When Locke stepped out of the Art Center after the reception for the 1933 Harmon Foundation exhibit that February, he reentered New York dominated by the Great Depression and the real suffering it was producing. While the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the previous November had buoyed America’s hope that the Depression would soon be over, the nation had suffered through one of the cruelest winters leading up to the presidential swearing-in in March. All around him as he bounded from art exhibition to subway and Pennsylvania Station were signs of how far the city had fallen from the euphoria of a Renaissance he had predicted just eight years ago. Artists had been turned into beggars, veterans into apple sellers, and romantic versifiers into propaganda poets as the smell of death. Black-owned businesses in Harlem were suddenly, almost inexplicably bankrupt.
The art exhibit had been a success in two ways. Locke had succeeded in finding a Negro artist in Richmond Barthé who was comfortable with his homosexuality and adept at expressing it sinuously in sculpture. Barthé also had no difficulty seeing himself as a Negro artist, expressing himself in African-influenced forms, and yet keeping his eye on the goal of all artists to try and create eternal works of art. Locke had also found a new maternal patron in Mary Beattie Brady who, while overbearing and opinionated, allowed him to say what he wanted, without the pathological need to control and censor him in ways Mrs. Mason could not resist. But Brady was also not handing over any money or power to Locke, either. As successful as the exhibition had been, it did not lead anywhere, being the last that the Harmon Foundation would do in which he would play a dominant role. As the cold wind of the worst winter of the Great Depression hit his face, Locke still lacked access to the kind of leverage to foment broad-based cultural production in the early 1930s. So, alone now in a way he had not been in the recent past, Locke focused his attention on polishing his chops at the one thing he could do on his own: be a critic. That, in fact, was the saving grace of being on his own.
Locke still commanded a forum in the world of educated Black readers due to his popular annual retrospective reviews of Negro literature. Those retrospective reviews became the place where he recorded the change in Negro intellectual life and revised his social philosophy self-consciously in light of that change. Wedded publicly to the concept of race as the central metaphor of the Negro experience in America, Locke acknowledged the paradigm shift that had occurred, as a younger generation of writers and scholars matured in the early 1930s, studied at White elite universities, and now argued that class was more important to explaining the Negro’s current desperate plight. This youthful energy was sparking a largely invisible “renaissance” of what he would later call the “Newest Negro” that was bubbling up even in the field of creative literature. As his retrospective reviews increasingly revealed, a plethora of little magazines, theater groups, and art “collectives” had been inspired by the brash intellectual energy that Marxism, with its method of dialectical materialism and its seemingly prophetic prediction of the collapse of capitalism, injected into the New York literary and art communities.
No one knew better than Locke that it was not the script that he had written. Although Locke was not the target of those younger thinkers who began to rail against Negro leadership for having “misled” the Negro in the past, it was a sign of his lack of significance that when the “Young Turks”—E. Franklin Frazier, Abram Harris, and Ralph Bunche—had met in January with the heads of the NAACP in Amenia, New York, and attacked Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, and others for not embracing a class analysis of the Negro plight, Bunche had not even invited Locke to come along. Indeed, Locke was not even mentioned. This was what always happened in Locke’s infatuations with young radicals—they drew upon his insight and support in private but dismissed him in public when around their younger radical friends. He was not even toxic in the social science division at Howard; it was worse—he was seen as irrelevant. Feeling the sting of being ignored, Locke used his retrospective reviews to insert himself into the discussion given that others were not going to do so. The very definition of a retrospective review became a tool for Locke to revise his own cultural philosophy in public and give his audience a consistent education in why looking backward was essential to moving forward.1
That December 1933, Locke would use the review, “The Saving Grace of Realism,” to interpret the political sea change from Black liberalism to Black Marxism as a literary odyssey from Negro romanticism to realism.
