40

The Queer Toussaint

Rather than escaping during the summer of 1938, Locke accepted the challenge to make American culture what he wanted it to be. He now undertook this work with a kind of military zeal. Black people could only be freed if their avant garde, intellectually weaponized Black artists followed him into battle against the notion that Black people should not be proud to be Black in a discursively White America. His sense of destiny now matched his ability to fulfill his calling without the help of any one person. No longer a lieutenant of someone else’s agenda, Locke fulfilled his own agenda believing it was the last best hope for a world historical Black race.

Locke applied himself to what was in front of him—the coming conference on Negro adult education that he himself had put into motion during the spring. Since this adult-education meeting was held at Hampton Institute, housing was not an issue. By holding the conference at a Negro college, Locke not only solved the problem of Jim Crow hotels by putting attendees in Black college dormitories but also made a larger point—that adult education was part of higher education. He also pulled in the White authorities on adult education into the bosom of Black education and forced them to see Negro education as American education, and vice versa.

Still, there were hassles in the run-up to the conference, as Locke, the go-between of establishment adult education and Black grass-roots adult education, had to balance the conflicting agendas. At the last minute, the delicate balance of bringing large numbers of White administrators into conversation with Black ones was threatened when Morse Cartwright, director of the American Association for Adult Education, insisted the conference change its dates so that the Secretary of Education could speak. But the star speaker at the conference was Locke, who delivered one of his powerful speeches on a subject that transcended the factions and elites he brought together—and defined what Negro adult education had to teach American adult education. In a rare moment when he acknowledged the reality of segregation, Locke cast it as an opportunity for American education to reinvent itself. Mainstream American adult educators could learn something from how Negro adult educators engaged communities displaced from the American dream by teaching them to think critically about what lifelong education really meant. It meant the teaching of people to think for themselves. If American education could embrace that notion, it would not only have learned something from Negroes, it would have learned something about how to transform America.

Of course, after the conference, Locke was exhausted, his heart taxed by the networking, chitchatting, and hand shaking that Locke usually avoided. But the conference had renewed his faith in his interracial diplomacy if for no other reason than he had brought together in the same college auditorium people who never saw one another and made them interact. Once he had recovered his strength and regained traction in teaching that fall quarter’s classes, Locke took a chance. He wrote to “Papa Keppel,” as he called the head of the Carnegie Corporation, with a powerful proposal. He wanted to produce a portfolio of images of Negro art that would be a companion to his Bronze Booklet, Negro Art: Past and Present, and present the argument of that booklet in a large format. The new art book would include photographs of African art, art by Negro artists, and art of the Negro subject by White artists. Most of the artwork already had been located during the research for the Bronze Booklet. He needed a Carnegie subvention to shoulder the costs of getting high-quality plates made of artwork and to price the book low enough to reach Negro artists, Negro college students, and the Negro lower middle class.

But the radicalism of the proposal did not escape the notice of the art experts Keppel consulted for a recommendation. “We are interested in anything you think well of,” Keppel wrote back in a month, “but our advisers believe there is a mistake in principle about this whole enterprise and, under the circumstances, I am inclined not to take it up formally with my Board, but to wait, if you agree, for the next suggestion that will come from your fertile mind.”¹ Not willing to simply accept the rejection, Locke used his reply to make a stronger counterargument even as he accepted Keppel’s decision not to bring the proposal before the Carnegie Board of Trustees. He knew well the advisor’s objections, but also believed he had an answer for them.

Oddly enough had the project been framed merely as a record of the work of Negro artists, the major dilemma would have been resolved. But as in the little booklet on “Negro Art” I am committed to the less established position of emphasizing the Negro subject as an art theme rather than the more chauvinistic position of merely playing up the work of Negro artists. The position that it is wrong to emphasize the color line in art is logically sound and seems to take the high moral ground. But it is a Pharisaical virtue. It denies us as a group already the victims of an enforced cultural separatism the positive incentives and residual advantages of a situation which isn’t cured by partially ignoring it. The work of the Negro artist needs documentation and is maturing to a point where it deserves it. Yet this emphasis in my judgment would be chauvinistic and reactionary if it were not threaded into the broader theme of the development of the art of the Negro subject, and in a way to show the collaboration of the white artist in an ever-increasing penetration into the Negro types as subject matter for American art.²

The Black body, that he loved, had to be the centerpiece of a book on Negro art that enabled Black subjectivity—the “less established position of emphasizing the Negro subject.” Although Locke did not say so in his letter to Keppel, putting the work of African artists and European artists in the same book with African American artists would also be radical—and break down the racial segregation of canonical art history. The proposal also rejected the notion that Black art could be studied in isolation, as not always in conversation with, reaction against, revision of the work of White artists and European and American art histories. Locke’s book would reveal that the White artist had had a love affair with the very same Blackness that Western society routinely demonized. It had had no chance of being recommended by Keppel’s experts.

