36

Warn a Brother

The 1934 trip to Greece rekindled Locke’s love of philosophy by kindling his affection for a philosopher. We do not know if there was sex or even the promise of it. But Locke found something in T. V. Smith that quickened his desire, and he pursued Smith for several years. Smith could write on ethics, stump speech for Roosevelt, and stamp through the ruins of Athens with insight and aplomb. He was philosopher as sophisticated cosmopolitan, a bit like Locke, without being the original thinker Locke was. But he was warm in ways Locke never was and gave him a new sense that philosophy mattered and could enrich rather than clog his cultural criticism. As Horace Kallen put it after the 1935 conference both Smith and Kallen attended at Howard: “I have always liked Smith immensely as a person.” So did Locke.¹

Of course, philosophy had always been the invisible architecture in Locke’s cultural criticism. But there was something about that trip to Greece that gave him the confidence to produce a more thoroughgoing philosophical critique in 1935. When he began writing the first drafts of his adult-education booklet, The Negro and His Music, finished later that year, he utilized his very sophisticated value theory from his dissertation to argue the Black experience held special potential for the development of fine-art music. Black folk music, he would argue, even from those unschooled in formal music theory, contained within it a “pre-aesthetic” quality that came from how Africans traditionally engaged their environment, their daily lives, in terms of the aesthetic, the music, the dance. Rather than a genetic disposition, Black people carried from Africa an aesthetic valuation that continued to survive despite the radical change in context.

Shortly after returning to the United States in the fall of 1934, Locke moved quickly to create an opportunity for him to reconnect with Smith and build on this new enthusiasm for philosophy by hosting a conference at Howard University titled “Philosophy and Problems of Minority Groups.” Howard’s Board of Trustees had reorganized the College of Letters and Sciences and created a new division, the Social Science Division, that included the Department of Philosophy; it also made Locke the first head of that division. This was no accident. Locke had insisted for years that philosophy belonged with the social sciences, not the humanities, as the meta-discipline of the human sciences. Remarkably, the board had acceded to his wish, put him in charge, and allowed him to drive the conversation about what that new division would examine in modern society. Jumping at the opportunity, Locke proposed and received $600 in funding for the conference, which allowed him to push philosophy to the forefront of the new division and bring his philosophy friends to campus. Such figures as William E. Hocking, the heir to Josiah Royce’s social idealism at Harvard, came along with Kallen and Smith, who, as a congressman was already often in Washington. Planning for the conference took an enormous amount of Locke’s time securing the other speakers. Locke had his hands full at Howard in ways he had not had in the past. But finally after years of thankless labor as a philosophy teacher at Howard he was now able to build an edifice for philosophical research and public comment—and provide a context to continue his relationship with Representative Smith.

In the meantime, Locke maintained himself with sex with philosophically inclined young aesthetes with whom he had tense if rewarding romantic relationships. One of those was with Solomon Rosenfeld, a student at City College of New York, who in April had reported on his classes he was taking with public philosopher Harry Overstreet, the chairman of the Philosophy Department. Drawn to Overstreet’s lectures, “almost entertaining,” on “the question of freedom of speech, violence, and isms as in quotation marks,” Rosenfeld shared Locke’s distaste for metaphysics. “Do you suppose that the aesthetic minded generally disliked metaphysics? Or do you think that I am just ignorant and generally not interested in philosophy?”² After a difficult rendezvous in New York following Locke’s return from Greece, the relationship, as was habitual of Locke’s relationships with younger men, turned dark. “Was it not an air of finality about our last meeting? I felt so. At any rate I shall not be able to see you for sometime. Please do not misunderstand. I am just experimenting with many things in life. For instance, I have just joined a dance group to try to find expression in that art. I have not had time to get back to Plato; but if you need the book do not hesitate to ask for it and I shall send it to you.”³ The loaned book on Plato was perhaps a sign. Was Locke less tolerant of the emotional self-absorption of a young aesthete with only Greek philosophical inclinations after experiencing the real thing with a mature philosopher in Greece? As much as Locke chased young aesthetes throughout his career, the longing for a peer romantic relationship grew as he rounded middle age. Locke was forty-nine in 1934. Was it now time to settle down? Smith was not ready. No one else was either.

Locke received an early Christmas present in 1934. On December 21, Morse Cartwright informed him that the Carnegie Corporation had decided to fund Locke’s Negro adult-education project, the only project by a Black intellectual the Carnegie Corporation would fund during the 1930s. In addition to continuing the “experimental” adult-education centers in Harlem and Atlanta set up by the AAAE, the funding included $5,250 to go to Locke to prepare the “syllabi for use in the Negro adult groups.”⁴ The Carnegie Corporation award consummated a masterful campaign by Locke to match his desires with the goals of a corporation, but now the really difficult work began—to get the authors contracted and the books written.

Most important, the funding to create these “Bronze Booklets” furthered Locke’s politics of collaboration with younger scholars and solidified his reputation as a new kind of minority intellectual. Locke sidestepped the rewards of intellectual individuality to knit together disparate scholars and artists to produce one powerful collective statement of the contemporary Negro mind. Deeding his talent to this group expression showed great maturity, but also brought great risk. Locke was an outsider to the group of younger scholars who formed the main body of authors.

Some were wary of Locke. As Harold Lewis recalled, “We had mixed feelings about him … the way in which Locke used to dress. I do have some visions of Locke wearing spats, carrying a cane and if I’m not mistaken wearing a pince-nez. The judgments that some of us made about Locke were judgments that took him out of his perspective and therefore was unfair. Now, they weren’t malicious, but they were in a way presumptuous. … Here is an old man who doesn’t exactly want to plunge into these fights in the way we do. I do recall some circumstances … some of us used to say this about him, that, maybe, Locke sometimes has a point that he wields a stiletto where we tend to result to the shillelagh.”⁵ Locke was the aging, dandified queer in the 1930s, and some were suspicious of his motives. But he offered them access to White money and the possibility to reach the Black masses with Black scholars, something no one else offered. His success would depend on whether he could close the deal—get the money from the Association and get the books published by an unpredictable group of young socialist intellectuals who would force him to change or fall back into irrelevance.

Others were downright undermining. In January 1935, Mary Beattie Brady wrote to Locke that James A. Porter, a lecturer in the Department of Art at Howard, had brought Robert Goldwater, a young PhD candidate at New York University where both studied art history, to the Harmon Foundation office looking for images to illustrate an article Goldwater was working on.⁶ Locke had gotten the Foundation to photograph the African art he had deposited at the 135th Street New York Public Library, and Brady’s letter in part requested more information from Locke on the pieces in order to compile detailed descriptions of them. Perhaps a survey or document of all the African art collections in this country could be produced. Perhaps Mr. Goldwater, already an expert on West African art, might be the one to produce it.