We can trust and encourage a literary philosophy that can sustain the devoted art of a Julia Peterkin, that can evoke from the liberal white South a book like The Tragedy of Lynching, that can transform gradually the superficial, caricaturist interest of the early Roark Bradford into the penetrating, carefully studied realism of his latest novel. … And to the extent that James Weldon Johnson’s autobiography represents a new and effective step in Negro biography, it can be attributed to the sober, realistic restraint that dominates it in striking contrast to the flamboyant egotism and sentimentality of much of our previous biographical writing. So we must look to enlightened realism as the present hope of Negro art and literature, not merely because it is desirable for our art to be in step with the prevailing mode and trend of the art and literature of its time—important though that may be—but because both practical and aesthetic interests dictate truth as the basic desideratum in the portrayal of the Negro—and truth is the saving grace of realism.2
What was the truth of Locke’s situation—the saving grace of a realist view of himself as a Black intellectual in 1933, the fourth year of a Great Depression that showed no signs of ending its assault on Black writers, artists, and thinkers, his natural constituency?
A realistic self-assessment would encompass that Locke’s years, roughly from 1927 to 1932, spent embosomed in the maternalism of Mrs. Mason’s patronage, had hurt him by alienating him from the forces of economic and social change that affected the masses of Black people in the Depression. Of course, the key factor in his remaining solvent was that he had a job—a professorship, no less, at Howard University. But the patronage scheme had given him extra money at a time most Black people lacked even the confidence of continued essential earnings, but even more—by running the patronage organization with Hughes, Hurston, and half a dozen other Black artists receiving coin from Mrs. Mason, Locke had been removed from the rest of the Black community’s struggling to make it without such patronage. He had also been isolated by her maternalism, her domination of his psyche, her constant instructions to avoid other Negroes so that now, in 1933, he was alienated from other Negroes who might have been helpful to him. She was also more feeble by 1933, moving into a hospital to live, where she would stay for the next dozen years. Still writing her weekly, the volume and intensity of Locke’s correspondence declined, but also her voice declined in his brain; and with it came a new freedom, but also abandonment, a lack of direction, a lack of surety. But the most important consequence of all that listening to her was a lack of listening to the lumpenproletariat of Black people in the first years of the Great Depression. What Mrs. Mason had never realized is that the urban African Americans who had transitioned through the Great Migration to the North were the greatest source of Black intelligence in America, and her maternalism had driven him away from that.
Now, in 1933, something new was on the scene. A new generation of young White writers was taking up pen and writing stories, novels, essays, and books on the Black reality in America. If Locke was going to survive the Black Literary Depression, he realized he was going to have to use his alienation as a plus, an openness, to what other Black critics were not considering—the writing on the Negro done increasingly and sometimes more effectively by Whites. His saving grace was that he could write about Erskine Caldwell instead of Claude McKay and Jessie Fauset.
As the volume of Black poetry, novels, and nonfiction books plummeted in the Depression, Locke shifted to reviewing more White books of “Negro literature” to establish his authority as their critic too. Of course, such spade work meant praising even modest efforts by White writers to transcend the blatantly racist literary characterization of the Negro in the past. Locke’s own survival as a critic was dependent on separating himself from his past allegiances and forming new ones based on the race and class politics of the 1930s. Ever the “realist,” he pivoted without a blink of an eye. But the pivot was not always as easy for Locke because now Whites felt they were authorities on the Black issue and were willing to assert that authority when it came to vetting Black writers who had had the field to themselves for years. While Locke might inhabit the position of the gatekeeper in his retrospective reviews of Negro creative literature, he was a supplicant to that power structure when, as a writer, he had to submit books for review and critique by others inside American publishing.
The same February in which he successfully challenged Brady’s attempt to define Negro visual art he was fencing with the American Library Association about what qualified as acceptable Negro history. This gig—another one of Locke’s assets as a minted “Negro authority”—was for him to write a pamphlet and recommend a course of readings on the Negro question for distribution throughout the nation’s libraries. The project, “Reading with a Purpose,” was designed to encourage the use of libraries for systematic self-motivated education, part of a wider effort of nonprofit educational or quasi-educational organizations in the 1930s to address the crisis in unemployment by making forms of adult education free and widely available. Locke contracted to write this pamphlet on the American Negro to give it his own particular intellectual stamp. “I knew the thing would be done by some cowardly racialist if I didn’t do it,” he wrote Godmother. “It is put as straight from the shoulder as writing for such an organization will permit—remember it had to go South, North and West and to fit the white and the Negro reader.”3 By doing so, he would make a little money, but also extend his influence by utilizing the institutional reach and apparatus of the American library system.
