising the report for recounting efforts at “local government,” requested that next year’s report detail more on efforts to stimulate “self-government” among the native population. In his written response, Jan Smut of South Africa expressed his chagrin. The notion that the Mandates opened up the possibility for African transition to self-government made it into Locke’s eventual report.
Rushing home before October also denied Locke a golden opportunity to see Marcus Garvey, who delivered a speech on October 6 that might have helped Locke hone his skills as an inspirational speaker, and also as a reporter on the importance of the League’s activities for the international Negro. Marcus Garvey addressed almost 1,600, mostly White listeners at the Theater of the Gaiete Rochechouart. It was Garvey’s bid to enlist France as a partner to establish a country and government for the Negro in Africa. Garvey had recently filed a petition with the League demanding it provide the Negro an independent state in Africa. The speech, as well as the petition, showed Garvey’s growing sophistication as a manipulator, since both sought to curry favor with the French by lauding France as the only nation to treat Africans with dignity. But Garvey went on to threaten the international community with an uprising of the 11 million followers he believed still awaited his instructions back in the United States, if it did not act on the reputed “promises” President Wilson had made to “liberate the small nations of the world.” Garvey’s militant, if unlikely, demand for self-determination might have given Locke evidence for his report of a growing concern in the Black Diaspora with having a stake in the League’s activities in Africa.14
But without making contact with Garvey, Locke had no such evidence, thin as that would have been, to argue to the Foreign Policy Association (FPA) that a groundswell of interest in the League had arisen among people of color outside of Africa. And having missed the Mandates meetings in June and October, he had little concrete evidence of how the Mandates Commission worked that could be put in his report, still unfinished when he returned home. “I can understand,” Raymond Buell, the director of research at the FPA, wrote Locke, “the many delays to which you have been subjected, but I think that you too can appreciate the position we are in, and understand our desire to receive some return for the assistance which the Association placed at your disposal. Could you then send me something so that I may relieve the impression which the situation has created in the office and among the members of the Board of Directors?”15 Locke’s growing embarrassment had been caused in part because of the shift in his professional life since 1926. When he had engaged the Foreign Policy Association in the scheme, he had been unemployed with a relatively free calendar, no patron, and no obstacles to spending the kind of time in Europe needed to monitor the League activities. But once taking a position at Fisk and managing Mason’s own Black empire, he lacked the freedom, the research, and the motivation to produce a detailed report.
While Locke struggled to finish the report, he began his fall teaching. Howard University was undergoing dramatic change. Not only did it have its first Black president, Mordecai Johnson, elected in June 1926 but the university also achieved its first milestone in financial stability when Congress passed a bill in December 1928 that authorized annual appropriations to Howard. Rather than haggling every year with southern members of Congress as to whether there would be support for the university, the president and his allies in Congress merely had to bicker over the size of the appropriation. Moreover, Johnson brought a zeal for transforming Howard into an elite university on a par with the best American universities. Toward that end, he began a rebuilding campaign that upgraded the faculties of the professional schools, and the faculty of the College of Liberal Arts.
Perhaps most important, Locke found in Johnson a president who was greatly enamored of him and very pleased he had not left for Fisk. In the spring Locke had resubmitted his old proposal for an African Studies Program to an enthusiastic, if cautious, Johnson. Over the next five years, Locke would become Johnson’s trusted confidant, helping to identify and bring to Howard PhD-trained, leftist-oriented specialists in the social and human sciences, including political scientist Ralph Bunche, sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, philosopher Albert Dunham, linguist Louis Achille, poet Sterling Brown, and historian Harold Lewis. To make space for these younger, progressive-minded scholars, Locke maneuvered behind the scenes to force out the “old guard” professors, some of whom had secretly supported his ouster in 1925. For the first time in his academic career, Locke felt Howard was home.16
After settling in at Howard, Locke turned his attention, once again, to projects he had undertaken with Mason’s patronage. He unpacked and began to catalog the shipment of African art from the Ivory Coast he had purchased from Laporte in Paris. He wrote letters as secretary of the Harlem Museum of African Art to report on the sad financial state of the treasury for the projected museum, and begged Black intellectuals and artists to make contributions to a project that would enhance the standing and dignity of the Negro in America. Perilously few contributions had come in over the last six months, in part because Locke had been elsewhere and no one had been assigned to raise money in his absence. The weakness of the Harlem Museum of African Art project was plain from a business perspective: it was a one-man operation, with Locke, the jack of all trades, serving as the curator, the secretary, the exhibit designer and installer, the booking agent, and the fundraiser. He had found no one to take over the most important of these: fundraising. Mason lacked both the administrative knowledge and the financial will to hire the requisite staff to make the museum a functioning unit. Part of her reluctance was curious: she believed that “Negroes themselves” ought to endow this museum. If so, why was she involved at all?