But the key here is that Porter, Locke’s colleague, had brought Goldwater to the Harmon Foundation to obtain photographs of art that Locke had collected. As Porter well knew, Locke was the man at the Harmon Foundation. Locke must have wondered why Porter had not spoken to him about this opportunity instead of going straight to Brady. Brady continued, “Mr. Goldwater has expressed some interest in our work, has looked at the pictures, and stated that he was writing an article on this subject, and if we would hold the pictures for illustration in any article that he could get published, he would be glad to cooperate by making the material available to me.”⁷ In other words, Goldwater wanted to reserve the photographs for his work, photographs that had been made at Locke’s instigation and of Locke’s collection. And Locke’s Black colleague at Howard had engineered his access to and potential publication control of photographs of Locke’s collection at the Harmon Foundation.

Given that Porter’s portrait, “Woman with a Jug,” had received a Harmon Foundation prize in 1933, when Locke had co-curated the exhibition, one might ask why Porter would not defer to Locke and ask him directly to help his friend. But Porter was a protégé of James Herring, who detested Locke and his theories on Negro art. Herring, for example, as director of the Howard University Art Gallery, had refused to put on an exhibition of the very same African artwork that Porter was interested in having used in Goldwater’s articles. Both Porter and Herring disagreed with the argument Locke had made in the catalogue to the 1931 Harmon Foundation exhibition that American Negro artists should look to African art for inspiration, modeling European artists who had been inspired by the “art lessons” of African art to create modernism. Goldwater was working on a theory that modernist artists had misread ancient African art, and that visual modernism had emerged from Westerner’s misguided notions of African “primitivism.”⁸ No doubt Goldwater and Porter had had conversations on the subject.

One might ask why Goldwater did not approach Locke directly. Goldwater needed Locke’s help, because it was difficult to get photographs of African art collections in the United States, especially since the “peculiar Dr. Barnes,” as Brady referred to him in her letter, refused to have anything to do with art historians. But Goldwater was a mentee of Meyer Schapiro, who had penned the critical article on Locke in the New Masses. Not only did Goldwater consult Schapiro extensively during the writing of his dissertation but also the two were close allies in the rough-and-tumble world of Trotskyite politics in New York. Interestingly enough, Robert Goldwater’s father was Dr. Sigismund Schultz Goldwater, commissioner of the Department of Hospitals, who refused to meet with La Guardia’s committee investigating the causes of the Harlem riot of 1935. Robert Goldwater was thus very familiar with Locke but no doubt viewed him, as did Schapiro, as an “ethnic chauvinist,” whose attempt to inscribe the role of Black people in the fashioning of modernism was not only wrongheaded but also dangerous. Goldwater thus tried to bypass Locke to access a very valuable commodity in 1935—high-quality photographs of a major African art collection—because he felt he could do so without consequences.

Porter’s and Goldwater’s maneuver revealed an uncomfortable truth of Locke’s scholarly career: pursuing multiple lines of entrepreneurship, one of which now was an adult-education publishing company, robbed Locke of the kind of focused concentration on one issue that established scholarly reputations. Locke had not established himself as an authority on African art by writing a major book on it. Time was running out on Locke. Even supporters like Miss Brady were antsy. She was game to give this young expert access to the photographs if he could give her accurate descriptions of them. But Brady also sensed the implications of Porter’s ploy. “I had hoped that it would be possible for you to get out an article on the general subject of primitive African art in the art field, and have been holding these pictures for your use in that event. I know, however, how busy you are, and that there is a limit to your strength.”⁹ Unlike Porter, who also sensed Locke’s limitations, Brady gently goaded him to publish. This is one reason why Locke trusted these older White women patrons: even when difficult, they protected his self-interest rather than undermined it. By contrast, James Porter, his young Howard colleague, and a Negro, whom one might think would “warn a brother,” did not. This incident suggests the irony of the racial brotherhood ideology Locke continued to advance in Negro art despite its contradictions in his own experience.

Of course, Locke’s main goal that February 1935 was to move the Bronze Booklets toward publication. He advanced that process with a Memorandum of Organization that informed Cartwright that Eugene Kinckle Jones would be chairman, Garnett Wilkerson treasurer, Locke secretary, and Lyman Bryson the second member of the editorial committee that contained Mary McLeod Bethune of the Bethune-Cookman College, A. J. Foster of the Chicago Urban League, and Mary Beattie Brady of the Harmon Foundation, among others. Interestingly, Locke chose to be the secretary of the project, a sign of how Locke chose a secondary administrative title in projects he developed to avoid garnering too much attention on his role in these almost secret operations. But there was nothing secret about who was in charge in his correspondence with the authors. He invited them to join “in a series of booklets for adult education groups—white as well as Negro—made possible by a grant of the Carnegie Corporation through the American Association for Adult Education. These booklets are to be prepared, however, under my general editor-ship and there is no restriction as to content,—and the sponsoring publication medium will be a committee styled:—Associates in Negro Folk Education,—who will administer the grant.”¹⁰

Here was another contradiction: while Keppel and Cartwright, the Carnegie Corporation, and the AAAE always insisted these were booklets solely for Negro readership, Locke was conveying that this critical education in the history of America from the Black experience was intended for “White” readers as well. Indeed, after Locke promised each author would receive a $200 honorarium upon receipt and acceptance of the manuscripts, he expressed another opinion at odds with the AAAE adult-education agenda. “I look upon the venture however as primarily an opportunity for legitimate academic publicity,—and as an opportunity also for gaining a much wider public than otherwise possible for competent scholarship on Negro life and culture.”¹¹ Locke intended to use these “adult-education” booklets to create a market for Black scholarship outside the academy and upgrade contemporary Black public discourse by making Black scholars, rather than ministers, lawyers, schoolteachers, and so forth, the accessible stewards of policy and civic debate.

And yet the academy continued to distract him from a complete focus on the Bronze Booklet project. As he wrote Godmother, “At the university we have been doubly upset—there is prospect of a change of administration—President Johnson’s egotism which you detected years ago is now apparent to everyone—and government (Department of Interior) investigator[s] have been on the grounds for the last two months.”¹² The Interior Department investigators arrived, because the federal government had been subsidizing Howard since 1928, and with that came increased oversight of the president and the political leanings of Howard’s professors. Johnson’s securing of this long-term federal appropriation at the beginning of his tenure in 1926 had been seen as an act of genius, ensuring Howard’s financial future and its emergence as the preeminent Negro university in America. Now, it appeared as also an act of folly: as Congress reviewed the appropriation every year, southern Congressmen, many of whom disliked congressional funding for a Black school in the first place, used the review process to carry out a witch hunt.

