35

Bronze Booklets, Gold Art

Early in the 1930s, when Locke happened to be in Washington, D.C., on Saturday nights, sometimes he would stop in at his friend Ralph Bunche’s house. As the historian Harold Lewis recalled many years later, a small group of young Black social scientists “tended to focus around Ralph Bunche” at Howard University, “not only because he was an attractive (that’s not really the word) personality, but also because he was one of the few faculty members who lived on campus in one of the two houses that are long gone.” Lewis recalled that “we used to gather there every Saturday night and I recall that Locke was rarely a visitor to the group, but Ralph Bunche, Abe Harris, the economist … several of the younger people, and [E. Franklin] when he came from Fisk was accepted as a member. It had such a different perspective on this whole matter of social change … we thought the future of mankind was tied up with some sort of Popular Front and it wasn’t racial.”¹

Bunche was an “attractive personality,” and a highly attractive man. What Lewis and others at those meetings did not know was how close Bunche and Locke were, even though Locke was “rarely” a participant in Bunche’s Saturday night meetings. But that Locke dropped by at all suggested Locke realized what was brewing at Bunche’s house on Saturdays—a new renaissance of thinking, this time launched by some of the finest young African American social scientists of the 1930s, whose discussions of political theory, sociological controversies, cultural politics, and the prospects for a global revolution were laying the groundwork of a 1930s awakening that would rival in a different way the one Locke had chronicled in the 1920s. After all, the New Negro literary awakening had been launched in fact in Washington, D.C., by Georgia Douglas Johnson, whose Saturday Nighters had featured Jean Toomer. Now, in the 1930s, another generation of radical-thinking young men, albeit educated in elite White universities, and immersed in Marxian economic and modern sociological theories, were convinced their thinking would lead to the liberation of Black people in ways older race theories could not. While other radical intellectuals were meeting and discussing these issues in the early 1930s, what distinguished these men, of course, was that they were African American, forced to teach at Howard University though possessing Ivy League PhDs, and convinced that the Black experience was at the center of capitalist exploitation in America. In particular, they believed that African Americans needed to eschew Black nationalism and race-only theorizing because such nationalist sentiments made it more difficult for the Black masses to do what was absolutely necessary in the historical moment: join with White workers in such progressive labor organizations as the Committee on Industrial Opportunity and challenge capitalism in a Popular Front.

Of course, economic determinism was not Locke’s philosophy of social change, and he bruised easily in the rough-and-tumble tussling conversations that erupted on Bunche’s Saturday night evenings—debates really between highly educated, self-confident, even arrogant young Black intellectuals who felt the future of the race depended on advancing the correct line on social change during the Depression. Abram Harris, the young economist, who would eventually be the first to leave Howard for the University of Chicago, was particularly critical of Locke and Du Bois, as well as others, for emphasizing race over class in their analyses of Negro progress. E. Franklin Frazier, the sociologist, regarded Locke as something of a dilettante since Frazier seemed to turn out a massive new tome on the Negro Family every couple of years, while Locke produced mainly magazine articles that did not even appear, generally, in scholarly journals.² Harris also recalled that Locke was a furtive, almost invisible figure around Howard in 1934, when the group around Bunche really started to articulate what would become a Black Radical critique of capitalism with the Black masses at the center of it. Most of them dismissed him as a real social thinker, having never been exposed to his Race Contacts lectures. But Harris noted they sensed that Locke had been a radical much earlier at Howard, but that he had been “burnt” by the experience.³ They did not know he had been fired, but knew that he was protective, aloof, and, most often, alone.

Part of Locke’s problem was that solitude did not really work for him creatively. His best writing was always done when husbanded by the creativity of young men around him. How could he reproduce that kind of collaboration of the 1920s in the current historical moment? He did not agree enough with the intellectual community around Bunche, and he seemed not to be able to generate a new one around himself. How could he tap the intellectual energy of this new scholarly Black community around Bunche without having to join in with their largely heterosexist, Black masculinist Marxian culture generating up out of their scholarly activism on Howard’s campus?⁴

Where could Locke turn for a community to fire his muse, now that the old ones had turned against him or abandoned him in insanity? Early in 1933, Morse Cartwright, the director of the American Association for Adult Education, asked Locke to evaluate two “experimental” efforts in Negro adult education at the Harlem “Schomburg” library and Atlanta’s Negro library. These efforts were administered by the AAAE and funded by the Carnegie Corporation. Locke had been in the hunt to secure funding for his projects from the Carnegie Corporation since 1928 when he contacted them about an African Studies Department at Howard University. He renewed his efforts in 1931 when seeking life support for the dying Harlem Museum of African Art. After Frederick Keppel, the Carnegie Corporation head, rejected that request, Locke realized that he would have to develop proposals that fit already-existing program initiatives of the Corporation. Corporate funding required outside evaluation, unlike his Mason projects. Locke acceded to a request from Cartwright to evaluate the Harlem and Atlanta projects, because he needed a nonprofit, nationally based, and professionally managed organization like the American Association for Adult Education to sanction his work for the corporate funder if he was ever to access Carnegie funds.

Locke entered AAAE as an evaluator but eventually transformed himself into a subcontractor of a program the AAAE sanctioned and the Carnegie Corporation funded. By gaining this institutional support, Locke showed his growing institutional competency in negotiating the sea change from personal to corporate patronage of the arts and education in mid-twentieth-century America. He was no stranger to adult education even if one considered it unusual, at first glance, that one of the most highly educated Black men in the nation would invest years of effort in a program to bring simplified knowledge to adult learners seemed a stretch. Adult education had roots in his own family history back in the nineteenth century when his grandfather and father, like other Black Victorians, had educated ex-slaves and their descendants through literary, historical, and church-based self-help associations as well as schools. As early as 1927, Locke had been attending local Negro adult-education meetings, learning the cast of characters who ran such initiatives in Harlem and Atlanta, and engaging them in discussions about what should be the nature of adult education for the Negro. When Morse Cartwright, the head of the AAAE, whom Locke had been courting for years, asked Locke to evaluate these projects for their renewal of their three-year grant from the Carnegie Corporation, Locke had his chance to define himself publicly as an authority on adult education.

Before Locke had completed his report, Cartwright asked him to present his preliminary findings in May 1933 at the American Association of Adult Education’s annual convention in Amherst, Massachusetts. Locke used that platform to launch a bold idea. After noting that the Harlem and Atlanta adult-education projects had benefited from being located in libraries—especially the 135th Branch of the New York Public Library in Harlem “by virtue of its unusual equipment of the Schomburg Collection” of Negro history and art materials—Locke judiciously criticized the pervasive segregation of American education, the lack of basic skills of the adults who attended, but also the great hunger for knowledge of Negro history, politics, art, and economics that was voiced by the participants. Locke’s “judiciousness” was especially noted. As Cartwright put it: “I should like to add my personal appreciation of the careful, scholarly way in which you described the Harlem Experiment and brought out the important implications which it has not only for Negro adult education, but for the problem of racial development. Mr. Bryson spoke for all of us when, during the panel discussion on Wednesday morning, he commended the philosophic temper and measured restraint of your paper.”⁵

Locke’s remarks convinced the AAAE leadership that he was a “safe Negro,” something Mason had already informed him was one of the prerequisites of White people in power giving him power. He was not someone who would hurt them or embarrass the adult-education movement by throwing up in their faces the obvious—that segregation and racism was a crime against public education. But he also impressed them as the Renaissance man, with broad learning who had little or no political interests, but who only wanted to help those less fortunate and less educated than he. His conversation was sprinkled with references to Plato, John Dewey, Greek culture, classical music, and world literature, and he made them feel confident that in advancing adult education for Negroes he meant to open up the minds of poor Negroes to the worldly knowledge he possessed. Impeccably dressed, holding forth on pedagogy theory as easily as the realities of Negro education in the South, Locke impressed them as embodying the kind of enlightened inquiry they wished for Negro adult education even if it did not exemplify it yet in its programs. Locke had convinced them that he was a disinterested scholar who would steer the Negro adult-education movement away from what they regarded as “propaganda”—analyses that blamed all of the Negro’s problems on White people and racism—and toward cultivating a desire for self-education and rewards of the life of the mind available to Negro adult learners albeit in a segregated library system.