The achievement did not come without a struggle. After submitting his manuscript and book recommendations, Locke had to wait several weeks while the editor pored over his text and sent it out to anonymous critics who, in turn, tried to second-guess Locke’s recommendations, especially in the field of history. As his editor wrote, “Everyone agrees in admiring the manuscript but there is some difference in opinion about the selections of books. Of course I am aware of the fact that the titles you selected, or nearly all of them, were on the list we sent to you of books recommended by reader’s advisement of the librarians. In spite of that fact the critics of your manuscript, who are better informed in this particular field, have offered criticisms which I think should be brought to your attention and I hope you will change one or two of the books at least.” In particular, “Carter Woodson’s book has been questioned by several. The critics say that it is written with a bias that makes it inadvisable to recommend. Would you be willing to substitute Brawley’s Short History of the American Negro, which seems generally acceptable? Our sociologist calls it the best thing available.” In addition, the critics wanted to substitute Countee Cullen’s Caroling Dusk for V. F. Calverton’s Anthology of American Negro Literature. They cited the “many purple pages” in Mary White Ovington’s Portraits in Color and argued that something other than the special issue of the Annals of the American Academy devoted to the study of the Negro should be recommended because of the difficulty of the libraries stocking this rather specialized item.4
By 1933, cultural organizations like the ALA were determined to police the version of Black knowledge they would disseminate to the American public. The ALA had “our sociologist” who felt authoritative enough to declare that Brawley’s Short History was better than Woodson’s and confident enough of that authority to tell Locke, an eminent Black scholar, what to put on a reading list for largely Black readers. White academics were now in the game of Black Studies in a way that had not been the case in 1925, and they were reacting against Negro nationalist–based histories like Woodson’s that reflected a sharper critique of White power in the history of the Negro. But Woodson enjoyed tremendous popularity in the Black community, by virtue of his Association for the Study of Negro Life and History conferences, teacher workshops, and directed marketing of books to Black readers, even if he was unpopular with White academics who saw the arc of African American studies going in a more socialist and integrationist direction in the 1930s. Such White authorities felt comfortable trying to marginalize Woodson’s work as flawed by anti-White “bias,” but Locke knew that if he wanted his series to resonate with the Black reading public, he had to have someone with Woodson’s Black lumpen cache.
Locke wrote back to the editor: “After wrenches of change of mind, I find myself coming back to my original judgment about these books. The Brawley short history is too simple and orthodox, and I think we must consider that the younger generation today do not want their facts too highly glossed or watered down.” Locke was educating the ALA that if it wanted to have any authenticity with the younger generation of Black readers, it would have to promote books that reflected their criticality toward America in the fourth decade of the twentieth century, especially given the Great Depression. Locke respected Woodson’s fierce integrity in his histories that pulled no punches about the hypocrisy of American institutions and his promotion of self-determination as a legitimate Black response to living in a segregated America. As Locke explained to Miller, “I have felt I should thread through with a fairly systematic interpretation,” because he was “conscious all along of the necessity for putting a rather chaotic house into some sort of intelligible order.” That “order” was a Black cultural pluralist paradigm in which Black Studies was more than simply the record of successful assimilation of American “civilization” that Brawley narrated, but also a critique of the American project in light of the treatment of the Negro. Similarly, Locke wanted to keep the Annals collection with his own essay, “The Negro’s Contribution to American Art and Literature,” as well as The New Negro, to force recognition that Negroes possessed a unique culture and a unique history of resistance against complete acquiescence to White cultural supremacy.5
While a minor skirmish in Locke’s biography, the tussle with ALA is important for two reasons. One, it exemplified Locke’s new mood—willingness to stand up to White authority and risk losing a gig because of a philosophic principle of self-agency as a Black thinker who knew his mind and resources, and had been strengthened in standing up for himself by his work with Mrs. Mason. Despite all the abuse he took from her, something of her fierce strength had been migrated into his subjectivity, so that he was not going weak at the knees when confronted with White authority that had a bit of power behind it. But the second point is as important: Locke had picked up the new militant mood among unemployed, heartbroken Negro men and women, who had nowhere to turn for knowledge that explained their condition, something that had fallen back into the dungeon of pessimism about the future that the Negro Renaissance had temporarily interrupted. He had to find a way to connect with and hopefully rescue from total despair the mind of the still-thinking Negro who worked ten-hour days for a dollar and read books to keep his or her mind alive. He had to find a way to produce something in the 1930s that would resonate with all aspects of the thinking Black reading public like The New Negro had done in the mid-1920s. Having recommended The New Negro to be part of the Reading with a Purpose series, his publisher assured him that it would keep the book in print—perhaps longer than it would have done so otherwise, for an eight-year-old book selling for $5.00 in the depths of the Depression.