Locke still functioned as a middleman between Mason and her cadre of Black artists and continued to collect artists at the same rate as he collected African art. In the fall of 1928, his latest catch was Richmond Barthé, the painter turned sculptor, who was leaving Chicago to come to New York for more training and wider recognition. Bringing Barthé to Mason was particularly important, because Barthé was a sculptor, enormously gifted, and willing to be flexible about bending his art practice to meet Mason’s concerns. After bringing Barthé to her Park Avenue apartment, Locke had to answer many questions before she opened her pocketbook to Barthé. She wanted details on his ancestry, his nurture by Jesuit Catholic priests, and Locke’s true estimate of his real talent. Eventually, Locke wore her down with persistence—a gift of Jubilee Singer, a cut-down sculpture, sweetened her temperament—in part because Locke was determined to get funding for Barthé.
Part of Locke’s zeal was his attraction for Barthé. Although they were not lovers in any permanent way, Locke and Barthé were occasional sexual partners. Perhaps even more significant to Locke in 1928 was that Barthé, unlike other artists Locke helped, was always enormously appreciative of his help, even as Barthé sought endorsements, patronage, and even catalog introductions from other critics, such as Carl Van Vechten. Plus, as a sculptor, he was more amenable than many of the Black painters to the idea of using African art as an inspiration for contemporary art. Barthé even proposed in 1930 to go to Africa, instead of Europe, to study sculpture, a proposal that endeared him to Mason as well as to Locke.
Locke also sought to establish transatlantic business relationships between Black Americans and West Africans, through his friend King Amoah (Kwamina Tandoh/Amoah III) from Ghana. Locke had met Amoah sometime in 1925–1926, when the king had visited the United States.17 At that time, Locke had written an article on Amoah for the Survey Graphic, accompanied by a stunning portrait of Amoah done by Winold Reiss, that detailed the enlightened leadership emerging in Africa and willing to forge relationships with African Americans. On and off over the next two years, Locke worked to try and set up some kind of economic relationship between American Negroes and Amoah, perhaps to begin importation of African raw materials—coffee, for example—directly into the United States. In a sense, this lay behind his efforts in the League of Nations—to use trips to Europe to meet and forge economic relationships with African elites and others from colonized peoples. Locke also was using Mason to create an umbrella for such efforts. But this relationship, like so many of the others he brokered with Mason’s support, exposed the pitfalls of Locke’s middleman role. In late January 1929, he reacted strongly against Mason’s criticism, sharply delivered, about Negroes never getting anything done. “I note keenly what you say about dropped stitches,” he wrote to Mason. “But I cannot be responsible for the failure of others to follow through. I have heard nothing from either Amoah or Dyett.”18
The most fruitful outcome of Locke’s curating African art, dabbling in global politics, reading African literature, and managing, at a distance, Zora Neale Hurston’s pioneering research, was his article, “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,” published in the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science in November 1928. “There are two distinctive elements,” he began this seminal essay, “in the cultural background of the American Negro: one, his primitive tropical heritage, however vague and clouded over that may be, and second the specific character of the Negro group experience in America.” Influenced by Mason’s Afrocentrism, and Hurston’s view that Negro folk culture was a living, evolving, presence in American life, Locke advanced beyond the notion he had outlined in “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts,” in The New Negro, that African culture was a distant, forgotten tradition. Now he argued that the African cultural presence persisted as an important, if submerged, influence in African American culture even as the Negro had made a complete adaptation to European culture.