Locke utilized this positive regard to make an even bolder suggestion: given the paucity of quality research guides for Negro adult learners, why not have the Carnegie Corporation fund the preparation of materials—easy-to-read syllabi or pamphlets—that answered the substantive questions the Harlem and Atlanta adult learners raised in their discussion sessions? He included that proposal as part of the list of recommendations in his report of how best to continue the “work for Negro centers in Adult Education.” The first recommendation, of course, was to continue funding the two projects and perpetuate credible work done already, especially as both projects had excessive race propagandizing and overemphasis on practical knowledge. Second, Locke proposed that the key weakness of these programs—that they lacked adequate study materials for the population targeted—be overcome by allowing him to publish a series of “syllabi” on subjects of interest to the students. Over time, as he was asked to refine this idea in a series of memoranda, the syllabi evolved into “booklets” authored by professionally trained young Black scholars on topics such as Black politics, art, economics, music, literature, drama, and so forth, that had been established as desired areas of learning for these programs.

Perhaps the most challenging recommendation was the third one—to fund a young man or woman “of high scholastic equipment” to be a roving ambassador of adult education, who would visit the projects, consult with the librarians and clients about their needs, and stimulate the local chapters with strategies on how to get Black people to come and grow their minds. This ambassador would help start similar adult-education projects in communities that lacked them. Having such a trained person circulating nationally would counterbalance one of the weaknesses that Locke pointed out about the local adult-education advisory boards and committees, that they were far too often staffed by people with civic goodwill but no scholarly or higher educational training to make the programs anything more than perfunctory. Locke also recommended that Negro adult-education work be connected to some “permanently organized institution in the communities already catering to the cultural and social needs of the Negro group, such as a Negro college or University, branch public library.” But the heart of the program from Locke’s standpoint was the production of these “syllabi,” for even alone they would raise the level of learning in these projects and bring the emerging criticality of modern Black humanities and social science to a lay public.⁶

Locke offered to pull together a group of scholars—here he had in mind the scholars arrayed around Ralph Bunche at those Saturday-night gatherings—to write the series of syllabi or pamphlets and sell these booklets to individuals, libraries, schools, and so on. As usual, with Locke, there was always a double motivation—his self-promotion as the one who would coordinate and benefit from the arrangement and the altruistic impact of distributing knowledge to people who lacked the opportunity to get a college or university education. Rather than provide the bare minimum of reading, arithmetical, and technical knowledge to Blacks in order for them to get a job and accept “their place” in a segregated society, Locke offered to deliver critical knowledge on art, literature, politics, economics, even education itself, in short, inexpensive pamphlets. He would call them the Bronze Booklets.

It might seem odd that Locke, one of the most educated men in the United States, and one of the most difficult professors for students to understand at Howard University, would choose to create an adult-education project to publish easy to understand pamphlets to the Black masses. But in some respects, he had little alternative. The usual avenues of advancement for a professor like Locke were blocked. Racism kept him at Howard University and away from those kind of research universities in his field of philosophy that would have allowed him to develop a complex expression of his views at the highest level of sophistication. His hopes to generate that kind of enlightenment at Howard University were dashed early in 1934 just after he returned from his New Year’s break in New York. One day his door burst open and an extremely agitated Albert Dunham, the junior philosopher in the department, entered, verbally abused Locke, and then abruptly left. As Locke confided to Mrs. Mason, “The next day I barely got off with a sound neck after a struggle in the office” as Dunham chased the much smaller Locke around his desk and into the hallway, where Locke called for help. Mercifully, other professors, secretaries, and students came quickly after hearing the noise and subdued the unhinged Dunham. Locke “arranged to have him committed for observation to Gallinger Hospital,” but soon Dunham was transferred to St. Elizabeth’s, Washington, D.C.’s renowned psychiatric hospital. Locke’s friend, psychiatrist Dr. Benjamin Karpman, most likely took charge of the case. Diagnosed with “dementia praecox,” or paranoid schizophrenia, it is known today that Dunham had suffered from this condition previously. He would never recover from this breakdown, never return to Howard University, and never fulfill his considerable promise.⁷

Dunham’s breakdown shook Locke. “Of course after the struggle I went myself to our hospital—and after an examination just retreated to a private room for rest overnight—but nothing developed. “But you can imagine,” he confided to Mrs. Mason, “that I have had to blank out everything like cutting an electric switch.”⁸ Dunham’s illness was a tremendous professional loss for Locke, since Dunham was the most brilliant Black philosopher of his generation and also someone whom Locke hoped would inspire him to renew his interest in professional philosophy. The loss was deeply personal because of Locke’s barely hidden attraction for Dunham. Since the collapse of his fantasy about a lover-muse relationship with Langston Hughes, Locke had searched for someone who would give his work—and his life—meaning. While there is no evidence Dunham was gay, Locke courted him, most likely had sex with him, as if he believed Dunham was open to a love affair. Is it possible that Dunham’s attack on Locke was his reaction to Locke’s having slept with him? Or was this attack, which followed a steady increase in the frequency and intensity of Dunham’s breakdowns once he arrived at Howard, his reaction to the reality that after a brilliant career at the University of Chicago he had no alternative but to teach, perhaps forever, at a segregated school? Was Dunham increasingly frustrated that at Howard, his philosophy colleague was an aging gay philosopher known more for race propaganda than first-order philosophy? Surely, none of these stimuli alone would have been enough to produce the permanent psychotic break that Dunham experienced. Still, any of them could have been the final straw.

Dunham may have been in Locke’s mind when he wrote an unpublished essay in 1937 titled “On Insanity,” which he shared with Benjamin Karpman. In it Locke argues that brilliant minorities were especially prone to mental illness because society has no place for them—or rather only a place that suffocates their genius. Remarkably, Locke speculates—ever so briefly—on how homosexual and racial minorities are particularly vulnerable to psychic breakdowns because society deems them abnormal. Locke usually took a “tough-minded” view of any attempt to link psychological difficulties to racism, suggesting to friends and lovers that racism brought out the spiritual discipline in Negroes—or if it did not, they were lost. But “On Insanity” admitted such discipline crippled Negroes who internalized the “discipline” of segregation or homophobia. Gifted Negroes who tried to live a life of reason in an irrational segregated America faced a daily struggle with questions of what constituted sanity. Locke’s hospitalization following Dunham’s attack suggests that it touched Locke in ways he found difficult to handle.