Johnson’s personality did not help matters. He reacted to the constant questioning and internal attacks that came with being president by returning fire with fire. He became distant toward and publicly critical of Howard’s faculty after the alumni attacked him viciously in 1931. Suspicious of friends as potential enemies, Johnson could also be petty. When Ralph Bunche, who had accepted a job to be Johnson’s assistant in 1931, took a leave of absence to go to Europe and Africa to complete his Harvard PhD dissertation on colonial administration, Johnson publicly expressed his displeasure in front of the faculty by declaring, “Bunche is going all the way to Africa to find a problem.”¹³ When Bunche returned to Howard as a faculty member, he became one of Johnson’s staunchest critics. He was also partly responsible for Locke’s increasingly hostile attitude toward Johnson. On one occasion, students reported that when interrupted from lecturing by the mowing of the grass outside his classroom’s window, Locke turned toward the window and said, “If Howard University had a president who was not a Baptist minister, it would be an infinitely better institution of higher education!”¹⁴ This attitude also reflected the change in Locke’s relationship with the president. Early in his return to Howard, Locke had been one of Johnson’s trusted advisors; after the conflict of 1931 with the alumni, Johnson drew the circle of trusted friends tighter, and Locke was left out.

Locke coped with the disappointments at Howard by giving lectures at other schools. One of his favorites was the “Bennett College for Women” in Greensboro, North Carolina, which he visited over one weekend in January 1935. In the southern comfort of overhanging trees and lush walkways on the small campus, Locke gave what had become his signature lecture of the early 1930s: the “Negro’s Contribution to American Culture.” As he related it to Mason, “The talk was sound, I think, especially since it admitted what we haven’t done—and that statement seems to have paved the way for me to speak out in an article on ‘Why the Negro Renaissance Failed.’ An independent magazine has been started in New York called The Metropolitan. It isn’t what it should be, but its under Negro management … it would be wrong to discuss this in any publication but a Negro journal.” Here was another double bind. He was reluctant to air publicly his frustrations with Negro writers lest it become grist for the mill of White supremacy attacks on Negro cultural production as fundamentally inferior. In the end, the article would not be written, although elements of it would be sprinkled throughout his retrospective reviews of the 1930s and 1940s. “It does not seem the right moment for this, even if there were the right medium,” he concluded. A public attack on former allies would risk criticism from inside the race and might backfire, drawing attention to how his predictions had not panned out. That sense of responsibility for what had not been realized gnawed at him. Locke knew his prediction, however well coached in defensible language, that a literary renaissance would free Negro subjectivity in America, had not only been far-fetched, but now seemed cruelly misleading. He felt pressure to say something about the movement’s collapse “having been so intimately involved,” as he phrased it to Mrs. Mason.¹⁵ But even he knew that simply pointing the finger at others would not make for a coherent—or convincing—argument.

Howard University remained the key to whether the second phase of the Negro Renaissance would succeed by generating a lay audience for Black high aestheticism and critical social science, but Locke had trouble securing the writers he wanted for the Bronze Booklets. First, Eugene Kinckle Jones, executive director of the National Urban League, begged off writing the pamphlet on adult education as he was too busy with his new job at the Department of Commerce, especially during the Great Depression. Then came a rejection from Abram Harris, the most outspoken member of Howard’s “Young Turks.” A Trotskyite economist and fierce critic of Black progressivism’s emphasis on race, Harris argued in his classic study, The Black Worker (1931), that a race focus did not help the Black worker, because it exacerbated conflict with the White working class. Harris and his coauthor, Sterling Spero, also soundly criticized independent Black business development, arguing it would never become big enough to change the material conditions of most Black workers.¹⁶ Abram Harris and Ralph Bunche had even criticized the young student movement, the New Negro Alliance, that in 1933 began to stage boycotts of Washington, D.C., stores that refused to hire Negro workers, arguing that “Don’t Buy Where You Can’t Work” campaigns displaced White workers, caused a backlash, and failed to address the main problem causing unemployment: cyclical capitalism. Harris could hardly take seriously Locke’s advocacy that the Negro Renaissance could mitigate the oppression of Negroes.¹⁷ There was also considerable personal competitiveness between Locke and Harris. When Locke participated in the Saturday-night sessions at Ralph Bunche’s house, sparks would fly between the two of them. On one occasion, Harris reputedly called Locke an “intellectual whore” for his willingness to shift positions in response to the changing times of the 1930s. Not surprisingly, when he received Locke’s letter asking him to do a pamphlet on the economic situation of the Negro funded by money from the Carnegie Corporation, Harris declined to participate.

Being undermined, rejected, and criticized by Negroes at Howard did not stop Locke. As the winter of 1935 turned spring, he moved forward with the adult-education project, pulled together his conference, and responded to the challenge that Robert Goldwater posed to his control over African art. Once he got his wake-up call from Brady, Locke moved to get an article with Miss Griffiths’s photographs of African art published in the Magazine of Art, the same magazine in which he had published his pivotal article on American Negro artists in 1931. After writing, calling, and leaving messages for its elderly editor, Mr. Whiting, for two weeks, Locke learned that Whiting had turned the magazine over to his son. The younger Whiting demurred about having Locke write an article with Griffiths’s photographs, but did need a review of the first exhibition of African art at a major American museum, the Museum of Modern Art. Preparations were already causing a stir that first week of March as the museum closed to the public while more than six hundred works of African art were installed on four floors. The curator had spent months in Europe and the United States tracking down the best examples of African art in collections and may have been helped by Locke to secure some pieces he had collected for Mrs. Edith Isaacs for this exhibition. Thanked in the catalog by Sweeney, Locke was recognized as a curator by this exhibit, but not really as an intellectual authority on African art. Nevertheless, Locke hustled up to see the exhibition, trying to coordinate his visit so that he could see it with Sweeney; when that failed, he took Miss Brady and Miss Brown to the exhibition, letting Sweeney know that he had brought influential members from the Harmon Foundation through it.¹⁸ Locke wanted to get photographs made of the exhibition, so that he could use them in the article he was preparing for the Magazine of Art. Sweeney secured permission from the museum director, and got Locke the photographs, which became the stunning focus of Locke’s article. Sweeney even gave Locke an interview about the exhibit, also featured in the article, “African Art: Classic Style,” that appeared in the May 1935 issue.

Locke’s article gushed over the exhibit for documenting African art as embodying a civilization devoted to high aesthetics long before the European Renaissance. He applauded the beauty of the artworks discovered, including a beautiful mask, made by the “lost wax process,” whose backstory was that it was exemplary of “Benin, the chief city of one of the great Negro empires” with “cultural arts as early as the tenth century,” a monumental city of avenues “seven or eight times wider than the main street of Amsterdam,” and with a “royal palace that was said to be as large as the whole city of Harlem.” Locke applauded how MOMA exploited the brilliant show. A thousand schoolchildren from Manhattan and the Bronx toured the exhibit one Saturday after Easter in 1935 and marveled at “the amusing, delicately designed, tiny bronze weights for measuring gold dust, and the textiles … in which the harsh fibre has been refined by the hand of the weaver almost to the softness of velvet.” Dramatizing the exhibit for the children, a museum press release related how these fine designs were “created in the jungles of the Congo before white men had penetrated them.” Here on 53rd Street was the vision of African civilization Locke had hoped to generate among Black schoolchildren on 135th.¹⁹

But Goldwater capitalized on the exhibit too, getting an article in the MOMA brochure with photographs of the exhibit shot by the up-and-coming Walker Evans. More substantively, the article for which Goldwater had wanted the Griffiths photographs also came out that fall. Published in an obscure art historical journal, Parnassus, “An Approach to African Sculpture” signaled a major shift to close, formal analysis of the plastic achievements of African art with a priority on ethnological examination of individual art objects and whole traditions within their social and cultural—often religious—contexts. Goldwater was moving African art interpretation away from evaluating it in terms of taste, as a connoisseur, and also away from analogous assessment, such as European nomenclature like “classic,” Locke used in his article, to describe African art.