Instead of sulking, Locke advanced his approach to Negro art through a curatorial strategy even in major Black exhibitions he did not control. As he wrote Mason in January 1939, “There is to be a grand show of the work of Negro artists at new Baltimore Museum of Art—opening February 3rd. I have helped make contacts and in return they are asking me to be guest speaker at the opening-night—8:30 pm.” In the process, he circumvented his opposition through connections to White museums that relied on his judgment and aesthetic taste to make their curatorial decisions in the Negro art field. When the trustees of the Baltimore Museum of Art, and a local committee of African Americans, headed by Sarah Fernandis, expressed the desire to recognize recent activity among African American artists in some way, Locke and Brady had convinced the museum to do the show.³ Neither Keppel’s “experts” nor Howard University Art Department teachers were influential with that class.

Indeed, the leadership of the Howard University Art Department had to welcome Locke when the Baltimore curator selecting the work for the exhibition contacted Locke to accompany him on a studio visit to Howard University, but an awkward situation emerged. “Friday afternoon he [Rogers] came over,” Locke wrote to Brady, “and as he asked me to make the arrangements with Herring, etc., there had to be a sacred truce, which went off all right as far as I was concerned.” Being asked to do studio visits with the Baltimore curator provided Locke some sweet satisfaction. “There were some terribly ironic moments; among them a visit to Porter’s home and my having to help un-pack Miss Jones’s canvases. Mr. Rogers took only one thing of Miss Jones’s—a watercolor; nothing of Porter’s—whose work he criticized very objectively but firmly. I discreetly left the room during most of this, but had to participate in the beginning as Mr. Rogers cross-examined me to get concurrence on certain points.” Lois Jones, influenced by Locke, was selected to be in the show, while Porter was not. And Herring dared not block Locke’s access to artists in the Howard University Art Department given that he accompanied a White curator.

The local Howard art people have been very nasty and non-cooperative—although I ignored their previous attitude to take the curator around their studios. But he took almost nothing—criticized them frankly—and now I have earned their greater enmity. I took Mrs. Biddle to our lovely little University gallery—she enjoyed it—but did not realize that the director [James Herring] scarcely speaks to me—regarding me an intruder into “his” field. He himself cannot write a clear sentence and is vain as a mangy peacock. This isn’t spleen—its just truth.⁴

Herring dared not block Locke’s access to the Howard University Gallery of Art when Mrs. Biddle visited. She was the wife of the Attorney General of the United States, and it might have cost him his job.

Not surprisingly, Locke was pleased with the experience. “I am really quite impressed with Mr. Roger’s interest and sincerity. He is evidently deeply interested in Negro artists and their work; obviously more so than when he began. But he feels that they need criticism and that double standards or conventional ones either will do them more harm than good.”⁵ It was thrilling to have a White man with unimpeachable art credentials reinforce his recommendations. Lois Jones was the only artist in the Howard University Department of Art to have something selected by the curator of the show, and she was the only faculty member who followed Locke’s ideas. The “Contemporary Negro Art” exhibit showed the depth of Locke’s influence in the art world: a White curator of a major American museum of modern art was putting together an exhibit based on Locke’s ideas, selecting art Locke’s taste had shaped, and doing the work his writings had said needed to be done.

Locke’s newfound prominence alienated some former allies. Mary Beattie Brady had always had a tense relationship with Locke. Later in her retirement, Brady would confide to David Driskell in an extensive interview that she always was skeptical of Locke’s “Negro nationalism” and attempts to create a race-based program in Negro art. Richard Long, a Locke protégé and confidant, recalled a different reason for Brady’s late career animus toward Locke. It was not ideological. Reputedly, while discussing the prospects for the Contemporary Negro Art exhibit with Adelyn Breeskin, the chief curator of the Baltimore Museum of Art, she suggested that what the museum intended was something akin to the Harmon Foundation exhibits. Locke’s retort told his side of the story. “Oh, I think we can do better than that.”⁶ Somehow, that comment got back to Brady to her chagrin.