At forty-nine years old, Locke was a respected middle-aged professor, but a peculiar one as well. Howard students giggled about his nervous tics, his peculiar habits, and his strange phobias. On one occasion, students who knew he never touched the doorknob first when the bell rang and the class emptied played a trick on him. All the students in class refused to exit before him. Locke became nervous, urging the students—“go on, go on out.” After students refused and repeatedly said, “No, after you Dr. Locke,” he took a handkerchief out of his pocket, grabbed the doorknob with it, and exited hurriedly.⁹ Locke too had been a promising philosophy PhD expected to make a dent in his field of value theory, but he had not. Instead, he had adapted to the reality of segregation, had become a “Negro writer,” a “Negro critic,” and a “Negro leader,” and then struggled to inject his philosophical acumen into “race work.” Sitting in his office alone while his friend and erstwhile philosophical collaborator was incarcerated, Locke had to wonder if they were not both in straitjackets.

Two weeks after Dunham’s collapse, a letter from Jessie Fauset delivered another blow that showed the road forward would probably not be through creative writers he could nurture as he had done in the early 1920s. Stewing over Locke’s patronizing review of her novel, Comedy, American Style, the 1934 retrospective review, Fauset released a barrage of criticisms that summed up their tense, decade-long professional relationship. “I have always disliked your attitude toward my work dating from the time years ago when you went out of your way to tell my brother that the dinner given at the civic club for ‘There Is Confusion’ wasn’t for me. I still remember the consummate cleverness with which you that night as toastmaster strove to keep speech and comment away from the person for whom the occasion was meant.” She not only accused him of bias against her but also of rendering invisible other women writers of the New Negro movement who were co-creators of the literary frisson that led to the Harlem Renaissance awakening. “Incidentally,” Fauset continued, “I may tell you now that that idea originated with Regina Anderson and Gwendolyn Bennett, both members of a little literary club with which I was then associated. How you and one or two others sought to distort the idea and veil its original graciousness I in common with one or two others have known for years.”¹⁰

Unfortunately for Fauset, this women’s literary group had not felt confident enough to advance this graciousness without enlisting Charles Johnson to help them pull it off. And Johnson, in turn, was not confident enough to run the event without turning to the precocious Alain Locke, who made the event about his male writers, many of whom were gay and viewed subsequently as the leading lights of New Negro fiction. The Opportunity dinner was the first salvo in an internecine war between Black gay men and Black women for much of the 1920s, and it came to a head in Fauset’s letter in 1933. Fauset had a valid point: Locke had orchestrated a process that decentered women writers in his choice of whom to include in anthologies to review in his essays and to promote, and in doing so had advanced a male subjectivity as normative in the New Negro movement even though its original impetus had come from women writers.

From Locke’s perspective, he was evaluating Comedy, American Style within the context of the 1930s and the necessity New Negro literature had to adapt to a new situation. By January 1934, Negro literature had “become a prominent and permanent strain in contemporary American literature” and no longer a minority preserve in which Negro writers could carry on in isolation or ignore the presence of White writers. With such books as The Conjure Man Dies by Rudolph Fisher, The Southern Road by Sterling Brown, and Folk Culture on St. Helena Island by Guy B. Johnson, “the typical Negro author is no longer propagandist … the average white author is now neither a hectic faddist nor a superficial or commercialized exploiter.”¹¹ The dominant trend was away from the “moralizing Puritans” and toward social realism, with one prominent exception, Miss Fauset. “Lacking forceful style and handling,” her novel, he charged, was too “mid-Victorian” to be relevant.¹² Social realism, a harbinger of socialist masculinity, marginalized women’s voices and women’s stories, no less than New Negro primitivism of the 1920s.

Rather than accuse him of misogyny, Fauset attacked Locke for being racially biased. “It has always both amused and annoyed me to read your writing. … But today’s article is positively the worst because in it you have shown yourself so clearly as a subscriber to that purely Negroid school whose motto is ‘whatever is white is right.’ ” She claimed that in his reviews of White fiction writers, such as Julia Peterkin and Roard Bradford, he glided lightly over their faults, but when it came to her and Claude McKay, “our virtues are barely outlined, our faults greatly stressed and in my own case I am left without a leg to stand on, characterization, style, sentiment, treatment are all wrong. My art is ‘slowly maturing’; my ‘championship of upper and middle class Negro life’ is not even ‘singlehanded’; it is ‘almost singlehanded.’ ” She concluded that he had misread the novel’s main point—that it was not the “story of ‘one dark child in a family’ ” but instead was “the story of a woman who was obsessed with the desire for whiteness.”¹³

There was another element to their long enmity—Fauset seemed to object to the style of Locke’s reviews, regardless of whether they approved of her work or not. She despised his style, because it was too gay, with its hypertrophy of form, its studied obscurity, and its persistent irony. Fauset asserted something similar in a letter she wrote to Locke asking him if he could not use his influence with Bruce Nugent to avoid “bad writing” even if he persisted in narrating salacious, that is, homoerotic, literary subject matter. Fauset’s role as a literary broker had declined in the late 1920s in part because she could not represent overtly homoerotic Black writers. And Locke could not tolerate reading one more heternormative story about the tragic middle-class Black woman who had everything going for her except her race. Having created a space for queer artists of color, he could not create a space for heterosexist Black women as well.

Dunham’s breakdown and Fauset’s putdown strengthened Locke’s resolve to do philosophy in a new way and build, rather than abandon, his new critical voice. He would produce in the Bronze Booklets a critical philosophy of the humanities and social sciences by tapping the young social scientists, humanists, and activists of the 1930s, and an extended version of The New Negro—but this time as a series of separate books, rather than one anthology, spliced up by short books written by him. Locke was laying the ground for a knowledge revolution later called Black Studies by bringing a form of social philosophy to the masses in Bronze Booklets distributed through libraries and community centers across a segregated nation.

As early as Plato’s Republic, bronze was the designation given to workers, farmers, and proletarians in the fabled ideal society: their work was necessary so that the Gold people, the philosophers, could rule without distraction. Just as Plato moved from recording the philosophical insights of Socrates to creating a social system to realize those insights in the daily life of the people of Athens, Locke was moving from promoting the writers of the Negro Renaissance to institutionalizing their contributions in a distribution system he would call the Bronze Booklets. Rather than disseminate the Greek and Western philosophical tradition he so loved, Locke performed the role of a Black philosopher by disseminating a universal knowledge of how racism, classism, and power operate in the modern world. The Bronze Booklets reflected a pedagogical strategy to activate culture and critical thinking by teaching the Bronze people how the world worked from a critical Black scholarly perspective. In that sense, situating knowledge for the masses meant conveying to them a theoretically rigorous critique of how the fruits of the Western tradition were denied them and how Black people had created alternative structures of knowledge the Bronze Booklets made available to them. Rather than lowering the complexity of knowledge delivered to Black adults, Locke wanted to raise it. Such a stroke was radical in adult education. As was the case with much adult education directed at poor Whites, many agencies made the “obvious mistake of playing down to [the] disadvantaged condition” of poor people, as Locke put it.¹⁴ What they needed was a system of adult education that raised their desire to learn by giving them knowledge that gave them power and understanding over their situation in the modern world.