Modern art and African art, Goldwater contended, should be studied as independent traditions, because they emerged from different societies that became interrelated only because of the way Europeans and Americans had come to know African art—through modernism. Goldwater argued that African art could not have really germinated modern art because their forms and use of forms were quite different.

Revelatory as this analysis was, it diminished the world historical work done by African art in launching European modernism. Ironically, Goldwater’s preference for an ethnological analysis of African art effectively covered up that African art had opened the doorway to abstraction, cubism, and even conceptual art for modern European artists, regardless of whatever mistakes they made in understanding it. Much of art history has been driven by misinterpretations of earlier formal traditions, as Locke pointed out in his review of the MOMA show, when he noted the Italian Renaissance’s “misreading” of Greek sculpture. Goldwater’s cultural reading of African art marginalized how artists used African art—to open up the doorway to post-representational art of the twentieth century. Reading African art “on its own terms” severed that art from the circulation of ideas and forms that constituted world modernism, a circulation African art had participated in and shaped.

But Locke could not attend to this debate in 1935. While Locke wrote his African art article, he wrestled with getting people lined up for his conference held over two weekends—April 4–6 and April 11–13. Two problems dogged him. First, many of the prominent people he sought to include simply could not make it. His first choices of speakers reflected his strategy to bring in powerful New Deal figures to discuss minority problems and to insert himself into the discourse and communities of knowledge of the New Deal. Unlike Bunche’s conference planned for May, Locke wanted to mine the New Deal for strategies that could advance minorities. Many of those prominent New Deal figures were simply already booked. Locke’s second problem was more revealing. The people he selected were a curious mix. Some were quite old, like Raymond Leslie Buell, his sometime friend at the Foreign Policy Association, or William Ernest Hocking, Locke’s former professor at Harvard—not John Dewey, the more contemporary philosopher who begged off. Then, there were the young rebels like Bunche, Frazier, and Benjamin E. Mays—the latter the newly minted dean of the School of Religion at Howard University. The assortment of people and perspectives exemplified Locke’s role as harmonizer of divergent values, disciplines, positions, and people, who often brought together profoundly antagonistic intellectuals and scholars to find common ground. But it also showed the split between the two sides of Locke—the conservative, old-world approach to policy and philosophy versus the radical, new-critical approach predominantly academic and social science based. Even if the effort was not a success, Locke tried to bridge the racial divide in American higher education and start an intergenerational conversation about the direction of minority progressivism in the 1930s.

A global perspective also distinguished Locke’s choices. The conference opened with a lecture by Marvin Lowenthal of New York University titled “The Plight of Minorities in the Present Day World.” He argued that contemporary attacks on Jews in Germany, to be formalized in the Nuremburg Laws that fall, were analogous to the Jim Crow laws of segregation in the United States. Right after Lowethal’s stirring keynote, Locke slotted in a discussion of the New Deal’s policy on the Indian, by John Collier, the New Deal commissioner of Indian Affairs, and Ernest Gruening, director of the US Division of Territories and Insular Possessions—a rather remarkable follow-through on his correspondence the year before with Mason on how he wished to do something on the Indian question for the Survey Graphic. The next day’s “discussion conference” featured Leifer Magnusson, director of the International Labor Office, speaking on the politics of assimilation, with Bunche giving his insights from his research on the African Mandates system and “indirect” colonial domination outside of the Americas. E. Franklin Frazier, who was working on his theory of the assimilation of American Negroes of Anglo-American family and social mores, spoke on the politics of bi-racialism.

Most provocatively, Locke chose Raymond Buell to deliver a key lecture on Friday evening titled, “Autonomy vs. Assimilation: A Comparative View,” with Bunche following with a talk on the “new politics of imperialism.” That Locke invited Buell, given his involvement with the Foreign Policy Association that had rejected Locke’s African Mandates report six years earlier, speaks volumes about Locke’s ability to put past mistakes—or hurts—behind him to resurrect a relationship he might need in the future. Buell gave an amazing talk: after discussing the racial problem globally, Buell argued that “the American Negro, while not abandoning his quest for equal rights, would make further progress if he supported the principle of Negro autonomy and group representation in certain areas of the country.” For example, Buell argued that the “Bankhead bill creating the Farm Tenant Homes Corporation” was a “real opportunity” to increase “domestic purchasing power” if it was used by Negroes effectively despite its defects. Rather than sell land to individuals alone, the bill should be augmented to “organize cooperative farm communities” and “earmark part of the funds for the establishment of Negro farming communities. So long as full discretion as to the allotment of these funds is left in the hands of the administration, grave danger of discrimination against the Negroes exists.” But if “half of the Bankhead fund should be used to develop Negro cooperative farming communities—in other words, to develop a kind of Negro TVA … it would help those ‘many Negro families’ who were ‘utterly landless.’ ” Buell even went so far as to suggest that “the Negroes should carefully consider the wisdom of advocating the adoption in certain states of the idea of racial representation” and of fighting for the right to elect, say, “a certain proportion of the members of the state legislature” to “take part in the state legislature upon a complete basis of equality.”²⁰ In having Bunche follow Buell, Locke set up an ironic debate between a White man advocating a form of Black power and a Black man advocating that only class analysis and solidarity with the White working class could transform the colonial situation of minorities, at home or abroad.

Racial and generational debates continued in another session, “Minority Tactics and Techniques of Minority Assertion.” There, Locke set up a discussion among Rabbi Jacob Weinstein, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Howard president Mordecai Johnson, who was included here to discuss nonviolent tactics by Black activists. Here again, Locke put aside his personal distaste for Johnson to have him participate meaningfully in a discussion of the militant versus nonviolent tactics of forcing change by young Blacks—some of whom were Howard University students. Du Bois spoke on two sessions, the second one resonating with Buell’s address—that Blacks ought to embrace self-segregation to build economic power at a time when even the New Deal was not really helping them. Here too, some of Locke’s burgeoning interest in the Soviet Union bore fruit in a talk by the New Masses editor, Joshua Kunitz, on “The Soviet Policy and Program for Minorities.”

