It was as welcome as it was unexpected.
In the spring of 1945, Locke received a note from a mere acquaintance, Max C. Otto, a philosopher at the University of Wisconsin, with an invitation. “Those of us here at the University wondered whether you would be available to come to Wisconsin for a year as a visiting professor. My inquiry is not official since we don’t have authorization yet. But I wanted to inquire whether this might be a possibility.”
Where did this come from? Locke’s visibility as a philosopher had steadily increased since the publication of “Values and Imperatives” in 1936, especially in the early 1940s, after he was invited to join Finkelstein’s conference. Locke had taken participation in that annual conference seriously, presenting two papers that allowed him to redefine pragmatism and cultural pluralism. Of the two, “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace,” had been the most innovative in charting his answer to the question highlighted by World War II: to what extent were values relative in the face of fascism? Pluralism allowed people who looked at the world through different eyes to move through stages of consciousness in holding together opposites and difference, yet at the same time recognized that some things, such as the value of human life, were nonnegotiable. His mature, careful, and unique approach to the philosophical problem of unity and diversity had caught the attention of the fellow participants in the conference. Evidently, it caught the attention of Max Otto as well, as this liberal social philosopher decided his department ought to break with the segregated tradition of institutional philosophy in America. On June 11, 1945, Otto wrote formally inviting Locke to come as visiting professor the spring semester, January to June 1946, for $2,500. That was twice the salary of the assistant professors at Wisconsin. Still, Locke took six months to accept the invitation in writing, perhaps because of financial considerations. While the salary offered by Wisconsin was considerable, Locke had to take a pay cut to teach at the White university, because Howard’s administration insisted on a full two-quarter leave dating from December 31, even though he still conducted departmental registration through January. But once a front-page article appeared in the Sunday edition of the local paper announcing the historic visiting professorship of Dr. Locke to the university, Locke hurried off his formal acceptance to Otto.1
For Locke, the invitation could not have come at a better time. He was exhausted with teaching at Howard, where he felt its students and its administration did not fully appreciate him. Philosophy had remained an anomaly at Howard despite his being able to hire some assistants like Eugene Holmes, the Marxist social philosopher, and William McAllister, an able ethics philosopher. The truth was that few students were interested in philosophy as a major, and most students took his large introductory classes because Locke was a celebrity on campus, whose international reputation as a scholar and rumors about his sexuality made him a draw. But Locke wanted students who would study his works, listen to his philosophizing about contemporary issues, and take philosophy seriously. On a White midwestern campus, he would be followed, be the center of attention, and might attract large numbers of students who took philosophy seriously.
From Howard’s standpoint, Locke being on leave was a kind of blessing. Someone would pay his salary, one of the highest on campus, and his absence would mean there was less of a chance he might cause a sexually embarrassing scandal. But the issue was larger than Locke. In 1945, Abram Harris accepted the invitation of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago to join its permanent faculty. Reputedly despondent about the cause of Negro liberation, as well as teaching at Howard University, Harris was glad to be one of the first, if not the first, Black professors to be hired to a permanent position at a White research university in the United States. Ralph Bunche had already left Howard at the outbreak of World War II, having been recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner to the Central Intelligence Agency, to work as an analyst of colonial affairs. From OSS he went to the State Department in 1943, becoming an associate director under Alger Hiss and a major player in planning the United Nations in 1945. Howard had nurtured a generation of African American scholars who were able to take advantage of the changing racial climate to serve in mainstream institutions of higher education after the war. Could Locke, the elder statesman of the group, take full advantage of the opportunities that a rapidly desegregating system of higher education offered him?