Torn from his native culture and background, he [the Negro] was suddenly precipitated into a complex and very alien culture and civilization, and passed through the fierce crucible of rapid, but complete adaptation to its rudiments, the English language, Christianity, the labor production system, and Anglo-Saxon mores. His complete mental and spiritual flexibility, his rapid assimilation of the essentials of this new culture, in most cases within the first generation is the outstanding feat of his group career and is almost without parallel in history. Costly as it was, it was complete and without reservations. And yet from the earliest efforts at crude self-expression, it was the African or racial temperament, creeping back in the overtones of his half-articulate speech and action, which gave to his life and ways the characteristic qualities instantly recognized as peculiarly and representatively his.19
Locke came perilously close to suggesting primitivism was “creeping back” into civilization because of the presence of Negroes. But Locke had something else in mind. For him, the success story of the American Negro cultural history was the complete and rapid assimilation of the European language, foodways, work rhythms, familial and social institutions by the Negro accompanied by the retention of a distinct intelligence or consciousness by which the Negro selected that from the smorgasbord of Anglo-American culture what to emphasize, stress, and style, such that the completely assimilated culture was then re-expressed, uniquely. This intelligence was best revealed in an aesthetic sensibility that allowed the Negro to create unique, composite forms out of what she or he found in America, producing a composite but distinct set of innovations that were more inventive and complex than those created by European migrants. This article broke new ground because here, for the first time, Locke made clear that what distinguished the Negro culturally in America was not the experience of racism, but the unique improvisation of form—in music, storytelling, dance, speech, and song—based on African principles. “The materials were all American,” he concluded, “but the design and the pattern were different.”20
By calling his article “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,” Locke asserted himself as an American scholar and transcended the segregated frame in which Mason and Hurston celebrated African and Negro American folklore. Mason saw African culture as diluted and debased through contact with “Western forms,” while Hurston sought to capture a Black folk culture that thrived under segregation, away from White people. Locke realized that too strong an emphasis on Negro culture as “different” would back the movement into the corner that Lothrop Stoddard had tried to position the Negro Renaissance in his published March debate with Locke, “Should the Negro Be Encouraged to Cultural Equality?” There Stoddard had argued that segregation was necessary not because the Negro was inferior but “different” from Whites. Du Bois, who had publicly debated Stoddard, had used the example of miscegenation to counter the notion that Whites wanted to be separate from Negroes. Locke went for a more nuanced rebuttal: it was not biological intermixing that rendered Black and White difference a chimera, but rather that the African American culture, which had been absorbed and mimicked by Whites, who grew up reading Brer Rabbit tales and singing spirituals, actually suffused American popular culture. Assimilation was not a one-way street. Whites in America had imbibed and mimicked Black culture even as they remained racist. Once they recognized their debt, Locke believed, a cultural revolution must eventually follow that would recognize African culture as a transformative force in making American culture. A wholly European or White American culture was thus a fiction. The American Mind Emerson had pointed to in 1837 could now be recognized in 1928 as a racially formed Mind in which the African elements were predominant in the way popular American culture formed.
That America was an African culture was too much even for most Negroes to accept in 1928. Locke’s bold prediction fell on deaf ears. Black and White commentators ignored his dialectical mapping of American consciousness as the product of an “Aframerican” culture. Locke still lacked the ability to speak directly to the American Mind when he had the mouthpiece of the Nation article and say unequivocally that American “Beauty” transcended America’s racial “propaganda.” His writings still reflected, perhaps inevitably, the segregated nature of his American mind.