Most important for Locke’s future as a philosopher, the conference had panels on philosophy and social change, which brought friends T. V. Smith and Horace Kallen to the conference. That paid off almost immediately. Smith invited Locke to do an article for the International Journal of Ethics, where Smith was associate editor.²¹ In the process of developing that article, Locke began reading the Journal closely, especially its articles on value theory, which brought him back into sync with contemporary moral philosophy and gave him a new context in which to place his musings on the philosophy of value. Kallen followed up his presentation with an invitation of his own—for Locke to write an essay for a volume on contemporary philosophy that he and Sidney Hook were editing.²² The volume, American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, included essays by Harry Overstreet, Harry Costello, Paul Weiss, Irwin Edman, Will Durant, as well as Kallen and Smith. Ultimately, Locke would publish an essay in Kallen’s anthology and not in Smith’s Journal.

Even before the conference, Kallen had helped Locke with suggestions of speakers, such as Lowenthal, a protégé of Kallen, and Hocking, his former colleague at Harvard. At the final session of the conference, titled, “Cultural Reciprocity,” with Locke chairing, Kallen articulated his philosophy that ethnic pluralism was the essence of American democracy. Their reconnection through the conference would initiate Kallen’s insertion of Locke in professional philosophy circles. He would look out for him, bring opportunities to him, and promote Locke as a serious Black philosopher in the White American philosophical world at a time when the “Black philosopher” was an oxymoron in mainstream American philosophy.

Two other speakers at the conference played an important role in Locke’s future intellectual production. Locke used the opportunity of including W. E. B. Du Bois, always a draw as a prominent Black intellectual, in the conference to invite him to do one of the booklets, titled, “The Negro and Social Reconstruction,” a study of the Negro during the Great Depression, for the adult-education series. Du Bois’s second talk, an evening critique of the New Deal administration’s approach to the Negro and the impoverishment caused by the Great Depression, prefigured his analysis in his booklet. The other key participant was Bernhard Stern, a Columbia University professor of education, who spoke on “Religion as a Separatist Force,” with whom Locke would later collaborate. Even the contentious E. Franklin Frazier must have been pleased with the conference, as Locke brought Frazier’s mentor, the dean of the Chicago School of Sociology, Robert Park, to lecture on his theory of the relationship of race and culture.

Locke could not, however, bask in the positive aura of the conference, because even during its planning, a nasty conflict emerged with Carter G. Woodson. Locke thought he had a verbal assurance from Woodson to write the booklet on Negro history for the Bronze Booklets. But when Locke wrote at the beginning of April to say that he had secured funding and expected Woodson to contribute the book, Woodson balked and claimed he had never agreed to such a proposal. One aspect of Locke’s letter undoubtedly irritated Woodson: Locke coupled his request with begging off his own writing commitment to Woodson. Earlier that year, Woodson had written to Locke, “Not long ago you promised to prepare a biography of Frederick Douglass. There is a demand for such a book. We should like very much to publish it at once. Kindly let us know when we may have the manuscript. If you do not intend to write the work, kindly be frank about it for it is necessary to have such a work produced by some one in the near future.”²³ Locke’s answer was not an apology for failing to meet his writing obligation, an admission that he had reached a mental block in writing the biography as he confided to Mason, but his claim to have stopped writing because Benjamin Brawley, the series editor, had told him that the project had been discontinued. The other irritation for Woodson was that Locke had secured funding from the Carnegie Corporation that he would have liked. “I am now in a position to take up formally your appreciated verbal acceptance of a commission to do a pamphlet for the Adult Education Series on Negro History.” Locke continued:

There will be nine of these booklets, Negro Music, Negro Art, the Negro in American Fiction and Drama, Negro Poetry, the History of the Negro, The Negro and Economic Imperialism, Economic Reconstruction and the Negro and Economic Aspects of the Race Question. These booklets will be approximately 96 to 112 pages and will be published under the grant given by the Carnegie Corporation through the American Association of Adult Education. I have assurance in writing that there will be “no restriction as to content,” and I know very definitely,—since your name was mentioned in all discussions of the project that you would be as welcome a collaborator to the Committee and the sponsorship as you are to us. … The topics might very well follow the general outline of your The Negro in Our History.²⁴

Woodson replied that he could not possibly write such a booklet for Locke’s series, unless Locke let Woodson publish the entire series under his Associated Publishers. The request stunned Locke, but it shouldn’t have. After all, Woodson was the head of an association that had been doing public history programming for almost a decade. He invented the Negro History Week celebration in 1926, along with annual meetings to stimulate the study and appreciation of Negro history among the public and among Negro teachers and self-trained scholars. Woodson had even supported some of Locke’s proposals to research African art, had hired Locke to teach African art in his correspondence courses, and even created a publishing firm to print and distribute his and other books on Negro history. As Woodson put it to Locke, “The only way for me to cooperate with you would be to serve as the publisher of the entire series. This firm will gladly welcome the opportunity to bring out this series in keeping with its policy to stimulate adult education as it has done through the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History. You cannot expect the undersigned to join with others to duplicate what he is already doing.”²⁵ Locke was proposing to create a publishing firm in Negro Adult Education to compete with Woodson’s own efforts in this area, even if his did not bear the official title of adult education.

Not surprisingly, Locke was unwilling to deed over to Woodson the publishing of the booklets, since Locke had secured the funding to publish them himself. Locke accused Woodson of reneging on his previous commitment but then somewhat disingenuously suggested that “the matter of publication is as you may imagine entirely in the hands of our Committee,” which might be more inclined to have Woodson publish the series if he was to contribute a book. But that was really not going to happen, as Locke made clear in the rest of the letter. “I am sure, for one thing, that few would agree with you in the rather monopolistic interpretation you make concerning this general field of work. I, myself, thought of this pamphlet as a friendly way of recognizing the work that you and your association have done in this field, and of making through this primer considerable publicity for The Negro in Our History and other of your publications.”²⁶ Woodson’s reply barely contained his fury: “You refer to a verbal agreement which I have never made. You must be using your imagination. When you talked to me about the affair I replied in the negative. I said in the first place that I would not write such a work for less than $500, and I advised you not to mention my name to your committee.” Then, going to the heart of the matter between them, Woodson used the race card to hide the fact that they were now, in fact, competitors: “As to my ‘monopolistic interpretation’ I shall say only that Negroes need to cooperate in presenting their case to the world rather than serve those who for the last four centuries have been doing this for them in a distorted attitude.”²⁷

There was a kernel of truth in Woodson’s charge, but at core he resented Locke for succeeding where he had failed in getting funding from the Carnegie Corporation to fund a publishing project. Indeed, despite his critique of Locke for “serving” the White people, Woodson himself had sought and received $25,000, paid in installments of $5,000 a year for five years—from the very same Carnegie Corporation in 1921 when starting the ASNLH.²⁸ The image that Woodson sought to convey—that his was a completely independent Black agency aloof from seeking support and funding from White folks—was an illusion, although he did not have to work under the American Association of Adult Education, a fact that would be important soon. As recently as 1927, Woodson had been pressuring Keppel to give him a substantial grant. Rejection of his grant request came because of an assessment in the Carnegie Corporation that Woodson was difficult and irascible; by contrast, Locke was perceived as someone they could work with. Plus Locke had presented his proposals within the nomenclature of Adult Education, a Carnegie initiative with AAAE oversight. Locke had trumped Woodson in getting the Carnegie money, and Woodson was not happy about it.