Going to Wisconsin showed Locke was willing to try. As his letters to friends and lovers attest, he had a fabulous time at the White university. “I am delighted to be able to tell you,” he wrote Horace Kallen, “that things continue to go well out here at Madison. I think and hope dear Max is satisfied, and have tried my darndest to have it so. The contrast both in student reaction, colleague’s friendliness, and, of course, administration situation has been damning in Howard’s disfavor.”2 Locke also made an impression outside of the university. In February, he wrote Kallen that he had “just come in from a talk on ‘The Price of Democracy’ to The Lions Club at the Park Hotel. Mentioned this because they took it and seemed to like it and got it foursquare with only indirect reference to the Negro end of it.” Here, Locke was reprising arguments he had made in the “Color” issue of Survey Graphic, that America could not continue to promote itself as a world-changing democracy without paying the price of confronting its domestic contradictions. Here he was at the Lions Club telling White people they had to change their ways if they wanted to survive in the postwar world and they applauded him for saying it. While he had expected a positive student and faculty reaction, he was more than pleased with the “cordial community reaction after three weeks.” It was “quite something to be proud of, and thankful for, because it vindicates Max Otto—that being the main point.”3 Locke did not mention that such a lecture before White folks in a prestigious hotel would have been unthinkable in still rigidly segregated Washington, D.C. One wonders if Locke would have been tempted by a permanent offer, but one never came.
For the first time, Locke had students he believed were genuinely interested in him as a philosopher. His undergraduate lecture course on the Philosophy of the Arts enrolled a whopping 156 students, an undergraduate seminar on Elementary Logic drew 29, and a graduate seminar in Theory of Value attracted 8. Coming two years after his pioneering lectures in Haiti on the revolutionary universalism of Negro aesthetics, and just after he had signed a contract with Random House to write his magnum opus on The Negro Contribution to American Culture, his lectures suggested Locke was on the verge of a fuller statement of his theory of how aesthetics—art, music, and literature—could be a process of healing. But referencing Freud in his lectures showed that Locke was willing to broach two subjects that other Black public intellectuals never addressed: sex and desire.
As an active homosexual in his sixties, Locke’s sexual life was a kind of victory over the Victorian tradition of repression so endemic to his upbringing as a Black Philadelphian. And it was the embrace of the life of art advocacy, the mentoring of young artists to accept their sexual identities—or even to define them—that had been a major part of his mothering the various iterations of the New Negro artist. Freud had stunned the world of psychiatry with such outrageous notions at the time that children had sexual lives. By bringing up Freud in a course on aesthetics in 1946, Locke was telling his White students that they too had to acknowledge the unacknowledged—racial and sexual—sources of their own potential creativity, and the creativity of artists. That he seemingly felt comfortable discussing this aspect of art formation at the University of Wisconsin suggested another aspect of desire—the desire of a Black intellectual such as him to be able to enter White spaces of learning that had been walled off from Black subjectivity with controversial knowledge.
Here was the crux of the career of Alain Locke. He narrated inclusion, self-determination, universalism, and pluralism as characteristics of the world and the discourse of the New Negro. But they also were about him. He was the Black aesthetic nationalist escaping Black education by taking a job in a White institution of higher education. His public lectures in Madison exemplified that the major part of his life as a public intellectual was lecturing to audiences of sympathetic if uninformed White people. At the University of Wisconsin, two sides of his career, his academic labor as a teacher of young students and his public intellectual career as a teacher of adults, came together—as an advocate for the enlightenment of liberal-minded White people. More deeply, what Wisconsin represented was something he had written about profoundly in his 1915–1916 Race Contacts lectures—that segregation contained the seeds of its downfall because it created desire—for those walled off from each other by segregation to break through those walls. He and dozens of other Black intellectuals were getting a taste of White academic life, and the students, no less than the people who showed up at the Lions Club, were getting a taste of a Black academic subjectivity they had heard about but never experienced before. It was not simply that White students at the University of Wisconsin were more interested in philosophy than those at Howard, but that they were interested in him. And he liked that.
Locke’s experience at Wisconsin was a metaphor of the 1940s New Negro—the talented if alienated Black artist and intellectual, who, after decades of preparation in segregated spaces and European venues, suddenly was attractive to elite cultural institutions. Locke had documented this trend two years earlier in “The Negro Contribution to American Culture,” published in the New Masses, where he noted the 1940s trend of desire for the New Negro. Broadway, for example, had mounted Othello, starring Paul Robeson, in the first major American production that starred a Black man in the lead role. Locke was able to hobnob with Robeson in Madison while the actor visited the parental home of Uta Hagen, Desdemona in the production and now Robeson’s mistress.