The larger literary problem for Locke—and the Negro Renaissance—was that the books from the 1920s and even those being published in 1933 were not destined to become the classics of American or even African American Studies. While McKay and certainly Fauset might see Locke’s critical reviews of their books as an act of betrayal, the truth was that both Banana Bottom and Comedy, American Style reflected a moment that, politically at least, had passed with the Great Depression. Their themes, especially intra-racial conflicts around class, peasant versus bourgeois origins, color and Victorian ideology, did not command White attention by 1933. They enjoyed no vogue in the 1930s the way Home to Harlem and There Is Confusion had in the 1920s. As Locke was beginning to note in his retrospective reviews, the paradigmatic form of the 1930s was not poetry or fiction, but the documentary exposé.
Fauset was at the end of her creative writing life, a victim of the masculinist bias of the Harlem Renaissance. Just as important, she was imprisoned by the middle-class Black imagination that, so far, had failed to create a great work of literature. The Black middle class was so hemmed in by segregation that it produced fiction or poetry mainly about its marginality as a class. Fauset’s cruel charge in her letter to Locke that he was a critic because he was a failure as a creative writer contained more than a crumb of truth. Both of them had been prepared by a middle class that was not a true middle class, not an owner of the means of the production, at least in Philadelphia and Washington, and thus were sons and daughters of a class that lacked the boldness to produce transformative writers.
Unlike Fauset, Locke was neither a creative writer, nor about to stop writing critical essays when Fauset stopped writing novels. But he was unable to move beyond writing the essay form, because he rarely slowed down enough to invest his intellect in a single, larger project. There also was the sexual problem: he was always running off to Europe each summer, hoping that it would produce a novel or substantial work, but it never did. He looked to Mason to give him the approval to avoid serious work. “I was much touched to hear that you thought I ought to go on with my usual vacation trip and the treatment” in Europe, he wrote to Godmother in May. He confessed that he remembered her earlier critique that by going to Europe he foreclosed the one opportunity he had all year to sit still and write something enduring. “I would really like to stay home and write, if conditions could ever be found for a decently healthful and relaxing atmosphere. I wonder if people ever stop to think what impossible conditions America imposes on Negroes who want to live and express themselves finely and creatively!” Once again, he voiced the bourgeois narrative of racial limits. “Of course, you have always known, and have in so many cases tried to help take the pressure off a few,” although never to the extent of inviting Colored godchildren to spend the summer with her in Maine. That was now out of the question, as Mason’s health had plummeted, she had been hospitalized, and Cornelia Chapin, one of her nieces, had taken over the reading of Locke’s letters. While he made plans to sail on the Bremen on June 17, 1933, he returned to his familiar reportage with Mason, keeping her abreast of the latest accomplishments—and failures—of the New Negroes. “Aaron Douglas opened an exhibit today at the Cay-Delbos gallery. He has about twenty canvases, mostly still life vividly and strongly painted. There is no doubt of a maturing of his ability to say things on canvas.” But Locke could not restrain his canonical view that the only true vocation for the Negro artist was to render Negroes. “As I told him, it seems that he has increased his power to say things but has forgotten the things he started out to say. The Negro things are weak and are echoes of his earlier work—not even as promising as those things were.” That appeared to be a judgment Locke could have rendered on much of the artistic production of New Negroes in the 1930s.6