Nevertheless, Locke’s influence on the exhibit worked to the Harmon Foundation’s advantage. Locke encouraged Richmond Barthé and Jacob Lawrence to bring their artwork to the Harmon Foundation offices, which served as an entrepôt for the New York–based artists to have their work catalogued for shipment to Baltimore. Brady seized on this opportunity to heighten the drama of the historic exhibition, by having James Allen photograph Barthé presenting a sculpture, Stevedore, to a White registrar, while next to him stands Lawrence with a box containing paintings of the Toussaint L’Ouverture series. Strikingly, the photograph registers the racial/sexual politics of Locke’s exhibitionary politics, and how Barthé adapted to the Zeitgeist of the 1930s, since his bulbous, hyper-masculine working-class Stevedore diverged sharply from the lean, classically beautiful Black nude he had submitted to the Harmon exhibition in 1933. Locke and Brady lobbied the Baltimore Museum of Art to devote an entire room to exhibiting Lawrence’s multi-panel series visualizing the Haitian Revolution of 1804 on its own, making it the artistic hit of the exhibition.

So influential was Locke in the staging of this exhibit that the Baltimore leadership gave him a prominent role in the printed materials and public rollout of the exhibition. Ever the queer strategist, Locke wanted to ensure that such a speaking role would not compromise his leading-from-behind strategy in steering the exhibition. As he wrote Brady early in 1939, “Professor Boas has asked me to do a foreword for the catalogue, which I will try to make justify your expectations. This especially since your suggestion must have started it. The suggestion has also been made that I give a brief talk opening night. I will discuss it further in Baltimore on Wednesday—as I am anxious to avoid the suspicion of putting myself forward. However, it looks like a hot campaign anyway; so why retreat?” Once again, the military metaphor announced a war for Negro art and against those enemy forces that would hold it back. “Negro art must go forward; and we seem to be critically challenged. I think I should accept it. Of course if I had realized this earlier I would have scouted around even more widely for available material.”⁷

While no photograph survives of Locke giving the opening-night speech at the “Contemporary Negro Art” exhibition, an indelible image does show us what Locke achieved with the exhibition. It is a photograph of two young children looking up at a large, mask-like sculpture by Ronald Moody, a Jamaican artist based in Paris (see page 776). The pre–Columbian looking Afro-Indian sculpture is huge, even more so in contrast to the little children gazing from below. Instead of the challenges of segregated life in the Great Depression, these young children display hope, optimism, and wonder at the huge possibilities before them. This photograph captures Locke’s purpose—to generate an art that would uplift the gaze of the young Negroes by filling them with a sense of pride, style, and wonder at what they could achieve if they believed.

Locke’s opening remarks that evening, printed in the foreword to the catalog, showed his willingness to change his message in order to reach that new generation. “Art in a democracy should above all else be democratic, which is to say that it must be truly representative.” Negro art had come into the center of the cultural democracy that those in WPA circles referenced as the raison d’être of cultural public art to build a new, more representative democracy for the future. Government support of the arts was breaking the elitist stranglehold that the gallery system and private patronage had exercised on American art. Speaking more directly to the Baltimore Museum’s intervention, Locke announced it exemplifying “changing the role of the museum from that of a treasure storehouse of the past to that of a clearing house for the contemporary artist,” a vision that Locke had communicated to the Baltimore museum in recommending the exhibit in the first place. Their staff’s receptiveness signaled a corner had been turned in “our now generally accepted objective to have American art fully document American life and experience, and thus more adequately reflect America.”⁸ Here was another new position: Negro art was justified as the logical outgrowth of the demand for cultural democracy in the 1930s, in which all of America’s constituencies should be represented in American art. Having pined for so long in the fields of an African-centered argument for American Negro art, Locke found traction in that long-ago developed argument of cultural pluralism.

Boys and sculpture, Contemporary Negro Art exhibition, The Baltimore Museum of Art, 1939. Photograph Collection, Archives and Manuscripts Collection, The Baltimore Museum of Art. AN6.40.