But inclusion came at a price, just as democracy did. Inclusion meant the New Negro had to pursue opportunity as an individual divorced from the larger politics of community taken up in the 1930s or rhetorically invoked by Locke in the 1920s. When Paul Robeson refused simply to enjoy the sexual and celebrity freedom America granted him and started critiquing cold war hysteria and attacks on working-class movements, the State Department turned him into a pariah in his own community. Also suppressed by inclusive discourses of the 1940s were radical nationalist discourses. The publication of Gunnar Myrdal’s An American Dilemma in 1944 dominated the postwar national discussion of race without any involvement by Locke, Du Bois, or Woodson. Myrdal utilized Ralph Bunche and E. Franklin Frazier—younger, specialist trained, and aggressively assimilationist thinkers to make his argument that Black nationalist discourses in religion, politics, and culture were part of the problem for an America committed to the notion that “all men are created equal.” Scholars like Locke were old and antiquated from Myrdal’s perspective. Even though Locke’s essays in the 1940s proclaimed the democratic necessity of acceptance of the Negro by the American mainstream, his cultural pluralism demand that difference be acknowledged in that process put him at odds with the terms of incorporation, which were complete worship of mainstream American culture.
The intellectual sea change of the 1940s brought a double irony—it adopted Locke’s notion that the Negro had made special contributions to American culture and then removed support from those voices that were considered “too Black” or “too nationalist” that had made that argument all along. Similarly, in art circles Locke found himself decentered, as his argument that Negro artists had had a special contribution to make to American art was widely adopted but without any discussion or support for articulating what exactly was special about that contribution. After the University of North Carolina Press published Modern Negro Art by James A. Porter in 1942, the book became the bible of the younger Negro artists like Romare Bearden and Norman Lewis, who had always chafed against Locke’s prescriptions that they mine the African tradition for inspiration or create art that would advance Black subjectivity. Porter’s argument synchronized perfectly with the ideology of assimilationist inclusion of the 1940s that also made political art, especially racially self-conscious art by Negroes, unpopular. The tide in America had turned away from social-activist notions of aesthetics and toward new ideas made explicit by abstract expressionism—that all true art did not reflect its social milieu. Major art critics like Clement Greenberg would argue vociferously that artists needed to divorce themselves from the dirty business of trying to foment social change through art if they wanted to be originals. Ironically, such trend and market-value-determining critics refused to recognize Norman Lewis as a true participant in abstract expressionism even though he voiced its aesthetic ideology.4
Locke responded as best he could. When the Albany Institute of History and Art asked him to write a catalog introduction to its 1944 exhibition of Negro artists, Locke emphasized that their exhibit showed “the happy and almost complete integration of the Negro artist with the trends, styles and standards of present-day American art.”5 He applauded that the younger Negro artist now had freedom to take part in all of the trends of American art and do so without any sense of betrayal of the Negro cause in art. But having been so publicly identified with the notion of the Negro artist as a racial subject, Locke could not pivot quickly enough to claim leadership of the new color-blind Negro art, nor did he really want to. He had created, largely through his writings and work with the Harmon and other race-based institutions, the conditions for the absorption of the Negro artist into the mainstream, but without bringing Black aesthetic politics into that mainstream.