But in spite of writing a historic proposal and several positive developments that spring, Locke’s internal mood turned dark. When isolated, Locke wallowed in his regret and hostility toward those ungrateful for his help. “You will see from the enclosed clipping,” Locke wrote to Mrs. Mason, “that Langston and Roland are working the same game in the same place. How tragic for them. I do not pity the victims [mainly White supporters]—that is the same crowd with whom Jean Toomer got off the track—and his residence at Carmel was responsible for his tragic marriage. How the moths will find the flame—even though it be miles away. It reminds me of a sight I saw at Salzburg this last summer—a searchlight on the hill-side—and a crew of men scooping in the moths and insects as they reeled against the scorching lenses.” Once the excitement of a possible new venture cooled as he waited months for a reaction, he succumbed to self-pity. He comforted himself by getting more sleep, taking “brisk walks in the open—(rain or shine)—and an occasional pick-up of good music on the radio. Toscanini is back on the air and was he grand!”¹⁵ Locke felt ignored and abandoned.

There were some bright spots, however. British socialite Nancy Cunard had assembled and edited the Negro Anthology, and included Locke’s spirited essay celebrating Sterling Brown as the next great Black folk poet. It was one of Locke’s best, most hopeful essays on Black literature since the late 1920s. Sterling Brown epitomized what Locke had wanted to see in the poetry of Langston Hughes and the short stories and novels of Zora Neale Hurston. Brown’s Southern Road had distilled a wonderful cache of poems from his research into the folk speech and mentality of the working poor in Nashville, Tennessee. Sitting in on barbershops, drinking spots, and shacks of blues-singing, story-telling “folk” Negroes, Brown had translated their lyrical voices into powerful poetry. His poem, “Strong Men,” became a kind of national Black workingman’s anthem. That same year, Brown would join Howard’s English Department, adding an ally on campus who believed in the kind of folk-based renaissance Locke now advocated as the future of the New Negro. No longer was he alone in his literary community as he had been in years past, with Brown in town. Aaron Douglas was commissioned to create four murals, titled Aspects of Negro Life, for the 135th Street Branch of the New York Public Library where the adult-education “experiments” were taking place, adding visual monumentality and African American nobility to many pieces from the Harlem Museum of African Art still on exhibit there. And the Harmon Foundation had established a traveling exhibition of Negro art in collaboration with the College Art Association, sending Negro artists’ work around the country, albeit with no input from Locke.

Another bright spot was President Roosevelt, whom Locke applauded not only for the New Deal but also especially, at least to Godmother, for his new policy toward “the Indian. John Collier has gone west with a considerable staff of young men to consult the Indians themselves about the new program.” Here was a connection to his pedagogical dreams. “I understand the old-time government schools are to be completely abandoned, and new reservation schools established. … The one unexpected is the quite unheard of expression of guilt and error on the part of the … under-secretary in charge and the new officials of the Indian Bureau.” He was “itching to write an article about this—as a Negro—and the next time I am in New York I will talk with Paul Kellogg about it.” After that bright suggestion went nowhere, probably because Kellogg reserved Locke for commentary on “Negro topics,” Locke’s mood turned dark again. “The other clipping [I enclose] is not so cheering—the latest blast from Langston.” It was an article by Hughes questioning whether the Negro ought to fight in the next world war, given the continued exploitation of Blacks after the last one. Though expressing what was no doubt a widespread mood among Blacks in the 1930s, the article signaled to Locke that Hughes had self-appointed himself a Negro spokesman, which Locke thought ridiculous. “His megalomania grows to ridiculous proportions.”¹⁶ Rather than feeding off the energy of his possible new venture in adult education, Locke continued to wallow in bitterness—at least when corresponding with Mason, which he kept up even though she was no longer giving him the funds she had in the past.

Indeed, Locke’s letters to Mason in the 1930s served as a kind of confessional of regrets on a variety of topics, especially his alienation at Howard. “I never thought that I would ever think of my work as just a ‘job’—and daily my resentment grows against those forces that have made it so. Although the students say ‘your classes are so different,’ I know they are not—in any very vital way—but what couldn’t be done in a real school!” He noted that “two classes are really worth while—and those hours I find nourishing—but three other classes are like life-sucking leeches—and after them I am simply exhausted.” As for the Howard University president, Mordecai Johnson, after he orchestrated Locke’s return to Howard in 1927 and utilized him as a confidant, he had dropped Locke from his inner circle and Locke did not like it. In conclusion, Locke believed “the institution as a whole is drifting and becomes more and more of an open farce as the days go on.”¹⁷

Good news did break in on Locke’s mood on two occasions. The first came from Hurston, then teaching at the Florida school, “the first word in God knows when.” Hurston praised Locke’s appreciation of Sterling Brown as the New Negro poet of the 1930s. She clapped and applauded, perhaps glad that some new male poet had stolen the limelight from Langston Hughes, now also her nemesis. “Zora has several articles—on Negro speech, which is really genuine and good in the same anthology. All has not been wasted [and] I think—without making any apologies for her—that even in the ashes some fire will always burn—and flare out occasionally—whereas Langston is all clinkers and ashes.”¹⁸

Locke also brightened up when he heard the news that Claude McKay had returned to Harlem from Europe. Surely, Locke thought, McKay would agree with the judgment that Black writers of the 1920s—McKay accepted, of course—had misinterpreted their mandate as New Negro writers and prostituted the Negro theme rather than seriously develop it. Locke hunted up news of McKay’s whereabouts, but strangely could not find him, initially. McKay had not contacted Locke upon arriving in the States, although he knew Locke’s address well and needed money. When Locke eventually found him, McKay was penniless in Harlem but unbowed, living off Max Eastman, his long-time friend, the editor of the Liberator, and sleeping in Arthur Schomburg’s Harlem apartment. Locke thought McKay saw things as he did. But McKay blamed Locke and other bourgeois intellectuals like him for the failure of the New Negro Renaissance, especially their lack of courage in challenging the White establishment’s norms of what constituted “good Negro writing.” Often out of touch with how others regarded him, Locke could not imagine that McKay might see him as the one responsible for the failed promise of the New Negro, nor did McKay reveal his feelings in 1934. For now, he was friendly, because he needed money, and most likely Locke gave McKay all he could spare when they saw one another. Locke even dutifully brought McKay’s predicament to Mrs. Mason’s ears, although she declined to open her pocketbook this time.¹⁹

While Locke drifted in terms of the current Negro literary scene, he kept up pressure on Morse Cartwright, the president of the AAAE, about his Bronze Booklets proposal. When Locke sent in a second, more-detailed budget version of the report in March, the AAAE president referred it immediately to his internal board of directors. Cartwright also informed Locke that Charles S. Johnson, now chair of Fisk’s Sociology Department, was also working on a series of syllabi for use in Negro secondary schools. Cartwright suggested that Locke get in touch with him and collaborate.²⁰ Locke had no desire to do so. Around the same time, Johnson wrote to Arthur Schomburg that he had heard Keppel was about to invest in the adult-education movement. “That explains why our friend has become interested in it,” a reference to Locke. Once collaborators, Locke and Johnson were now competitors for funding from the Carnegie Foundation. But Locke had the inside position on the adult-education funding. He already had been paid $2,000 by the Corporation to produce the evaluation, a huge sum in the 1930s. If his proposal was funded, he would receive another $5,000 to produce the booklets.