But Locke’s Annals article was a personal triumph, for he had found a way to put together the two aspects of culture—his mother’s culture and that of the folk he had encountered more directly during his time in Nashville. By showing the two antagonistic views of Negro culture dialectically linked, Locke revealed “Afamerican” culture as far more complex than any other commentator had rendered it. Locke had harmonized divergent processes—the Negro completely assimilated Anglo-American values, the Negro had remained a separate cultural formation—and carved out the possibility of a new way of conceptualizing African American art in its relations to American culture. The article also allowed Locke to situate the New Negro awakening within a longer history of syncretic inventiveness, something he had announced but failed to explicate fully in The New Negro. Having found that synthesis, Locke gained confidence. Now, he could begin to separate from the Negro Renaissance and craft new critical personae without simply mimicking or stealing the ideas of other commentators like Hurston.
When Elmer Carter, the editor of Opportunity, asked Locke in December 1928 to begin a series of annual reviews of Negro literature, Locke seized the prospect to create a forum to clarify the mission of African American art and declare himself arbiter of that mission. Just as important, the reviews allowed him to revise his opinions about the Negro Renaissance and create a new identity—the African American critic as prognosticator. More than detailed criticism of individual books, Locke’s “reviews” were prescriptive, prophetic commentary on what ailed the Negro and mappings of what direction healthy Negro literature should go.
Even before the stock market crash of October 1929, for example, Locke predicted in “1928: A Retrospective Review,” the crash of the Negro fad in Harlem literature. Rather than despairing, he cheered the collapse as necessary to return Negro art to a sounder foundation as something pursued by artists devoted to its internal values and not those chasing the latest get-rich scheme on Broadway stages or in the Tin Pan Alley of pop fiction. Along the way, Locke praised Claude McKay’s Home to Harlem as solid, vibrant realism and saw Rudolph Fisher’s Walls of Jericho as proof that the Negro writer could write great satire. Interestingly, he reserved his greatest praise for a woman writer—Nella Larson. Her first novel, Quicksand, was “a living, moving picture of a type not often in the foreground of Negro fiction.” Locke was evidently touched by its portrait of an alienated, educated, sensitive Black woman lost in the paternalism and patriarchy of early twentieth-century segregated America.
Once again, though, Locke’s optimism trumped his desire to criticize and blame. After consigning Du Bois’s novel, Dark Princess, to the dust heap of Negro propaganda, he applauded the promising explosion of little magazines in Boston, Washington, Chicago, and elsewhere, which showed the New Negro impulse to self-expression existed beyond showy Harlem. Deliberative, thoughtful, contemporary Negro culture had much work to do, he concluded, before it could begin to match the seriousness and profundity to be found in recent studies of the African, both ancestral and contemporary, such as Blaise Cendrar’s anthology of African folklore, The African Saga: “Milton Staffer’s symposium entitled Thinking with Africa, the publication of the new quarterly journal of the International Institute of African Languages and Culture … and very notably, I think J. W. Vandercook’s Black Majesty.” Perhaps the new seriousness in African research and fiction forecast a brighter future for Negro culture studies in America, for “even when the reaction comes that was predicted at the outset of this article, there will be a vast net gain that can be counted upon as a new artistic and cultural foundation for a superstructure which it really is the privilege and task of another generation than ours to rear.”21 Emerson would have recognized that a new man had emerged to take up the task he had passed on to another generation—and perhaps another race—to complete: to fashion a vibrant intellectual vision out of the cultures of America.
A profound personal transformation had begun under the veil of White patronage and reached fruition in Nashville. Through an arrangement to help artists find their way, Locke had found his way. With a new mother, Locke had begun to face aspects of his personality and Black culture that he had kept hidden in the past. Despite the pain and humiliation Mason had caused him, Locke was becoming stronger, more direct, and more confident as a thinker. Having left her bosom to enter the South’s, he had found strength in his ability to survive segregation and connect more directly with the African American folk. Less of an aesthete, more than a cultural custodian, Locke was becoming a literary general, directing his ideas, like troops, over a wide landscape he could call his own: American culture.
Alain Locke, ca. 1929. Photograph by Harold Hone. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.