There were other ironies as well. In 1945, the American Association of Adult Education elected him president. This was largely a ceremonial position as the director held the real power in the organization. Locke was pleased with the appointment and the recognition that came with it. But becoming president did not mean he could launch a revolution in adult education based on theories he had lectured about to the organization for more than a decade. And it was that same organization that decided not to reprint any of the Bronze Booklets. A separate Black intellectual formation like the Bronze Booklets now smacked of segregation, even as the system of segregation in school-age and adult education continued unabated. As president Locke did not have the authority to develop what he had hinted at for years—a series of Bronze Booklets for the White people that would reveal their “true history.” Instead of taking the lessons from Black educational marginality and allowing him to develop a critical history of American history, adult education, no less than scholarly history, inserted the Negro subject in an American history that remained largely the same, as was done by John Hope Franklin when he published his breakthrough From Slavery to Freedom in 1947. That book immediately put in its shadow all of the publications Carter G. Woodson had been pumping out from the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History for decades. Locke praised Franklin’s book for that, even as he realized its ambition made that of his Bronze Booklets series seem small. Indeed, during the 1940s sales of the books—with the exception of Bunche’s The World View of Race—fell off dramatically. In 1945, he ordered more copies of The Negro in Art printed without the expensive color insert, thinking he could find funds to bind them once the war ended. But at the war’s end, there was no funding to bind and sell his major art book, even though he was president of the AAAE. Certainly, there was no reason for Locke to try and finish the moribund African-centered history of the Negro that Arthur Schomburg had started: he couldn’t even move unsold copies of Adult Education and the Negro and The Negro in the Caribbean.
Locke’s personal irony epitomized the plight of the New Negro. Wanting self-determination, and yet working inside White institutions like the AAAE, Locke and the New Negro were boxed in by superficial inclusion. The New Negro had changed the way America talked about itself, renegotiated the spheres of segregated culture by mid-century, and announced a Negro subjectivity in the arts, letters, and social sciences. But it had failed to give the Negro power to reconfigure American education with the insights of the Black experience. Without real institutional power, it—and Locke—could do little but persist in old Negro segregated institutions or accept honorific appointments in liberal White institutions that could not become revolutionary despite his enlivening presence.
Nonetheless, invitations kept coming from White institutions and opened up opportunities he had never enjoyed before. In March 1946, Horace Kallen wrote him with “an unofficial inquiry. Would you be available as Visiting Professor in the Graduate Faculty of the New School for the spring term of 1947?” Kallen was offering Locke $2,000 to $2,500 to come for one semester as “an American philosopher.”6 Locke hurried off a positive reply, “Terribly pleased at your usual but ever surprising friendly concern in my behalf.” Locke was definitely interested in the chance to be close to New York and to Kallen. The difficulty was that Howard was on the quarter system. He inquired whether he could give courses in the evening beginning on Thursday so that he could teach at both schools in winter quarter and then take the spring quarter off from Howard. He hoped especially that it would work out because he “had to take a financial loss” going to Wisconsin. “But, of course, it has been more than worth while.” It made sense that Locke was resigned to sticking to his post at Howard “with only five more years before retirement and the possibilities of working out from there as a base on such welcome assignments as these, which, incidentally increase my prestige and potential influence at Howard itself.”7 Then, after his successful visit at the New School that spring of 1947, invitation came from the City College of the City University of New York, to be visiting professor in 1948. He took this position, in part, because it allowed him to teach in New York Thursday evenings and all day Friday, while still keeping his post at Howard.
The invitation from Kallen and the New School was significant. Teaching in New York would realize a long-held dream—one that had begun during his stay in Harlem compiling The New Negro: An Interpretation and whetted by his hankering after James Weldon Johnson’s NYU post and his struggle to direct a cultural center in the 1930s. Locke took the money he had squirreled away from years of projects outside of his job at Howard University to buy a house at 12 Grove Street, a stunning red-brick three-story walk-up in Greenwich Village on October 31, 1946. He bought the house from a Rae Lechner by taking out a mortgage for $11,775.00.8 The three-story flat already had tenants on the second and third floor, allowing Locke to secure the ground-floor apartment for his own use. Being able to stay over in his own apartment rather than Hotel Theresa made it financially feasible for the now-elderly Locke to teach part-time in New York. Such a purchase contextualizes Locke’s assertion that he took a “financial loss” when he went to the University of Wisconsin. It is possible, since Arthur Fauset claimed that Locke borrowed $6,000 from him to make the down payment. In return, Locke let Fauset live in the first-floor apartment when Locke was not in New York, with Fauset decamping to his home in Philadelphia when Locke needed the apartment.9 Unfortunately, six months earlier, his “Godmother,” Charlotte Mason had died, removing another person with whom he could have visited more easily from his new perch in Greenwich Village. He had not visited her since 1944; but if she had been alive, there would have been the chance to have one last rapprochement, without having to run to catch the train or hole up at the Hotel Theresa afterward.