Perhaps as significant as who was included in the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibit was who was not. No Harmon Foundation critics from the Harlem Artists Guild such as Augusta Savage or Romare Bearden had work in this February 1939 exhibition. But Harlem Guild Artists still enjoyed the advantage of location in New York. Augusta Savage had scored a personal triumph when those planning the New York World’s Fair commissioned her in 1938 to do a sculpture to commemorate the African American contribution to American culture. Unfortunately, Savage was not able to restart her career as a sculptor with that commission: her huge sculpture, Lift Every Voice and Sing, was roundly criticized as amateurish and poorly executed, by “experts,” though it was extremely popular with Black visitors to the Fair.

Indeed, the New York World’s Fair gave Locke an argument to anchor an article in Opportunity about his debate with the ideological perspective of the Harlem Art Guild. The New York World’s Fair exhibit arguably trumped the Baltimore Museum exhibit in that works like Savage’s were exhibited in the American pavilion rather than an all-Negro show. In the run-up to the exhibit, Locke heard New York’s Negro artists debating whether the Negro artists should exhibit in the American or international pavilion, with the latter venue including African art.⁹ Rumor circulated that the Harlem group turned down the international opportunity and chose the American gallery partly in reaction to being segregated with “primitive” African art. Locke seized on this debate to write his most incendiary essay on African American art to date, boiling over with his frustration with what he saw as the lack of strategic vision on the part of Negro visual artists.

Titled “Advance on the Art Front,” the article sparkled. “The recent advances in contemporary Negro art remind me of nothing so much as a courageous cavalry move over difficult ground in the face of obstacles worse than powder and shell—silence and uncertainty.” With telling use of the military metaphor, Locke sold the notion that Negro art represented a world historical subjectivity, whose fate hinged on its courage, clarity, and unity in the face of White disdain and racist dismissal of the worth of Negro art. “I have read only one book of military strategy, and remember only one or two sentences. … One said, ‘It’s not the ground you gain but the ground you hold that counts’; the other, ‘Even retreat, organized, is safer than disorganized advance’.”¹⁰

Victory would not be possible for Negro art unless it went beyond a few individual or even collective successes on the exhibitionary level to “consolidate our art gains” with a coordinated strategy. Referencing the success of Marian Anderson, who, once prevented from singing in Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution, sang to an even more memorable effect on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, Locke snapped: “But why should we wait upon a mis-maneuver of the enemy or hang precariously on a fumble of our opposition? The essence of strategy is planned action and the tactics of intentionally organized resources. Imagine the educative public effect of a permanently organized traveling exhibit of the work of contemporary Negro artists? Or visualize the social dividends on such a representative collection as part of the Golden Gate Exposition or the New York World’s Fair?” But that had not happened at the New York World’s Fair because of internal dissent over whether to include their work in a national or international exhibition. Locke went on to argue against the rejection of identification with African art by saying one could not pry away from South Africa or any of the European nations the African art they put on display. Almost every nation in the World’s Fair was double billing—showing in the international hall but also mounting a national show to advertise their agency in art to gain attention, while the Negro fumbled the opportunity by forcing upon itself a “consistency [that] was the enforced virtue of the disinherited.” Black artists exhibiting at the fair thought of themselves only as representatives of the American nation when America did not even consider them citizens.

What made Locke unique is that he could hold such fierce Black nationalist opinions while at the same time working the White people in his camp to garner all of the power he could get. It was a revolutionary dialogic nationalism, and some of them could see it. When he wrote Mary Beattie Brady after the article’s publication saying that it had said some harsh things, but “Negro art must go forward,” she was silent about the article, no doubt, disturbed by its fierce nationalism, but dependent on his discursive power to defend her presence in the domain of Negro art where she had no real aesthetic authority. But she had a taste in her selection of art to promote, a more mixed-race notion of new world art than Locke had, and she also had an institutional structure that could make Negro art more than a local, community phenomena. If there were to be a “permanent traveling exhibition of contemporary Negro art,” the only entity that could mount such a campaign was the Harmon Foundation, especially once conservative right-wing congressmen began dismantling the WPA in 1939. Suddenly, the Harlem Artists Guild’s WPA “leverage” was disappearing and such Black artists like Charles Alston, Augusta Savage, and Gwendolyn Bennett would have to fend for themselves without government patronage. While artists saw being an educator as a step down, Locke saw education—as his parents had seen it—as a step up for the Negro.