Before the adult-education publication project mushroomed into another crisis, Locke had his own publication to finish. Kallen had been serious about having Locke contribute to the volume of American philosophy, and Locke’s first opportunity to publish philosophy was due July 1. The article was a real struggle for him emotionally, but he found writing an essay on pure philosophy a welcome escape from the problems of being a Negro intellectual in Depression-era America. Even though Kallen pushed Locke to include something on his racial politics as a Negro in this article, Locke resisted, except in the autobiographical statement that accompanied the article. The essay he contributed, “Values and Imperatives,” dealt with issues of diversity and group conflict raised at his conference but he posed them as a problem of values rather than a problem of race. In doing so, Locke formulated a new voice for himself speaking to American culture about its fundamental ethical confusions. So nervous was Locke about whether the article accomplished its goals that he submitted a draft of it to Smith to review before turning it over to Kallen. “Now I wonder if I could really impose on good friendship. Here is a copy of the paper for Kallen’s anthology. I have asked him … if it deserves the mortuary’s lap. But he just might be too embarrassed to do it. So will you please give me the benefit of your usual long-sighted sort of friendship? With the travails [?] of the fatiguing year, no local consultation available, I have been at a complete loss; and it is maybe a fizzler. Could you let me have your reactions rather promptly?”²⁹ Smith’s reactions were swift. “Between legislative committees I have read your piece, and with no little enjoyment. To answer all questions at once, I say this: If Kallen declares the morg for your article, then I will be happy to immortalize it by publishing it in the Journal. I think it just that good.” Kallen published it in American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow, well situating Locke’s maiden philosophical publication in a broad community of contemporary philosophers.³⁰

Indeed, the essay probably made Locke uneasy because of its boldness: it takes that community to task for abdicating its responsibility to construct a common ethics of the twentieth century after Nietzsche’s declaration that God is dead and William James’s declaration that all values were pragmatic. Universal values had also received a different kind of blow from Franz Boas, who taught that diverse peoples viewed and valued the world quite differently. But Locke challenged American philosophers to avoid succumbing to value anomie even while recognizing all values were contextual. He criticized American philosophers for their bad faith in not confronting the problem posed by twentieth-century revolutions in knowledge—how to develop and promote a system of values that is inclusive of difference and promotes a new global consciousness of tolerance without undermining the power of values to order our world. “Though they have at times discussed the problems of value, they have usually avoided their normative aspects, which has led them into a bloodless behaviorism as arid as the intellectualism they have abandoned or else resulted in a completely individualistic and anarchic relativism which has rightly been characterized recently as ‘philosophic Nihilism.’ In de-throning our absolutes, we must take care not to exile our imperatives, for after all, we live by them.”³¹ Values might be relative, but they were necessary.

Relativism, Locke argued, could not answer the fundamental question of the twentieth century: how do we construct a shared understanding of what we value in life? Pragmatism and positivism largely wished it away by saying values as such did not exist, which, as he brilliantly observed, is itself a value statement. “By waiving the question of the validity of value ultimates as ‘absolutes,’ we do not escape the problem of their functional categorical character as imperatives of action and as norms of preference and choice.”³² It is better to face the reality that we live making value judgments all the time even as we as yet have no philosophically adequate rationale as to why our values are superior. Instead of an intellectual critique of “realms of value,” Locke shifts the focus to our “modes or kinds of valuing.”³³

Strikingly, the essay does not fit easily into any familiar philosophical camps, being less a pragmatic philosophical statement than a psychological one. Locke directly repudiates John Dewey, arguing that relegating values to the “logico-experimental slant” makes “truth too exclusively a matter of the correct anticipation of experience, of the confirmation of fact. Yet truth may also sometimes be the sustaining of an attitude, the satisfaction of a way of feeling, the corroboration of a value. To the poet, beauty is truth; to the religious devotee, God is truth; to the enthused moralist, what ought-to-be overtops factual reality.”³⁴ This reveals a bit about why this essay appeared in 1935 while Locke was wrestling with the thorny questions of how to continue to promote poetry, the arts, and especially performance, as forms of knowledge at a time when knowledge seems increasingly sequestered to the scientific. The psychological perspective on values was his way out of the cul-de-sac the philosophical community heads backed itself into with its attention to the experimental approach to truth. Unlike the lions of pragmatism, Locke puts the feeling subject at the center of any discussion of value.

Locke’s recurring phrase—a “functional analysis of value norms”—grounds any theory of value in the experience of the feeling subject, whether accessed through Gestalt theory or Jungian symbolism, both of which Locke references, to uncover the nuanced feelings, aesthetic-like reactions, to our experience that becomes over time our values. That’s why they are often expressed in poetry and religion and politics, not simply in scientific or philosophical arguments. “For every value transformed by change of logical pre-suppositions, scores are switched by a radical transformation of the feeling-attitude. We are forced to conclude that the feeling-quality, irrespective of content, makes a value of a given kind.”³⁵

Putting feeling at the center of value creation also places the artist at the center of understanding not only about how values emerge but also how they change and acquire meanings from our experience. “The artist may feel duty towards his calling, obligation toward his unrealized idea. … Instead of the repose or ecstasy of contemplation or the exuberant flow of creative expression, he feels the tension and pull of an unrealized situation, and feeling obligation and conflict, senses along with that a moral quality. The changed feeling-attitude creates a new value; and the type-form of the attitude brings with it its appropriate value category. These modes co-assert their own relevant norms; each sets up a categorical imperative of its own, not of the Kantian sort with rationalized universality and objectivity, but instead the psychological urgency (shall we say necessity) to construe the situation as a particular qualitative form character. It is this that we term a function categorical factor, since it operates in and through feeling.”³⁶ Like James’s earlier work, Locke is tracing the formation of value consciousness and charting how it works and moves as a consciousness, not constructing an argument about the best way to test the truth of values. More than a statement about what is reality, valuing is a feeling with which we structure the reality we have.