That Locke purchased his New York residence in Greenwich Village, rather than Harlem, was significant. Race took a back seat to sexuality, it appears, since Greenwich Village already had a gay-friendly reputation by the late 1940s. Under the cover of an appointment at the New School, Locke avoided Harlem, where he would have faced more scrutiny of his comings and goings. Then too, Harlem in the late 1940s was a scourge of heroin drug addiction, reeling under an epidemic that put the last nail in the coffin of whatever it was that could be called a renaissance. Harlem might have been too depressing, given the failed dreams that still haunted its streets for him. Perhaps the logic of inclusion was also doing its work on Locke; teaching at a White institution of higher education, Locke sought inclusion in a White bohemian space in Greenwich Village. That did not mean he could avoid the problem of race. Locke revealed to Fauset that upon his first arrival at the house someone had laid the body of a dead rat on its doorstep.10
All of these opportunities—to work in an enabling White institution of higher education where being a Negro philosopher made him a celebrity, to work in an environment with peer philosophers who rekindled his zeal to develop a new theory of aesthetics, and to get a book contract from a major publisher to bring all of his insights together—were coming too late for him to take full advantage of them. It was probably too late for him to have made the move to Wisconsin and abandon his East Coast contacts and lovers, but a permanent offer from a university in New York would have allowed him to live and work in the city he loved. But no such offer was forthcoming.
Another invitation was quite welcome. In 1947, Locke was asked to resurrect his annual retrospective reviews of Negro literature for a new publication, Phylon, a journal started by W. E. B. Du Bois in 1944. In an article, “Phylon: Science or Propaganda?” Du Bois took on those who denigrated Black intellectual practices that did not adhere to the Myrdal color-blind ideology ascendant during the 1940s.11 In contrast to Locke, Du Bois was a vigorous seventy-six years old in 1944, capable of reinventing himself by creating in Phylon a new Crisis-like vehicle for Black intellectual assertion. Once again, Du Bois’s boldness created the opportunity for Locke to continue his work of charting the direction of African American literature when other journals believed no such separate intellectual agenda was worthy. That Locke began again in 1947 to chronicle the particular literary trajectory of Negro writing in the postwar period suggests that his intellectual strategy was similar to his academic one—to reverse the postwar practice of Negro inclusion inside White institutions, by including, as of old, reviews of White-authored novels in new retrospective reviews in a Black media institution. Nevertheless, these new retrospective reviews kept alive the notion that Black literature and culture should be discussed separately from the mainstream of American literature. But the double consciousness along with the double burden of teaching two jobs a year was beginning to take its toll.
Then, in 1948, according to his confidant Robert Fennell, an incident took place at Howard that must have shaken Locke. As Fennell noted:
A man, or a boy really, at the school, accused Locke—the boy was a homosexual prostitute. And he attempted to blackmail Locke, not for money but for a grade. A meeting was called of a committee consisting of—let me see, Mordecai Johnson, I believe, Sterling Brown, maybe Robert Martin, one or two other friends of Locke. The boy was around 20 years old and was attempting to blackmail Locke. Well that boy didn’t know what he was doing. They switched it around on him so they made him the subject of the inquiry. They said to him, “We have reports that you are in and out of the men’s dormitories, which you are a homosexual prostitute, and we don’t want anyone like you in this school.” That boy was a fool—you don’t bring a charge like that against a prominent man like that. I saw the man again in 1958. He was a derelict, his hair falling out. It was remarkable, the change. But the point is you couldn’t track Locke when it came to the homosexual thing. He was very discreet.12
It is not known whether the young man’s accusations were true or not, but having to go before a committee of friends and allies to defend himself against a student must have been disturbing, especially as Locke was under surveillance by the FBI. Nevertheless, Locke was able to use his institutional power to crush an adversary. Instead of the adversary being Jessie Fauset, Albert Barnes, J. Stanley Durkee, or W. E. B. Du Bois, it was a student, and a homosexual one at that, who felt the sting of Locke’s counter-attack. Notably, in Fennell’s recollection there is no concern with whether the accusation of Locke’s impropriety was true or not, merely that “you don’t bring a charge like that against a prominent man like that.” But that the younger man had had gumption to bring such a charge must have shaken Locke, even though he escaped without a public scandal.