“I shall try to be a real Negro and improvise,” he wrote to Mason in a bon voyage letter. “In fact, though suffering, that is just what is keeping Negroes alive these days—they have the art of day to day living—and while it has been a handicap in times past—today it is an advantage.”7 As usual, he kept up the barrage of bile against Hughes. “I have met one Ernestine Evans on the ship—a radical publisher’s agent who knows Langston. She says he is returning to the States via Siberia and China—and that his book on the Russian treatment of minorities is coming out soon.” That reminded Locke that in a “premature and unguarded talk I had years ago (you remember) with L. about our going to Russia” that he, Locke, had mentioned the idea of a book on the Soviet treatment of minorities. That resentment was temporarily relieved when Locke was noticed by a reporter on board the ship and asked for an interview, in which he said “among other things” that he was going abroad to “look into the question of the European treatment of minorities (especially in Germany)—as there was a deep connection between these world questions and our Negro problem.”8
In fact, Locke was not undertaking a study of minorities in Europe, but attempting, finally, to get down to work on a long-delayed biography of Frederick Douglass, a project that Mason may have suggested. He had many notes from Douglass’s papers with him in Europe, where he began to “dig in” and “digest it by elimination”—a curious anal metaphor. Before exposure to Mason’s philosophy, he confided, he would have tried to write a biography of the entire life; but now, he realized that to write something that really lived required pruning away the dross. “I see now that I must simplify and clarify what I have before me, and if I should succeed, his life story will live again—and be influential in this and the next generation.” What attracted him, and perhaps Mason, to Douglass was his “manliness,” for as Locke observed, “we need manly Negroes above all else.” Yet, Locke had seemed to view Douglass through a narrow notion of what his manly rebellion against racial convention consisted of. “I have been on the look-out for defects—but I find at least little egotism and no false pride in his earlier work. After emancipation, vanity and egotism do come in stronger, and I take it, that led to his second marriage and his loss of power.” In a surprising way, Locke saw Douglass through a Black Nationalist lens uninformed by his own struggles with the problem of finding love within his own racial group. Mason may have been responsible for that tack. It was problematical, not only for understanding Douglass but also for fitting his thought with the intellectual tenor of the 1930s. Racial essentialism was increasingly out of step with the times, which tended toward interracialism, not only in the daily practice of Leftist organizations but also in the theory of social advancement being advanced by Marxists.
Being abroad did allow Locke to observe the spread of Nazism in Germany and Austria, and theorize about one of his favorite subjects, Europeans who shared Negro attributes. “You know, Godmother, Austrians are somewhat like Negroes—in their artistic fineness and nonchalance” and, in particular, for Locke’s way of thinking, the similarity to Negroes in that Austrians “have to endure so much at the hands of more practical cruder people. Just now, they are having a terrible time fighting off German propaganda to turn Austria Nazi—which of course means annexation.” What Locke could not avoid seeing was the way in which Hitler had transformed Austria and the Germany he had come to know and love. “Almost every other day a border guard is shot from ambush—and with printed propaganda forbidden, the Germans are crowding the air with propaganda radio often on Austrian wave lengths that spoil their concert programs. Isn’t that the height of devilry—I should say the depth?” The Austrians and the liberal-minded Germans became the minorities Locke was studying in Europe. He began to keep notebooks written in coded English to mail home to himself from Germany to keep them from being seized. From Berlin he exclaimed: “But what a world—you cannot wink an eyelid today or something startling has stolen up on you. The mad drama is going at such a reeling pace.” Then, “what they say about Germany is all too true. They have loosed a hoodlum element and cannot leash it again—all sorts of violence are being perpetrated in Germany now—and the concentration camps of political enemies are unspeakable in their brutality. But what nation has clean enough hands to stop them and call a halt! Roosevelt should dare, and would, I think, if he hadn’t already his hands full with the domestic situation. But Hitler has already twice reminded the United States, a propos of protests over the Jewish pogroms, about the United States treatment and lynching of Negroes.”9 Here, Locke voiced an idea that would later flower into his editing another issue of the Survey Graphic in 1942, “Color: The Unfinished Business of Democracy,” in which he would revisit the notion that America’s moral authority vis-á-vis Germany was crippled because of the propaganda weakness of America’s own treatment of its minorities.