But a problem surfaced in April, when Cartwright wrote back about the proposal with a different tone. He still loved the book publication project and wanted to continue funding the miniscule efforts at the Atlanta and Harlem libraries, but his board of directors had expressed reservations about the idea of a paid ambassador of Negro adult education. In his plan, Locke wanted to hire a young Black sociologist, Ira De Reid, already an expert on adult-education activities in Atlanta, to spread the good news about adult education among Negroes. But Cartwright balked. Under no circumstances was he willing to fund a proselytizing Black adult whose advocating for adult-education programs might mushroom into an effective—and controversial—educational program that might change the racial calculus in the South. As he wrote to Locke, “I have discussed your proposal with others, and there has been a rather strong reaction to the part of the proposal in which you advocate us creating a field secretary to stimulate adult education in the field. As someone had put it in the office, the Association has always relied on local efforts to stimulate adult education on its own, without stimulation from the national organization. And we feel that there is no reason why Negro adult education ought to be treated any differently from White adult education.”²¹

This was a remarkable statement from a nationally aware educator, given that Cartwright knew the disparities in education for White and Black adults in segregated America. Locke had no way of dramatizing this issue with Cartwright and his board because Locke had studiously avoided a critique of segregation in his argument for the booklet proposal. Even so, the board was not fooled: they could see that this adult-education program, especially if guided by a northern activist intellectual, could undermine the logic of southern education and foster strong self-conscious Black thinkers whose existence would come to the attention of the authorities. And these authorities or a lynch posse might view adult education as “dangerous” and hold the AAAE responsible. Scared to run afoul of southern segregationists and threaten the educational status quo in the South, the AAAE refused to sponsor even one Black adult-education activist to go out in the field to interest adult Black learners in adult education under its auspices.

When the proposals were presented to Frederick Keppel, president of the Carnegie Corporation and founder of the national adult-education association, he concurred with the Association’s view that appointing a field representative was dangerous. Keppel and Cartwright were clear that they did not see adult education as destabilizing the class structure in America, nor were they interested in it upending the educational etiquette of segregated America. The Rosenwald Foundation, also consulted about Locke’s proposal, was skeptical of this element too, especially since its director had other plans for Mr. Reid. Both the Carnegie and Rosenwald Foundations believed in educating Negroes to fit within existing segregationist structures of learning, whether in the North or the South. They were prepared to fund Locke’s proposal only if it was clear that no effort would be made to use such education to transform the racial social order.

Sensing the delicacy of the situation and the moment, Locke let Eugene Kinckle Jones, the former head of the National Urban League, and by 1934, working as an advisor on Negro affairs in the US Commerce Department, react to the gutting of the proposal’s most activist element. As chairman of Locke’s advisory committee, Jones fired off a letter to Cartwright expressing his strong disappointment with the funders and stated that the Association’s refusal to fund the field representative was a tragic setback for the program, dooming it to be a passive rather than an activist pedagogical intervention. But when Cartwright was unmoved, Locke did not press the issue. For one thing, Locke was not an activist, having studiously avoided grass-roots involvement throughout his career. That Locke proposed someone other than himself to be the roving ambassador had been telling. If he were that man, he would have to confront Deep South segregation on a daily basis and be exceedingly careful that his sexual orientation did not expose him to unwanted attention. He had already been kicked out of Howard University for the volatile mix of being a visible gay professor and activist leader of its Black faculty in its struggle with the school’s White president. And if he could not hire someone else to do this kind of dangerous work in highly segregated Black communities, he would drop that part of the proposal. What also was sacrificed was the research and dialogical potentialities of the proposal, for without a field representative, the Bronze Booklets ambassador could not bring back to the project the reactions of those who were being educated to be poured into future book lists, learning strategies, and so on.

Locke turned this stumbling block to his advantage. While the funders were focused on the paid activist component of the proposal, he shifted the definition of what constituted a “syllabus” from an outline of topics to quite substantial little “booklets” to be written by the best Black scholars in the United States. He noted that, given the paucity of quality Black scholarship even in most of the libraries in America, the syllabi should include introductions to the subject matter that could stand alone. The pamphlets themselves would be powerful agents of consciousness-raising, by articulating a critical race history and politics for Black people. The booklets could give Black readers a sense of their destiny as a world historical people, who could transcend racism and make their own futures if they read the texts he presented them.

When Locke had updated his proposal to Cartwright in March, most of the authors he listed as “sub-editors” were professors at Howard, despite his telling Mason he needed to get away from that “prison of the mind.” First among them was Bunche, who chose to write a theoretical treatise on the idea of race from a global perspective. Recommended for a booklet on the economics of the American race problem was University of Chicago–educated Abram Harris. Sterling Brown, fresh off the acclaim for Southern Road, volunteered to author two literary history books—one on Negro literature and the other on Negro drama, subjects one might expect Locke to tackle. Instead, Locke decided to pen two other books—one on Negro art and one on Negro music, both areas of which were close to his heart and new areas in which he could advance himself as an expert through these publications. Rounding out the controversial list were Du Bois, whom Locke would ask to do a critique of the Negro and the New Deal, and Carter G. Woodson.

The list was a marvelous mixture of political and erotic tension. Du Bois and Woodson were associates, barely friends, but often adversaries of Locke. Harris sparred with Locke at the Saturday-night meetings, with Harris rejecting Locke’s aesthetic idealism in race relations. By contrast, Bunche and Brown had allowed Locke to take them under his wing. The most intriguing relationship was with Bunche, who spent most of his life away from his wife and family, traveling for his career. It is hard to imagine that Locke would not have made a pass at Bunche, and Bunche’s reaction was not one of disgust. Just as important to the success of their relationship and the Bronze Booklets was a change in Locke. He had finally learned he had to stop pushing a relationship with future stars beyond what they wanted if he wanted to reach his goals. Locke’s other transformation was just as profound: he had moved away from the star system still ascendant in Black social sciences to a collaborative model in which, for once, he was not as obsessively critical of collaborators that they could not breathe, have their own thoughts and independence, and produce the work he was going to ask them to do. He had moved beyond the Du Bois model and that of Woodson too—less dictatorial and controlling, more willing to indulge and tolerate those who disagreed with him—even of those who held quite different opinions. What Locke proposed in the Bronze Booklets projects was a modern, corporate system of knowledge production in what would later be called Black Studies.

While Locke waited to hear the final decision of Keppel and the Adult Education Association on whether it would publish the Bronze Booklets, he spent April, as usual, casting around for a way to go abroad for the summer, albeit under more complicated world circumstances. His previous summer trip to Germany had been dicey enough, as the Nazis carried out a purge of homosexuality, closing “homophile” clubs in Berlin, burning the library of the Institute of Sexual Research, the intellectual center of gay Berlin, and arresting and sending homosexuals to concentration camps. In the spring of 1934, the idea that homosexuality was a threat to racial purity had gained traction. That June, when Hitler decided to eliminate his potential rivals in the Night of the Long Knives, he justified the murder of Ernst Rohm, the head of the feared SA, as necessary because his homosexuality was a threat to the German race. Locke knew his race and his homosexuality made him doubly a target in a race-obsessed, hyper-homophobic Germany. He wrote to Mason, “It will be very unwise … for me to go abroad this summer. Although of course I must get psychologically out of this prison of mind and soul I work in.” He mentioned that if he could be in New York with periods to see her, “I would be in another healing and enriching world.”²² If Locke was fishing to have Mason set him up in New York, it did not work. Mason, by now, was living in a hospital, where she would remain for another decade. Of course, even New York did not offer the kind of complete sexual freedom that going abroad promised.

Locke settled on taking an Italian cruise through the Mediterranean to Athens, which he had never visited, Constantinople, and Russia, but difficulties rose even before he set foot on the boat.