Working two jobs, traveling regularly to New York, and increasing threats to his livelihood in Washington created incredible physical and psychological strain on Locke. He awoke in the middle of the night on November 21, 1948, gasping for air and clutching at his chest. He was sweating profusely, as the tightening in his chest became excruciating. In the dark, a sense of panic overtook him as he realized that the biggest heart attack of his late adulthood was upon him. Fortunately, that night, a young intern who answered the phone at the Frederick Douglass Hospital on Howard University’s campus knew exactly who Dr. Locke was and what to do next. Quickly dispatching an ambulance to 1326 R Street, he jumped in to accompany the orderlies to Locke’s apartment. Ringing the doorbell to the bottom apartment, he woke the landlady, who got the master set of keys to the building. Upon entering the second-floor apartment, they saw Locke passed out. The intern carried him down the steps and folded him delicately into the back of the hearse. This time it would not be carrying him to his grave, but to the hospital. It was a narrow escape.13
Locke had heart attacks throughout his life, even though sometimes it was difficult to determine whether some of them were real or convenient excuses for not showing up at engagements or responsibilities he did not wish to honor. But this one was different. A massive collapse of the major artery going into the right aorta required considerable doses of medication to stabilize the heart and eliminate the arrhythmia. Three days later, it was still not certain he would survive. This heart attack was different because at age sixty-three, Locke was far weaker than he had been in 1937 when his last massive attack had come. His health had been poor of late, as the combination of advancing age, overwork, nervous tension, and demanding schedule had begun to make him look and feel older than his years. Given that Locke had suffered from a weakened heart valve from infancy, it was remarkable he had made it to his sixties at all. But Locke’s entire life had been a victory of will over physical limitations. Locke, ever sensitive to signs, could see that this heart attack was one of them. He now had to face a burning question: what did he wish to do with his final years? And, relatedly, what would be his legacy?
Locke was the eternal optimist. He believed he could manage the new constraints on his energy imposed by this latest heart attack, and still continue teaching, socializing, and writing, albeit at a slower pace, that he had planned for his active retirement. Perhaps this belief that he could continue to juggle a dozen commitments a week was his undoing. He refused to give up his life to finish his magnum opus, The Negro in American Culture. From 1948 to 1954, he continually cited its significance to him. Letters from 1951 to John Rhoden and Richmond Barthé were typical. In the first, he apologized for not seeing Rhoden and Barthé off to Jamaica because of work on the book, “and that is all important right now as all of us know.” He recognized that the book was his best chance to ensure his legacy, his own place in history, for as he remarked to Barthé, Locke felt he “must stick to the book: it’s an awful bother, but must turn out up to expectation in the long run.” But what was Locke ready to sacrifice in order to produce it? Locke did cut back on some of his obligations. In 1948 alone, he declined invitations to attend the Adult Education Conference in Michigan, to serve on the Baha’i planning committee, to participate in a forum on race progress held by the Congress on Racial Equality, and to travel across the country to rescue friends, such as Jimmy Daniels, from the consequences of their own actions. But most of these were obligations he would just as soon abandon in any case. When it came to more visible and long-standing obligations, he tended to fit them in.
Some of these were significant, such as his annual retrospective reviews of literature for Phylon magazine. In January 1949, the editor Hill wrote to inquire whether Locke would be able to produce that year’s two-part retrospective, as he had already missed the usual end-of-the-year deadline, and hence the usual publication of the reviews in the January and February numbers. Hill even suggested that if Locke’s health prevented him from doing the reviews, he was willing to give the responsibility to Lawrence Reddick. But Locke refused to relinquish it; with some obligatory griping about the work—“I have to review Walter White’s A Man Called White, which nauseates me”—he penned the two segments, submitting the reviews in time for them to appear in March and April issues, respectively. This was understandable. His reviews of particular books had declined; his ability to agent or represent books to publishers had diminished, and his direct influence on writers had shifted from prepublication reading and commentary to guiding their careers through inspirational and personal advice. It made sense to hang on to the retrospective reviews because by the end of the 1940s, they were the main way in which he exerted any critical opinion over African American literature.