As Locke prepared to return to the United States, he waxed philosophic about the way in which the aristocracy in Austria and Germany had enabled the rise of Hitler. “Several people think that the monarchists and Junkers were using Hitler to offset the rising tide of socialism and communism, counting on keeping the power in their own hands behind the throne, but that the movement got out of their hands and the Hilarities by a coup took the reins themselves. They now secretly wish something would happen to unseat Hitler, but must carry through their gestures of support and approval.”10 Yet, remarkably, he wished to remain in Vienna. “Really I wish I had a quiet year here in which to write and think—rather than what faces me in a fortnight or so—the return to Hades. And yet in these uncertain times one perhaps ought to be thankful for bed and board in Hades.” In that last line, “realism” was beginning to intrude on Locke’s romantic attachment to Austria and things German. Even he realized that as bad as Howard University and Washington, D.C., were for his Eurocentric aesthetic self, the fantasy of a Black Austrian life of the mind was being interrupted—along with the radio broadcasts of Viennese concerts—by violence and terror.
Back home in October, he was once again disappointed with the quality of Black cultural productions. “I do want to see the Paul Robeson film of Emperor Jones,” he confided to a bedridden Mason, for whom going to a movie theater with Locke was now out of the question. “A few discriminating critics call attention to his poor acting while praising his magnificent singing. … If successful they say Porgy will be filmed—and there with Rose McClendon we have a real actress, and one who deserves a chance. Her art should be captured for posterity—and the inspiration of another generation of Negro actors.” Unfortunately, Locke was thoroughly disappointed by the Emperor Jones film. “How the critics can rave over it as they have is hard to understand—the photography is poor—and the acting not only overdone—but done almost completely from the outside. Gilpin played the character from the inside—with sincerity and genuine force. Paul barnstorms and poses—to me it is a very poor piece of work. This is all too bad—and is part of the times, I suppose.” By contrast, Locke continued to praise women actors and singers who seemed to honor the aesthetic values of deliberative creativity. “Abbie Mitchell gave a recital to a packed house in the Howard University chapel. She was grand—she makes up in maturity and understanding for the loss of the early bloom in her voice—and whenever anything deeply dramatic or tragic is called for she registers as few American artists can. She sometimes recalls Schumann-Heink—however it is best to say she is herself—since she has a unique range and is true soprano in her upper register. I mention this because the prejudiced local newspaper gave her two-thirds of a column write-up and compared her with Schumann-Heink.”11
Locke contrasted the way her performance honored the classical values of Black expression to the crass way in which the art of Black history was being promoted in America. Here his ambivalence toward Carter G. Woodson surfaced, but also his recognition that as a speaker he still struggled to connect with a mass Black public audience. Invited to give a lecture on African art for Woodson’s ASNLH, Locke lamented the commercial way in which Black history and culture was sold. He was overwhelmed by a slew of meetings, handshaking, and meaningless talk. Of course, he liked his own talk on African art and thought it much better than the first one he had read to her in 1927 when they met. “And if I had dared put you in a front seat in my imagination, it would have been still better. But I could not after one glance at the audience—there was just too much dead wood there.” Lacking the ability to set his audience on fire about African art, Locke fell back into a familiar tirade—blaming the Black rank and file for its lack of inspiration.12
More hopeful to Locke was the political news. “All we hear of the administration’s policy toward both the Negro and the Indian is more favorable than any administration since Theodore Roosevelt’s.”13 Later he went to hear President Roosevelt’s address to the Twenty-fifth Anniversary meeting of the Federal Council of Churches and remarked on how inspiring it was. “His speech was as simply and beautifully phrased as one of Lincoln’s, and his voice rang clear” without the occasional “false demagogic tone [that] has crept into his voice if I have detected aright from close listening to him on the radio.” While inspired by Roosevelt’s “3 sentences on lynching—but what a clear and strong stand”—Locke worried that “if Roosevelt fails—where shall we be—and most of what he is trying to save doesn’t deserve to be saved.”14 Even more inspiring politically was the activities against segregation that Negroes themselves were launching in his own town.