Centering feeling in value theory also connected Locke’s philosophical musings of 1935 with his adult-education interests. Values should not be deemed as valid only when they came from rational subjects, that is, educated philosophers. The common person values as much as the intellectual, and his or her tendency to be nonreflective and nonreflexive about his or her values is a key to what values are—a set of feelings about what is the good, the beautiful, and the just that we live by and are fiercely attached to. “The common man, in both his individual and group behavior … sets up personal and private and group norms as standards and principles, and rightly or wrongly hypostasizes them as universals, for all conditions, all times and all men.”³⁷

The deeper question, then, of the 1930s, was how to keep these commonly held “universals” from leading to a kind of conflict that could, if unchecked, destroy the world? What was the antidote to “Nordicism and other rampant racialisms” that seemed on the rise throughout the world? Locke’s answer to this problem was that even White supremacy and anti-Semitism “might achieve historical sanity or at least prudential common-sense to halt at the natural frontiers of genuinely shared loyalties and not so their own eventual downfall through forced loyalties and the counter-reactions which they inevitably breed.” Here, Locke reached back to his philosophy professor at Harvard, Josiah Royce, and his principle of “loyalty to loyalty” for the idea that those who fiercely held to their values could see the value in value loyalty. In a Kantian way, if they saw this kind of loyalty as a categorical good, as something good for all peoples, then the loyalty of other peoples to their values was a good and something to be upheld and defended despite our disagreement with them. It was analogous to the defense of free speech as a good even when I disagree with what others have to say. How can we have and celebrate our values without needing to deny to others their right to their values, their cultural preferences, their way of organizing space, their love of their way of doing things? That was the larger moral question facing the world in 1935, and Locke’s essay answered it by posing a “principle of maximizing values” as the most likely to curb their excesses.

Locke’s strength could be perceived as a weakness, since his tentative answer, loyalty to loyalty, and “maximizing values” did not outline any new path to get racists, imperialists, or fascists to stop imposing their will through violence on those who disagreed with “their values.” What if the source of conflict was not over different values but the desire for the same value, the desire for monopoly? What if the conflict that led to a world war, a race riot, or a general strike was really that different groups or peoples wanted more of the same thing—such as power, or decent living conditions, or money? Indeed, as brilliant as Locke’s analysis was, it skirted a burning issue—the issue of power, and how the powerful could impose their values, and keep more of what they valued for themselves and away from the weak, despite calls for tolerance. Tolerance itself needed to be backed by power to compel the more powerful to refrain from crushing the different or weak. Power, it seems, was the one key that Locke did not have an answer for, yet.

Loyalty to loyalty was not particularly useful for Locke in his own personal career when dealing with conflicts with others. During the conference, Locke had asked W. E. B. Du Bois to do a book for the Bronze Booklets series, which Du Bois agreed to immediately. Du Bois pumped out his booklet in record time and turned in the complete manuscript by June 1935, before anyone else. And it was a well-written and sharp critique of the New Deal approach to a “reconstruction” of the Negro. It was ideological, a plain but sharply worded statement of his conversion to nationalism in the 1930s. It was nationalistic rationalism in the face of segregation that said that Black folk needed to self-organize and follow in the footsteps of other immigrant groups who economically and politically fed their own. Initially, Locke seemed enthusiastic about Du Bois’s submission. “I received yesterday our first manuscript,—that on Social Reconstruction and the Negro, from Dr. Du Bois. It is a very interesting piece of work of 108 pages”—the exact length that Locke had specified for the manuscripts and most other writers exceeded it.³⁸ Locke decided to send Du Bois one-half of the honorarium, plus $40 in secretarial typing expenses that Du Bois also requested, with the balance of $100.00 to be sent upon editorial revision and acceptance of the manuscript. But Locke became more cautious once he had read the manuscript thoroughly. It became clear that Du Bois’s manuscript essentially critiqued all White intervention in Black social problems. Self-determination was the only solution to such problems. While sympathetic to this argument, Locke edited the manuscript with an eye to cleave off those arguments that might draw attention from the AAAE liberals whom he was producing, in an adult-education series, a radical adult-education critique of Americanism. Locke revised Du Bois’s paragraphs to tone down his anger. As for Du Bois’s alarming summary, “A Creed,” that made explicit the rejection of White assistance and the embrace of Black self-determination, Locke jettisoned that completely in favor of having Du Bois conform to the format of including study questions at the end of each of the short chapters.

But Du Bois would not cooperate. He accepted a few changes and was open to others Locke might find or point out in his manuscript as “errors of taste” or “problems of fact.” But he would not compromise on interpretation. He also resisted the idea of eliminating “A Creed.” At that point, Locke elected not to challenge Du Bois. He could have replied with a simple statement that explained he could not accept the manuscript without the changes. Instead, he seemed to accept that Du Bois could only be moved so far. He had the manuscript typed up with some of the changes reversed and wrote the editor’s preface that appeared at the beginning of each of the pamphlets. This preface introduced the author and rather deliberately encouraged the reader to “make up one’s own mind” about the proposals Du Bois made. Locke still held back on publishing “A Creed,” which was, quite frankly, a clear attempt by Du Bois to use the adult-education book as a propaganda advertisement for his program of Black self-organization.

Then Locke sent the manuscript to Lyman Bryson, whose role was to ensure that the series was written in the kind of simple language that would reach marginal readers in the adult-education target audience. However, form was not what Bryson was most interested in. Throughout his comments on this and other manuscripts, Bryson’s eye most often fell on content. In the most important exercise of his “co-editor” role, Bryson apparently expressed extreme dislike for the manuscript turned in by W. E. B. Du Bois—and not because of its style. Locke countered Bryson’s critique of Du Bois’s manuscript by defending the right of the series to be “controversial.” No letter from Bryson showing what he objected to in the Du Bois manuscript survives in the Alain Locke Papers at Howard, although he must have written Locke about the manuscript. He also must have made a stand on the Du Bois manuscript, and his threat was real, since if he alerted the Association that something untenable was being published under their auspices, they could end the whole series, with only part of the money having been dispensed.

The controversy threatened to bring an end to the whole Bronze Booklets publishing venture. Locke made that clear in a letter he wrote to Bryson:

I am concerned about your reaction to the manuscript, not so much because of the manuscript itself, but because of the principle that it raises. I had already considered the possibility that we would not publish the manuscript when I sent the first installment of the honorarium to Dr. Du Bois, believing that considering the extensive amount of time and effort he put into it, he should receive at least some of the honorarium. But the issue goes beyond simply the manuscript. Actually, I had considered that Du Bois might have a strident attitude in his manuscript on the racialist side, but believed that publishing his along with Bunche’s more Marxist manuscript, would have the effect of boxing the compass of prevailing attitudes in the black community. As I stated in the proposal, I did not want to publish or believe that it would be successful to publish simply staid sociological studies of the Negro situation, but that for the series to succeed with the reading black public, it would have to be controversial or at least engage the controversial issues of the day. If this principle cannot be adhered to, then I would rather be done with the whole project than to put out a series of pedestrian pamphlets.³⁹

This perhaps explains why Locke had not elected simply to write a big book that covered all of the subjects recommended in the series, for he could not express the radical views that needed to be expressed in order to connect with the radical temper of the 1930s. Instead, he had to let others write, because they could express his own opinions more sharply than he could and therefore establish him as a harmonizer of divergent values. But now those opinions, Du Bois’s especially, together with Bryson’s reaction to them, threatened his middleman position.