When they discovered I was a Negro, they informed me they could not book me for shore excursions—unless I would agree to a special carriage or auto for “my exclusive use.” I wrote saying I was experienced enough traveller to conduct my own shore excursions—and would unless they should discover that they could book me in the ordinary way. Am anxious to get their reaction to that. Isn’t it childish! Later, if I do get on, I can see the green horns now trying to pick up information and guidance—and I expect to have to help some of them count their foreign money or ask a simple question. And I’ll let them know what their tourist agency thinks.²³

The world was a plantation wherever Locke went.

Indeed, Locke was increasingly faced with the disgusting specter of segregation in Washington, D.C., as he tried to attract more Negroes into the official national adult-education association. In May 1934, while preparing to leave for the Mediterranean, Locke had to deal with an ugly issue: how to interest Negroes in attending the AAAE’s annual meeting in Washington, D.C., when the Hotel Shoreham, chosen by Cartwright for the meeting, refused, like all other major hotels in Washington, D.C., to allow Negro guests. Eventually the hotel’s management conceded that African Americans could attend the Association’s sessions held in the hotel, but not eat or stay overnight at the hotel. Cartwright turned to Locke, who secured dormitory accommodations at Howard University for speakers and visitors at the meeting. Once the meeting got underway, Locke played a prominent role, talking up the guests, smoothing ruffled feathers, and speaking at the discussion section on Negro Adult Education, where once again he provided his high-minded justifications and recommendations for the Harlem and Atlanta “experiments.” He then participated at an evening session with the leaders of the adult-education movement, including Morse Cartwright and Franklin Hopper. As reward, Locke was elected vice president of the Association for 1934–1935.²⁴

Mercifully, at the end of June, his summer escape began. The day of departure, Locke got to the Roma at 7:30 a.m. June 30, almost the first traveler on board. “Knew I had a difficult situation before me,—as a cruise is something more than a crossing—and I had already had a taste of reflected prejudice.” By getting there early, “I knew I couldn’t have any excuses of ‘tables filled’—and wanted to see what they would do.” Almost immediately, the chief steward started “using an eraser liberally as I left” on the table plan, “ ‘moving’ his clients. At lunch and dinner it turned out to be ‘my table,’ ” at which he sat alone. As Locke confided to Mason, “You know I take these situations as challenges, and provided one can be vital and fresh enough, there is always an eventual victory.” Self-possessed, Locke “went into the dining room with dignity, and paying no attention to anything—but with a smile—and I decided that smile wouldn’t change if the situation kept up the 40 days I was to be on the boat. By the morning of the second day, there were two ladies at the table—who later spoke—my mere acknowledgement of their presence breaking the ice. Later still I found one to be a New York schoolteacher, the other, if you please, a supervisor of nurses from Florida.”²⁵

On “the third day I was invited to a neighboring table by a young university couple (Swedish extraction) from Chicago. I declined, explaining that I had a fixed philosophy of sitting tight and letting the situation change about me. I hoped they would understand.” Then, “by the fourth day there were five at ‘our table’ and then I decided to accept the invitation to the next table for one meal—explaining my absence from the first table by going over there before taking a seat where I was guest.” Locke was choreographing the situation.

Now I daresay there isn’t anyone who hasn’t taken sides. I can feel it all around me—that the boat has been divided into two camps and that they are re-fighting the Civil War with the North winning as before. One definite reason for saying so is the guilty look on the faces of some with marked Southern accent, and this incident—a young girl’s coming up under cover of late twilight as we were leaving Madeira, to comment first on the coast line, and then to say “I’m Mary Jo Norton from Birmingham—we’all are going to the Passion Play from our school.”²⁶

Between him and ship’s segregationists, there was no contest. A different reality confronted him when Locke took shore leaves. “Why is it that these natural paradises are always filled with a misery stricken population on the verge of starvation! Beautiful eyes in pock-marked faces—wonderful hair over anemic skins—gay spirits in labor-broken bodies. Man is the cruelest where nature is kindest.”²⁷ Even with this pause of self-consciousness, Locke never stopped to think that the kind of country-hopping excursions he participated in perpetuated the conditions of dependence and poverty he lamented in the Mediterranean.

Locke moved on to Egypt where he avoided the sun, and instead bathed himself in premodern spectacle. Stopping by the Cairo Museum, which he had visited a decade ago on the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, Locke could report that the Egyptians had done a fabulous job of installing the exhibit of the artifacts taken out of the tomb—those not shipped off to the British Museum. “Such infinite care of craftsmanship—the coffin cases three of them enclosed one within the other have been beautifully mounted—with reflecting mirrors—so one can see both the top and the bottom—and of course, the bottom is just as elaborately worked in enamel inlay and incised gold as the top—and often in better taste—because not too heavily embossed. The archeologists cannot explain this orgy of prodigal care and display, nor the spurt of technical skill which made it possible.”²⁸

Angling to see the pyramids in the cooler evening, Locke positioned himself with the most attractive Egyptian tour guide he could find.

When I spoke to him … he agreed to come to take me out to the Pyramids that night—and by doing the decent thing I won his affection—I asked him to have dinner with me—and to choose the restaurant. So as soon as he got rid of his charges, he came around—we had dinner—and then went out by auto-bus to Mena. … By moonlight these huge mounds were ghostly and almost dream shapes and they looked ethereal, and spiritual rather than ponderous and earthly. I am sure that most of the Egyptian ritual must have been centered around sunset—night worship and dawn. The only reason we didn’t see dawn was a silly regulation of the reservation police—not even Suleiman’s pleas could move them—and once we had asked, we dared not disobey.²⁹

This interruption almost ruined an otherwise romantic night for Locke. Just as impressive to him was his visit to the Sphinx, a haunting sight at night. Locke could convey to Mason that a Harvard professor was excavating beneath its paws and upending years of misinformation about what the Sphinx symbolized for ancient Egypt. “In the moonlight the expression on the face was the serenest smile I have ever seen—a real benediction, Godmother, and you know whose name was in my mind and almost on my lips,—and together with mother’s (it was her birthday anniversary) I thanked the stars for the great mothering love I have been lucky enough to experience.”³⁰ Even when Locke no longer received money from Mason, he continued to laud her for the “mothering love” he continued to carry within his mind and heart.

Despite the heat and the disruptive police, Locke had a wonderful time in Egypt until it was time to depart. The Roma snaked its way along the coast northward, first to Odessa and then to Yalta. In 1934 both cities were part of the Soviet Union, affording Locke a chance to peek in on the Soviet experiment. Modern buses escorted Locke and the other passengers to camps and outlying areas, where worker communes were thriving. “We inspected a bread factory just opened with a capacity of 300,000 loaves of bread a day. To my mind—the original vision must have been a great one—but somehow class vengeance came in and fogged this vision.” Locke had to tread lightly here since Mason was a fierce anti-Soviet, who repeatedly cautioned him against getting “tricked” by Russia. “They were careful,” Locke confided to her, “to guard you every minute with two official guides to each party of fifteen.” He peppered guides with semi-embarrassing questions, such as what happened to the people whose land was confiscated or where they got such new uniforms—learning, thereby, from one guide, that he had to give it back after the day’s tour. Nevertheless, Locke was clearly smitten. “To me one thing seems certain—they are doing a good job with the children—never saw such hearty, wholesome, happy uninhibited things. But they are ruthlessly sacrificing everybody else—even their own party workers. In other words, they don’t intend fixing anything in the immediate present—it is a gamble on the future—and an indirect but ruthless sacrifice of one and a half to two whole generations—and an indirect extermination of whole classes.”³¹ Despite Mason’s caveats, Locke came away ecstatic about the Soviet experiment. What really impressed him was the way the revolution spoke to the Black situation; it had transformed the outlook and self-concept of the children in the ways he had hoped to do for Negro children with The New Negro and the Harlem Museum of African Art. The communist revolution triggered a type of transformed consciousness the Negro needed to fulfill its destiny.