Locke used those reviews to produce something profound. His retrospective review for 1949 appeared in 1950 under the provocative title, “Wisdom De Profundis.” Using the title of Oscar Wilde’s postmortem on his love affair with Alfred Douglas to head his review of the “literature of the Negro,” Locke noted that the most powerful literature of the year, from Alan Paton’s Cry, the Beloved Country to William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, was written in a gloomy, depressive tone that was found in Wilde’s confessions. Here was a brilliant example of Locke using gay literature to inform and subtly critique Black literature. In a sense, Locke made the same point about African American literature, or at least literature about African Americans and Black Africans, at mid-century as Wilde had. It was not the best, but it was the most truthful.
The title of the review, however, signified Locke’s own love affair with a much younger man. Maurice Russell was the cause of trouble for Locke, although not the kind that Alfred Douglas posed for Wilde. Not long after his heart attack in 1948, Russell, his long-time lover, abandoned Locke to go live with another man. Locke learned, once again, he could not trust a young man with his heart. As was his tendency, he turned to other men, even fantasizing about relationships with younger men who were not really available, like Arthur Wright. Suddenly alone, impaired, and beleaguered, Locke recommitted himself to writing, although without the zeal that writing with a loved one in mind gave him. The relationship crisis highlighted a wisdom de profundis of his own, that he needed to exhibit some of the passion that Wilde had manifested in his last years to write his opus. He needed to open up, be vulnerable, and risk writing a kind of intellectual confessional if he was to communicate the imaginative possibilities of Negro creativity to the American people.
What had Locke learned over four decades of commitment to the cause of Negro intellectual liberation? A full rebellion against caution was needed to create a conversation-changing book that would answer that question and suggest why his service as the Black Moses of art made a difference. Somewhere in that narrative, subtle subtext, or merely hidden, he needed to hint that the art movement was a product of the homosexual revolution of the 1920s. Yet, as always, the moment he tried to do that in his writing, he found himself checked by being unwilling—or unable—to reveal himself in print, just as he felt checked in revealing himself in the bedroom, according to informants like Owen Dodson and Bruce Nugent.
As seemed always to happen, a person with special qualities emerged once again in Locke’s life with whom he could reveal himself privately even when he struggled to reveal himself in print publicly. That person was a vibrant, precocious young man named Douglas Stafford, who may have been an undergraduate or graduate student at Harvard University during the late 1940s and early 1950s when the two became especially close. It is not clear that Locke loved Stafford. Indeed, he probably did not, but his spectacular mind and aggressive sense of confidence in being gay was liberating, and also a welcome contrast to Russell’s hesitant ambivalence toward his sexual identity. Where Russell was still questioning in the late 1940s whether he wanted to live “the life,” Stafford had no such reservations. In one of his early letters to Locke, Stafford related that Locke’s intuition that he, Stafford, was perhaps about to be outed by his classmates, came to fruition. Realizing that rumors about his sexual orientation were circulating, Stafford seized on an opportunity to publicly humiliate a young, effeminate, possibly gay member of a class he was taking, doing it brutally and forcefully as a heterosexist critique, in order to deflect, he hoped permanently, aspersions about his own sexual orientation. Hesitant at first that Locke was being critical of this maneuver to ensure the survival of his subjectivity in a homophobic environment, he was relieved to find that Locke approved. This revealed the inner Locke, the fierce survivor who, at various times over his career, had crushed competitors or destabilized adversaries in a variety of areas, not merely sexual, as part of his practice of subjective sustainability. Yet, faced with that moment of de profundis, that he had had to be, from time to time, both racially and sexually, a kind of monster to survive, what did that mean for a study of what it meant to be Negro in a homophobic, racist America?