Jacob Lawrence knew he needed a strategy for survival as an artist, which is why he eased out from under the collapsing Harlem Artists Guild umbrella and into the more sustainable patronage opportunities available from working with Locke and Brady. A member of the Haitian governmental ministry visited the Baltimore show and expressed a desire for the Haitian government to acquire the L’Ouverture series for display back home. Locke immediately communicated this information to Lawrence, who was enthusiastic. When it became clear that the Haitian government lacked the funds to purchase the series, Lawrence was not concerned. “It means much more to an artist to have people like and enjoy his work, than it does to have a few individuals purchase his work, and it not have the interest of the masses. As I told you when you were here, selling these things was the last thing I thought of when I conceived them.”¹¹ But Locke cautioned him against letting his work go for free, since he knew that the Negro artist had to profit from such work in a capitalist world of art if he or she was to have a sustainable career. Sensing that Locke and Brady had his long-term interest at heart, Lawrence would stay in constant contact with them in the coming months, letting Brady hold onto the L’Ouverture series while he traveled and worked on the John Brown series, later the Harriet Tubman series, and then the monumental Migration series that would cement his reputation.¹²

Coming artists like Lawrence, Elton Fax, Ronald Moody, and even the venerable Barthé scored through their association with Locke. Barthé’s sculpture, The Mother, retitled Mother and Son at the New York World’s Fair, was given considerable attention in “Advance on the Art Front.” The Mother epitomized Locke’s program—to foster art by Negroes that served multiple agendas but remained devoted to the central goal to create beautiful and subtle works of art. “Here is a subject racial to the core—a Negro peasant woman kneeling and mournfully cradling in her arms the limp, broken-necked body of her lynched son. But striking enough to be more potent anti-lynching propaganda than an armful of pamphlets, this statue group is properly, as a work of art, universalized,” because it used Michelangelo’s famous sculpture of the death of Jesus as the lens through which to capture the poignancy of an American experience.

Such art had to stand on its own as quintessential modern art even as it advanced a politics of revelation about what and who the Negro was. This came out forcefully in correspondence Locke had with a young man, Hercules Armstrong, whom Locke met at the exhibition. Recruiting Locke as a patron and a lover, Armstrong sent Locke some of his poems already published in radical journals. His poetry was fierce and white-hot with unadulterated Black anger. Locke wrote back sternly if affectionately that, in his opinion, Armstrong needed to do more work crafting his poetry before sending it out. Mere expression of harsh if heartfelt anger at the situation of the Negro was not poetry. Poetry required the crafted utterance, the subtle phrase, the ability to say something without saying it, so that the protest burned through the page and forced the reader to return to the poem again and again. Here was the quality that Jacob Lawrence’s paintings had that Locke wanted Armstrong’s poems to embody and become sophisticated and unexpected renderings of their subject matter. Armstrong was stung a bit by Locke’s harsh words, but also knew that this is what Locke stood for. In the 1930s, when all art had to be propaganda to be relevant, Locke still held that the best propaganda was great art, and great art was the best propaganda.

The day after “Advance on the Art Front” appeared in Opportunity, a very welcome letter from Morse Cartwright, director of the American Association of Adult Education, appeared in Locke’s mailbox.

While officially I must be as dumb and silent as the Sphinx in the matter, personally I am glad to be able to tell you that there is a ray of hope with respect to the Negro art portfolio. After our conversation of the other day I wrote a memorandum for Mr. Keppel in which I recommended that the Corporation make, through this Association, a supplemental grant to the Associates in Negro Folk Education, on account of the Bronze Booklet Series. Mr. Keppel has responded by giving me permission to poll my Board with respect to their willingness to recommend the utilization of a $2,000 balance remaining in the adult education experimental fund for the current year. If we should get favorable action on the part of our Board members, Mr. Keppel would be prepared to put up to his Trustees a proposal to match that sum, thus making a total of $4,000 available to the Associates for the further development of the Bronze Booklet Series. This would give you funds with which to go ahead with the Negro art portfolio.¹³

How did it happen that Locke’s proposal found such favor with Cartwright that he would come up with this plan to fund the Negro Art portfolio over Keppel’s objections? The answer is simple. The financial success of Locke’s Bronze Booklets brought very positive buzz to the AAAE, which otherwise had little to show for its intervention in Negro adult education. And the booklets countered whatever negative discourse existed within the AAAE about funding Negro adult education. Locke had run a cost-effective operation that was enormously successful in getting books to market, without causing any trouble with the segregated educational establishment. Black people were buying radical books with a class as well as a racial critique of America’s problems, and Locke was delivering that knowledge without eliciting a congressional investigation. Locke had effectively run an adult-education project that served the AAAE agenda and a subversive Black agenda at the same time.