From Russia, Locke headed for Greece, the object of desire for much of his adult life, certainly since he began reading the classics in high school. But what was the image of Greece that resonated so much in his soul that he confided to Hughes ten years earlier that he hated teaching philosophy and wished instead he could teach the classics? No doubt it was “Greek love,” a synonym for homosexual love. Entering Athens was thus a way to consummate a love that had been a fantasy for much of his life. Finally, he was coming to a community where what he did, whom he loved, what made his life complete was celebrated and embraced. In that sense, entering Greece was akin to going home, a home he had never had, a community of fellow lovers of men he had never seen before. “Athens,—and the long-wished for sight of Greece have made me very happy,” he wrote to Mason. “And though the heat is great, with care, I am experiencing a spirit-restoring time.”³²

Locke also embraced the Grecian sunlight, so important to him spiritually, as he had confided years earlier, now that Mason had given him permission to love the sun and not avoid it as his grandmother had cautioned. This light was a metaphor for something deeper—the light in his personality, the joy of a little man whose romance with the world was often suppressed by the burden of his Victorian strictures, neurotic tics, and obsessive preoccupations. In coming to Greece, Locke was seeking a refuge from the dark burden of racial representativeness he had shouldered for so long. In Greece, he was no longer Black, but some shade of bronze that reminded him of a different “god Locke”—the Greco-Egyptian god he imagined himself to be when bathed in the aura of positive primitivism. All of these factors—the quasi-religious, the sensual, the sexual, the bronzeness—released the mask of the academic race man he had brought with him abroad.

We can assume that Locke did not fail to sample the local community of beautiful young boys that even heterosexist observers like Henry Miller commented on when they wrote about Athens. But such escapades were silenced in his letters to Mrs. Mason, his main correspondent on this trip, who seemed to view his sexuality as a necessary evil. Since Mason did not view the Greeks as real “primitives,” certainly not analogs to her beloved Indians, Locke’s sojourn to the Greeks was doubly suspect—a “time-out” for wanton sex and a diversion from where he ought to have gone—to Africa, which Locke studiously avoided on this and other “Grand Tours” of primitivism. Locke replaced any reference to the “beautiful boys” with aesthetic patter about the landscape. He narrates beauty to her—and to himself—as a beautiful perspective. In Locke’s letters to Mason he criticizes other tourists who obsess with visiting monuments instead of standing back and appreciating how the placement of monuments concretized a perspective on the landscape that only he and other aesthetes can see and appreciate. He searched in vain for a postcard among the hundreds available that captured this sophisticated conversation between building and landscape; finally, he found a photograph that shows the Acropolis with the crumbled landscape in front of it. “What impresses me most of all—more than the buildings is the art of choosing the right spot. Every temple has a view which is still standing—even though the temple is in ruins, to proclaim what the people saw and meant by their effort.”³³

Locke was searching for confirmation of his life mission by trying to see his world as the Greeks saw theirs. He was in Athens trying to become ancient Greek himself and see the landscape of the rest of his life as they saw theirs—and with that the silenced desire to love bodies as freely as the Greeks themselves, he imagines, did. Indeed, so obsessed was he in this search to embrace the ancient Greek perspective on the landscape and, by implication, on life that he told Mason he found himself unable to be fully comfortable with the modern Greeks. At an outdoor Greek play, he sat far away from the natives, because they laughed and joked during the performance instead of adopting the requisite reverential attitude toward the play. Here, Locke reproduced the same attitude toward the Greeks that he adopted in his attitude toward things African: he approached them with an attitude of reverence for that which was ancient about them, not their modern approximations. As his friend Azikiwe put it, “Locke loves things African, but I never see him with any Africans.”

While young beautiful boys were available, Locke’s primary attachment went in another direction, as a photograph that survives from this trip attests. Taken inside on one of the monuments, Locke appears—dapper in his summer outfit of dark jacket, white linen pants, white shirt and tie, with two other men, one unknown African man, dressed a bit more conservatively, and the other a White man, University of Chicago philosopher T. V. Smith, whom Locke met and bonded with in Athens. Of the two figures, Locke wrote only about the latter to Mason, telling her that Smith was a “real humanist,” who was not “ego-mad” and intellectually arrogant as so many of his non-colleagues were in the profession. Locke and Smith had known each other from some previous connection, perhaps in Chicago at one of John Dewey’s fêtes. Locke writes to Mason that he and the bi-curious Smith decide to visit sites, share transportation and dinner costs, and talk about the contemporary political situation back in New Deal America. Locke, faced with an opportunity to immerse himself in Greece, chose instead to sojourn with an American.³⁴

Locke, T. V. Smith, and unidentified man, Greece, 1934. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.

Smith was running for Congress and asked Locke to visit him back home to lend support to his campaign in the suddenly politically efficacious Black Chicago. Early in the fall, Locke obliged by traveling out to Chicago to give a number of speeches for Smith’s candidacy. Locke also campaigned for Arthur Mitchell, his lawyer friend who came to his aid in his fight to get his job back at Howard, and who was running to become the first African American Democrat elected to Congress. Both Mitchell and Smith succeeded. Locke’s sojourn in Greece ended in an unexpected destination—the taking up of Greek democracy in modern America and the possibility that Locke could have a political efficacy beyond the racial world.

Interestingly, Locke did not discuss Greek democracy in his ruminations to Mason. Having come to Greece ostensibly for its past, it was Greece’s influence on American modernity that seized him. Having come to Greece presumably expecting a romp or two or several with Greek youth, Locke actually found satisfaction in bonding with a mature intellectual man, with whom he could achieve, if only briefly, an integration of his philosophical, aesthete, and political selves. Whether Locke realized it or not, the reason he was of use to T. V. Smith was because of the politics of race—Locke’s usefulness in helping to deliver Black support for a White Democrat back home. Having come to Greece to escape race, he was retuned to racial representativeness with his American companion. Yet Locke got from Greece what he needed—a sense that the new modernism he was creating was more in conversation with the truth of ancient Greece. While ancient Greece was emotionally liberating, modern Greece was not, because, intuitively, Locke sensed that modern Greece was tending toward that modern form of decadence that was flowering in Nazism rather than Bronze modernism.