I got back to find that the younger element in Washington had organized a New Negro Alliance and were beginning a real common-sense campaign for Negro self-help and employment. They have so far forced the A and P Grocery stores and a chain of drug stores to employ about a dozen Negro clerks after a house to house canvas of neighborhoods in the Negro section persuading people not to trade with these stores unless they did so. There is a new spirit stirring in the ranks—it is only our leadership that is bad and selfish. I was very impressed and touched by their selection of the New Negro slogan—Saturday I went to one of their meetings—and remained in the back row even though they insisted on a speech. I shall work with them quietly and with pride in their initiative and courage.15
Naming the New Negro Alliance after The New Negro was more than a compliment: it signaled that the awakening of criticality of the New Negro in the mid-1920s had, in fact, blossomed into class and racial activism in the 1930s. The New Negro: An Interpretation had had a broader impact than Locke imagined, as Doxey Wilkerson, the young communist educator attested. “That book opened my eyes to that there were Negroes who were artists, who were poets, writers, who were somebody.”16 That “somebodyness” meant Negroes were subjects who were activists because they realized they too were citizens with power to reshape American life. The New Negro Alliance was a step forward in the argument that the Negro possessed a cultural citizenship that demanded change. John Davis, the young organizer of the movement, realized that the Negro as consumer was a powerful force and that the boycott was an effective weapon against racist segregationist policies of commercial establishments in Washington. This activist extension of Locke’s idea of a New Negro was a compelling affirmation of the ability of the spirit of the New Negro to reinvent itself beyond aesthetics.
Yet that affirmation of his nomenclature did not move Locke to invest time and energy in the group. Shortly afterward, he was on the road again, closing out the year with a lecture trip “into the heart of the South—Atlanta. I hadn’t seen for some six years,” he confessed to Mason, “so I accepted the invitation. … It was so good to see the South—stricken as it is, and bristling with new possibilities of conflict between the races (over competition for jobs)—it was nevertheless a sense of belonging which came over me.”17 Here was something of a breakthrough for Locke, a man who had never before felt a sense of belonging in the South, around rank-and-file Black people. That did not mean that he really felt that he was one with them, although he tried.
[This is] due, of course, to my new sense of being truly Negro and part of the real folk. How fine they are even in their depravity and almost hopeless backwardness—for after all they all have a genuine joy in living and a direct simplicity and sincerity. If only that could be kept along with education—and maybe that will in time be possible. Certainly there will have to be different leadership in the schools and colleges—but already they are shaking free of the missionary influences. The young students speak and act more naturally—and simply despise those of their teachers who are hypocrites.18
His condescension did not obliterate his sense that the New Negro was alive and growing. For “wherever there is a sincere intelligent young teacher[,] he has a group of bright youngsters around him—who protect his radicalism in most instances.” He went on to document the emergence of these New Negro teachers: “For example—at Petersburg, Virginia when I spoke December 10th, about three such teachers quietly gathered some twenty-odd students in a fraternity room in the basement of the men’s dormitory—and we talked back and forth for over three hours.” Locke was being shown into a kind of “underground” where the students and younger faculty spoke “direct, frank—not over-optimistic, and their greatest hatred was for the hand-picked Negro leader who betrays those whom he is supposed to lead. That means much, I think, for the future.” In particular, it was “a welcome surprise” to find the same New Negro Alliance “spirit in the far South.”19
Locke’s challenge was clear: how was he going to connect with this New Negro Alliance spirit among the New Negro of the 1930s? Clearly, protest, the one element of the original New Negro conception he had exorcised from his anthology was back with power in the 1930s. It was #blacklivesmatter energy bubbling up from the youth of the 1930s to seize control of their lives no matter what the costs—and in some cases in the South that cost would be death. There was courage in the protests against the Scottsboro Boys in 1931 that had blossomed into an international movement for their freedom by 1933. But Locke had left himself out of that, had been out of the Left as a whole. It was time to find a way back in to the source of Black intellectual fervent in America or die as a relevant Black intellectual, looking backward for Hughes, Hurston, and Mrs. Mason’s advising.
That was the saving grace of realism Locke needed as he stumbled into 1934.