Cartwright was careful, however, not to embarrass Keppel in rewarding Locke for the overall success of the Associates of Negro Folk Education.

If this plan goes through and the portfolio is finally issued, then I think we should be sure to protect Mr. Keppel in his relations with his arts advisers by omitting from the volume any reference to the fact that its publication was made possible by funds provided by the Carnegie Corporation. The book will thus merely stand as a publication paid for out of receipts from the Bronze Booklet Series, which, of course, in effect is a true statement, in that this supplemental grant from the Carnegie Corporation, if and when made, is for the purpose of covering manufacturing and other costs relating to the presentation of the series as a whole.¹⁴

Locke agreed. Cartwright’s letter explains the mystery of who funded The Negro in Art, since nowhere in the book does it reference the Carnegie or AAAE subvention.¹⁵

Locke confided to Mrs. Mason that he had had to go to a meeting of the Adult Education Association in order to seal the deal for funding the Negro Art portfolio. Here again was a lesson. Going to these meetings with liberal Whites, listening to their ideas and opinions about what Negroes needed to learn, and bringing a few Black experts into the AAAE fold helped both the Negro educators and the AAAE leadership more effectively converse with one another. This harmonizer role created the conditions for Cartwright to value Locke enough to work around the obstacle of the funder’s restrictions to fund completion of Locke’s portfolio. Here, Locke’s insight that he needed a third party—the AAAE—to sanction his projects to obtain the funding from a patron, the Carnegie Corporation, had an unexpected benefit: the AAAE acted independently to secure funding for the book without his having to change its controversial argument.

Such funding was not the only opportunity to come to Locke through Morse Cartwright. While Locke was busy hunting down photographs to finalize the Negro art portfolio, Morse Cartwright told Claude Barnett, the founder of the Associated Negro Press, located in Chicago, to ask Locke and Mary Beattie Brady to assist him in arranging for a real Negro art presence at the American Negro Exposition, projected to open in July 1940. Barnett had taken over planning for the exposition, a flailing project he was trying to save from problems generated by its earlier mismanagement. Barnett saw the American Negro Exposition as a way to bring attention to the Negro entrepreneurial and cultural awakening in Chicago. He needed someone to arrange an exhibit of African art for the exposition, but also to manage a juried selection process to exhibit the best Negro American art in America at the exposition. Locke’s network of Cartwright and Brady brought Locke’s name to Barnett’s attention; and Barnett also became part of Locke’s network. In Barnett, Locke found a similarly competent—and a similarly dapper—Negro man who shared his desire to advance Negro agency in the twentieth century. While working as a postal worker after graduation from Tuskegee, Barnett began sending out photographs of famous Black people, creating a profitable mail-order business. Then, in 1919, he created the Associated Negro Press to supply news content for the fledging Black newspapers across the country and established a media network. Barnett exemplified the Black renaissance’s westward shift due to the Negro middle class’s greater entrepreneurial success in Chicago than in New York, and as such, Barnett provided Locke with a new base of operations away from the East Coast.

In April 1940, Barnett traveled to Washington, D.C., to win federal financial support for the Chicago Exposition. Not only did he secure the federal financial support, but the Labor, Agricultural, and Interior Departments also agreed to send representatives to the exposition, elevating it from a regional to a national celebration of the Negro’s coming of age. Despite meeting with Herring, Barnett chose Locke to be the unofficial coordinator of the art exhibits at the exposition. “Reaffirming our conversation, our idea is roughly that we will be guided by the suggestions of you and Miss Brady. Mr. Herring has been good enough to outline some very useful suggestions which I passed on to Miss Brady and which she evidently has approved.”¹⁶ Barnett had to include Brady as she had the storage facility, the administrative apparatus, and the financial resources for shipping, installing, and arranging art in space. Barnett divided invitations to artists regionally, with one group from New York and Washington, another from Chicago, the third from Atlanta. Key to the selection was Locke’s point that major art world critics and art museum players should be on the selection committees. Barnett planned to design the gallery space to accommodate African sculpture and contemporary sculpture by Negroes, following the logic of Locke’s portfolio. Barnett hoped he would be able to sell the portfolio and Bronze Booklets at the Exposition.