That reality was made plain to Locke when he arrived in Italy, the last nation on his cruise through southern Europe. “Here in Rome,” he wrote to Mason, “but again under the shadow of tyranny—this isn’t the sunshine of Greece—or even of the old Italy. True, it is infinitely cleaner, more modern, more efficient—but something has been drained out of the people—and they are no longer happy in spite of improved external conditions. They think they are happy—one never saw such arrogance—but one who has learned from Godmother sees through such things.” Once again, the contemporary people have swerved away from the truth of their ancestors in the interest of “modern efficiency,” seemingly a cautionary tale for Locke as to what can happen to the Negro in America if the pursuit of modernity required the sacrifice of the soul. “I thought you would appreciate seeing the modern motorcade Signor M”—Mussolini,—“constructed (or ‘caused to be constructed’ as the new Latin on the pillar-posts proclaims) right through the heart of the old Forum. The problem is to find the forum.” Better to suffer the inconveniences of pre-civilization than to die in the clutches of mechanization that hid the very basis of Roman democracy. “For me, however, [give me] the old forgettable sunsets of Monte Pincio—and the sombre elegance of the pines of the Villa Borghese. I have spent three afternoons there and have fed deeply—because something tells me that this next year will be trying—and I am building up reserves to stand in store.” Yet, this restorative moment came at a price in 1934. “My way has led through Italy because of a cheap railroad rate, 70% reduction in railway fare on one very interesting condition. You must go through Rome, stop off and see the ‘exposition’ of the Fascist Revolution—pass through fourteen rooms of clever pictorialized propaganda—go up a long flight of steps to have your special reduced ticket ‘stamped and validated’ and then pass out through an alley of bayonetted Black shirt guards. Well—I considered that I had earned the reduction after the ordeal—no other way round it—except shutting ones eyes—(which I did occasionally.)” Locke also indulged in a kind of dangerous protest. “I tried keeping my hat on as an experiment—was twice requested to remove it. Did so—innocently—and thought three might prove fatal.” Mussolini’s Italy sought to reclaim a grand classical past, but for something different from the aesthetic politics Locke had in mind—to anchor a modernist propaganda of the patriarchal ruler without a god. Locke found himself forced to bow down before Mussolini’s rituals of deference or incur a most uncomfortable kind of attention.³⁵

Despite that last-minute ominous reminder of the gathering storm in Europe, Locke returned ebullient to America that September, so much so that he bypassed trying to visit Godmother at her hospital bed when he landed in New York. That piqued her, as she later claimed that she saw the ship he sailed home on, as it made its way up New York harbor. He avoided seeing her initially to postpone the inevitable criticism that would be part of any extended conversation with her about the trip. Once again, he had escaped from working on his projects, she thought, for sex abroad. This time, even from a distance, Locke brought her good news. “On the boat, I have been drafting an article on Negro music, which I want to publish soon. Especially since I believe I’m going to get a chance to bring out a series of pamphlet courses in Negro music, art, literature, the economic side of the race problem under the auspices of the adult education movement. … For such an audience, I’ll have to be simple and straight forward—so it ought to mean a decided change and improvement in style. The summer has done its part—so if I fail, I’ll have no excuse or possible alibi.”³⁶

The summer had “done its part,” because the article, “Towards a Critique of Negro Music,” was really an important breakthrough. He spoke simply and directly to the Negro people to declare that Black people are superb cultural producers. But he chastised as well. They had created the original forms of Negro spirituals, blues, jazz—all original aesthetic forms—and yet consumed bad copies of these original works of art. Locke perceived that White musicians and composers were actually improvising these forms into more classically sophisticated forms for which Black people got no credit. He urged trained Black musicians to stop resting on their laurels, perfect their craft through study in Europe, and create the great symphonic music of the twentieth century.³⁷

Critics of Locke’s music reviews dismiss him for charting Negro musical development along the arc of European cultural development. But such criticism ignores the deeper questions Locke was raising. Is it a “Negro” thing to settle for the least aesthetically sophisticated and most commercially fluid iterations of these musical forms? The example of African art seems to contradict that. Or is it our accommodation to the low level of expectation in American popular culture that explains why we sometimes produce aesthetically vapid cultural products? Are critics subtly buying into the Western notion of the Negro artist as primitive when they eschew the demand that Negro artists be as trained as European or White American artists? Is the Negro artist excluded from the demand to create the most enduring, sophisticated works of art?

Locke was demanding that Negroes use their art to advance themselves as America’s quintessential artists. He was trying to subjectivize the Negro musician to demand not just to be heard, but to be heard creating his best music, to be the steering force in a system of music production that his genius created and sustains. Locke wrote in the article “Towards a Critique of Negro Music”:

Things Negro have been and still are the victims of two vicious extremes—uncritical praise or calculated disparagement. Of no field is this more true than Negro music. I have read nearly all that has been written on the subject, and do not hesitate to rate most of it as platitudinous piffle—repetitious bosh; the pounds of praise being, if anything, more hurtful and damning than the ounces of disparagement. For from the enthusiasts about Negro music comes little else than extravagant superlatives and endless variations on certain half-true commonplaces about our inborn racial musicality, our supposed gift of spontaneous harmony, the uniqueness of our musical idioms and the infectious power and glory of our transmuted suffering. True—or half-true as these things undoubtedly are, the fact remains that it does Negro music no constructive service to have them endlessly repeated by dilletante [sic] enthusiasts, especially without the sound correctives of their complementary truths. The state of Negro music, and especially the state of mind of Negro musicians needs the bitter tonic of criticism more than unctuous praise and the soothing syrups of flattery. While the Negro musician sleeps on his much-extolled heritage, the commercial musical world, reveling in its prostitution, gets rich by exploiting it popularly. … The real damage of the popular vogue rests in the corruption and misguidance of the few rare talents that might otherwise make heroic and lasting contributions. For their sake and guidance, constructive criticism and discriminating appreciation must raise a standard far above the curb-stone values of the market-place and far more exacting than the easy favor of the multitude.³⁸

Locke called for the Negro composer to push himself to a new, higher level of aesthetic production in Black music, just as Alain Locke anchored himself in a higher level of social science criticality through his association with the Young Turks of Bunche’s Saturday Nighters to push himself to a higher level of criticality in his cultural writings. The connection to the community of scholars at Bunche’s house was real, even if most of them could not see the cultural implications of their largely sociological and political science ruminations. But Locke could. Already well-versed in Marx and Marxist literary criticism coming out of the Soviet Union in the early 1920s, Locke made connections between what they argued about a class and economic analysis of the Negro’s “situation” in America as a sub-proletarian class to the new Marxist analysis of literature, music, and art as tied to a cultural means of production. Those on the international Left suggested that the artist must become a self-critical being if he or she is not to be completely destroyed by what Walter Benjamin called the “mechanical means of reproduction.”³⁹ In America, Locke was arguing, it was not just class, not just industrialization, not just economics, but the way that the system of cultural production was racial that made a huge difference—the system by which Whites could appropriate from Blacks the fruits of cultural labor and profit from them just as they did under the system of slavery.

Unfortunately, Locke lacked a solid enough foothold in the music industry to institutionalize the consciousness he recommended for Black musicians and composers, although some were appreciative. William Grant Still, a young, aspiring, Georgia-born Black composer, wrote to thank Locke not only for the line of appreciation in the article but also for the challenge to do great things as an artist. But few Black composers had access to independent cultural patronage to avoid catering to the codes of the “curb-stone of the market place” and lacked enough leverage in the commercial sector to become mainstream hits. Yet his deeper message still rang true: create sophisticated art or music out of your own tradition, not imitating the European or catering to the commercial rewards of playing to the cheap seats.

When Locke looked around, he saw one composer, one musician, one artist who epitomized all he said in this article—Duke Ellington. For it was during the 1930s that Ellington abandoned competing for purely commercial rewards with big bands like Tommy Dorsey’s and Glenn Miller’s and created enigmatic, complex compositions like Symphony in Black (1935) and Black, Brown, and Beige: A Tone Parallel to the History of the American Negro (1943), and the Liberian Suite (1947). Such compositions seemed as if Ellington was listening to Locke. “You may never be greatly appreciated in America,” Locke was telling African American composers. “But you can be great—if you demand the best of yourself, regardless of what the white man thinks of it.”

Bronze people could create a Gold art.