Locke was not committed to publishing Du Bois’s manuscript at all costs. But as he had earlier expressed to Woodson, “I have assurance in writing that there will be ‘no restriction as to content.’ ”⁴⁰ Du Bois was a lightning rod, but that was part of his appeal, and Locke needed his pamphlet to gain national, public attention for the series, to counterbalance some of the more tame booklets. If Locke could still publish the Du Bois manuscript in the first batch of booklets, the series might be an intellectual and political blockbuster and elevate Locke as publisher into the kind of impresario of contemporary Black Studies.

But Bryson was unrelenting. He suggested that the matter be put to a committee. Initially, Locke objected to this idea, recognizing that such a procedure would undermine his position as editor. But Locke’s position was already undermined as editor. It is not clear that if challenged, Bryson would have gone to the Carnegie officials and won such a confrontation, since it would have been risky for Cartwright to shut down Locke’s operation with the possibility of a public scandal over White censorship of Black thought through a supposedly liberal and democratic adult-education program. Yet Locke did not challenge Bryson. Rather, he scheduled a meeting of the editorial committee to consider three issues: (1) what should be done about the Du Bois manuscript; (2) whether, in principle, the series should publish controversial books; and (3) what kind of disclaimer should be appended to each pamphlet to absolve the Association from responsibility for the views expressed by the authors to address Bryson’s concerns. No notes survive from that meeting, but it is clear that the committee affirmed Locke’s interpretation that the series should publish controversial books. A subcommittee was formed to consider the Du Bois manuscript and a statement was approved to absolve the AAAE of responsibility for the views expressed in the Bronze Booklets.

In the end, however, Locke did not publish Du Bois’s manuscript in the series.

Not publishing his book was especially devastating to Du Bois, who was almost unemployed in 1935. Locke did remit to Du Bois the second half of payment for the book, bringing the total to the $200 promised. Afterward, Du Bois would tell friends that one could not trust Locke, and in fact, he was right. Locke would not sacrifice the adult-education project for Du Bois. This feeling of the betrayal of one Black intellectual by another lingers, even though Du Bois’s stubbornness in the matter of publishing his creed made it more difficult for Locke to stick with him. Loyalty to another Black intellectual who, despite his irascibility, had come to Locke’s aid in the conference was not enough for Locke to put loyalty to another Black scholar ahead of his own self-interest. Once again, something of his weakness as a leader was reflected in his choosing, albeit faced with a difficult decision, to ally with the powerful White people in his public politics.

The controversy delayed the publication of the first batch of Bronze Booklets for a year. Finally, at the very end of 1936, the Bronze Booklets appeared with Ralph Bunche’s A World View of Race as his first signature publication in the four booklets that launched the series. By dumping Du Bois and foregrounding Bunche, whose Marxist take on race was in sync with thinking of the day, Locke gave his series an immediate currency it would not have had otherwise. This decision marked a turning point for Locke. He had turned his back on old-style Black nationalist proposals of social change and embraced, if only tentatively, the new, younger politics of Marxist criticism. Ralph Bunche had become something Locke needed: a muse. Locke’s two booklets were written with a verve and clarity unseen in the rest of his writings. Teetering throughout the project on the brink of falling in love with Bunche, Locke absorbed not only Bunche’s beauty and grace but also his strength of mind into his prose. Ironically, by rejecting Du Bois’s manuscript, Bryson had helped Locke distance himself from the frankly nationalist, and increasingly dated, Du Bois, something that Locke would not have been strong enough to do on his own. Despite their conflicts, Du Bois had been a forerunner, someone who, since Souls of Black Folk had appeared in 1903, had been writing the books that Locke wanted to write. Now, in a stunning move, Locke kept Du Bois from publishing his book, at least temporarily, and published two of his own instead—The Negro and His Music and Negro Art: Past and Present. These were short booklets, to be sure, but milestones in his own career, his first solo-authored books in a long career as a writer.

W. E. B. Du Bois went ahead and published his booklet, The Social Reconstruction of the Negro, privately. He then poured his efforts into getting his Encyclopedia of the Negro, a massive compendium of all knowledge about Black people, written and published. He had the support of Anson Phelps Stokes, who believed he could convince the General Education Board to fund the encyclopedia to the amount of roughly $130,000 if they could secure matching funds for the multivolume project. That was a lot of money in 1937. By 1937, Locke had produced a much more modest set of eight booklets for $5,000. Locke had already published books by some of the Young Turk scholars at Howard that Du Bois was trying to get to work on the Encyclopedia, but they were rebuffing Du Bois because he had, in the words of E. Franklin Frazier, too many “politicians and not scholars” lined up to contribute. But Du Bois paid that no mind. He charged forward with the support of another Howard professor, Rayford Logan, also a critic of Locke, to try and get the GEB funding and to get Frederick Keppel to accept his proposal for the Carnegie Corporation to fund the Encyclopedia.

So convinced was Du Bois that his project would finally be funded that he invited Logan to wait with him for the telephone call on April 7, 1938, that he had been promised immediately following the GEB trustees meeting expecting confirmation that Stokes would call with news that his Encyclopedia would be funded. A bottle of vintage champagne sat chilling on Du Bois’s desk in a fine bucket. The phone never rang. Months later Du Bois would learn that the Carnegie Corporation also would not fund the Encyclopedia. Du Bois biographer David Levering Lewis notes that a group of “foundation WASPs” had determined that Du Bois was a propagandist and not “objective.”⁴¹ Certainly, Lyman Bryson had reached that conclusion. There was no chance that the Carnegie Corporation was going to fund Du Bois’s Encyclopedia after Bryson had rejected Du Bois’s manuscript for the Bronze Booklets. Du Bois apparently never knew that it was the White representative of Carnegie who blocked his booklet’s publication. Locke surely did not want to admit that the White man on his board held the ultimate power.

A photograph of the group of people Du Bois had assembled to contribute to the Encyclopedia tells the story (see page 716). Locke is off to the right of the picture, his tiny body wrapped in a silver-gray double-breasted suit, quite content. Du Bois is in the center, unmistakably facing away from Locke whom he believes is a backstabber. Keppel should never have let Du Bois think he had a chance to get the Corporation’s funding for the Encyclopedia, and Locke probably would have told Du Bois that if he had asked. But as in many of these competitive struggles for White money among Black intellectuals, there was no chance of solidarity, or that one would “warn a brother” that he was about to be disappointed. In the end, this was the purpose of patronage in the larger struggle of Black intellectual self-determination in the mid-twentieth century. It was designed to divide and conquer. As with Mrs. Mason before, it succeeded.

Contributors to the Encyclopedia Africana, ca. 1938.