Locke also wanted a favor in return. The annual meetings of the Association for Adult Education were being held on May 20–24, in Astor, New York, and Locke asked if Barnett could take part. If Barnett could not attend, Locke asked if he would be willing to send a paper, “The Negro Press and Negro Mass Education,” to be read at the conference, which he did.

Locke would prove critical to the success of the art side of the exposition. He even provided a list of judges and contacted his friend, Peter Pollack, who was launching the Chicago Community Art Center, for help in securing the best artwork for the exposition. “Your suggestions … are invaluable,” Barnett wrote to Locke in April. “So clear and worthwhile are they that I am confident they can serve as the basis of our plans for the Art Exhibit. Our program calls for the carrying out immediately of the various steps which you outline.”¹⁷

By July 3, on the eve of the exposition’s opening, everything was in place, according to Locke. As he wrote to Brady: “You need have no concern about the exhibit. It will be very, very good. The Western material was rich and plenteous, and the jury worked professionally on it. Even so, over a hundred items were passed. It was an enthusiastic jury. Mr. Rich of the Art Institute expressed himself as ‘amazed.’ ”¹⁸ Part of the reason she did not need to worry is that Locke was overseeing every aspect of the evaluation and installation of the art.

I sat with the jury, and after they had completed the jury pieces, took the liberty of asking their advisory opinion on the Harmon items. They went carefully through them all, which gave us the benefit of a check up criticism. They weeded out some pieces to the advantage, I think, of the showing. They liked Malvin Gray particularly, but thought his show would be better if about six or seven items were left out. The same with Albert Smith. … They omitted Waring’s Mother and Daughter, which I like because of subject matter, but must admit is very “flat.” … They also took out Aaron Douglas, but I saw that Power Plant was restored. They like the large William Johnsons. They were very fond of the later Palmer Haydens.¹⁹

Perhaps most important was Locke’s role in the actual installation of the galleries. Locke had recommended Barnett use Alonzo Aden, the Howard University Gallery of Art curator, to install the galleries. It was an example of Locke’s power that he got the spectacularly handsome Aden the job of installing the exhibit galleries rather than the “peacock,” Herring. Aden got needed experience, according to Locke, who helped him lay out and hang some of the galleries. The result was a tremendous success. “Barnett was very pleased,” Locke wrote Brady. Certainly, he had to be pleased that, with Locke’s participation, the exposition had the full support of people like Daniel Rich of the Art Institute, who even headed the prize jury that also, not surprisingly, included Locke. One wonders if Brady needed to be told that Locke would be making the keynote speech.

But even when someone else headed the jury selection, the prize-winning art epitomized Locke’s deeper message that Negro art exemplified Black power. The prizewinners mixed the modern, social realist urgency of the Great Depression with a powerful visual narrative of the Black body. Winning first prize at the American Negro Exposition, Charles White’s “There were no crops to share” was both social critique and powerful Negro art. Frederick Flemister’s “Artist with a Brush” redrew Italian Renaissance portraits with a Black subject as the artist. Despite the objections of those like James Porter, James Herring, and Romare Bearden that the Negro artists should not be confined to Negro subjects, the art that succeeded at the American Negro Exposition, judged by White and Black artists and critics, was an art of the Negro subject.

The American Negro Exposition in Chicago capped Locke’s remarkable journey over the last two years from intellectual outcast to the most influential force in African American art. Barnett had valued him for what he had become in the 1930s—a curator, an author, and a publisher whose system of cultural production allied the American Association of Adult Education, the Harmon Foundation, and the Carnegie Corporation, with artists, critics, and curators, Negro and White. Locke’s array of talent and influence had transformed the exposition’s exhibition from an also-ran sideshow into a major statement of the city’s—and the Negro’s—artistic coming of age. The American Negro Exposition was as much a renaissance for Locke as for the Windy City.

A photograph does survive of Locke giving the opening remarks at this art exhibition, a sign of Locke’s efficacy. Shot from the back, a tiny man is speaking to a small crowd garbed in their Sunday best, hanging on the words of this dapper presenter whose face is hidden from view. At the opening festivities of the American Negro Exposition in Chicago, Locke projected a larger-than-life-persona from a diminutive Black body barely noticeable in a crowd. Richard Long told the story of a woman appearing at an informal gathering asking to meet Dr. Locke, only to have to be steered away from a commanding presence in the room toward the tiny man standing isolated in the corner. Here, no one needed to be told who was the famous Dr. Locke: he was there, right in front in 1940, the dominant curator of Negro art in America.