Locke revealed life insights on long walks with Stafford when he would circle through Washington during the late 1940s—walks on which the older man advised this up-and-coming gay Black man on how to survive under oppression, as Stafford well knew, but also how to preserve the reason for surviving: to enjoy art, to practice the true purpose of friendship, to value companionship, and to help others who would not destroy one’s own life. As was the case with all the others, Locke shared with Stafford his love of classical music, introducing him to less well-known composers, buying records for him—although requiring Stafford to pay him back for them on time—and encouraging the brilliant young man to value education as an end in itself not just a means to a higher-paying job. This mentorship role was the essence of his relationship with all of his young charges in the Black, gay world, from Russell, to Arthur Wright, to Bili Bond and to the up-and-coming Richard Long, perhaps the most gifted of Locke’s young mentees, already teaching in the late 1940s at Morgan State in Baltimore. The attention of these other young men helped Locke screw up his courage, heal his broken heart, and recommit himself to writing his book in 1949.
But Locke lacked the brilliant young dialogic partner in the late 1940s and early 1950s to stimulate him to a new formulation for the mid-century. Russell was an intelligent young man who went on to make an outstanding career in New York mental health social services, in part because of mentorship by Locke. But he was no Langston Hughes, no Ralph Bunche, and no Eric Williams, whose conversations with Locke and the last Bronze Booklet, The Negro in the Caribbean, might have pricked Locke to address the absence of a hemispheric perspective in his theory of race and culture with an original theory of the Diaspora in his Haiti lectures. Desire for young, original, male thinkers provided a sexual-psychological vitality to make intellectual breakthroughs. But in his later years, he could not find the generative thinker who could teach him how to move in a new direction. Here was Locke’s wisdom de profundis that resonated with Wilde’s—the quality of one’s lovers determines the quality of one’s life.
Nevertheless, welcome invitations from his other lovers—institutions—appeared, this one from his beloved Harvard, which invited him, some might say finally, to teach American philosophy for six weeks in the summer of 1950 in Salzburg, Austria, as part of its Salzburg Seminar in American Studies. Interestingly, the invitation hailed not from the philosophy faculty per se, but from an institution started by three Harvard students, who started the seminar in response to the cold war during which they desired to introduce postwar Europe to American civilization. Held in the “Schloss Leopoldskron, a rococo palace built in 1744 by the Archbishop of Salzburg,”14 the seminar was taught, fittingly, by Margaret Mead and the gay English professor and chronicler of the American Renaissance, F. O. Matthiessen. Locke already knew Matthiessen, who tragically committed suicide the year Locke went to the Salzburg Seminar, a testament to the reality that even being at Harvard, “where these things are understood,” as Locke put it in a letter to a young man, did not ensure survival for the gay American intellectual. Matthiessen may even have had a hand in Locke’s invitation, because, importantly, the seminar was led by major figures in American Studies, not philosophers, per se. While he was to teach American philosophy that summer, the real focus was on his work charting the influence of the Negro in American civilization. Nonetheless, recognition by Harvard was welcome. It gave Locke an opportunity to put forward in one venue his views on values and cultural pluralism, international peace and foreign policy, and the role of race in creating a unique American culture under the auspices of Harvard, the one institution he had dreamed of teaching at his whole life. Taking place in Salzburg was also sweet. One can imagine Locke holding court in the Schloss Leopoldskron in a city he had visited almost every trip to Europe in August to listen to music at the Salzburg Summer Music Festival. There, two halves of his life—the racial chronicler of the Negro in American culture and the lover of European high aesthetics—came together one beautiful summer in 1950.
While preparing to leave for the trip, Stafford sent him a request. He needed a loan of $200 to help him and his mother over a particularly difficult stretch. A day or two passed before Locke wrote and said no, even though he had helped Stafford in the past with loans, always with Locke’s usual proscription that if one paid him back on time, he was always good for another loan. But this time, Locke said no, claiming that because of his weakened medical condition, he had to take an unusual amount of money abroad with him to Salzburg, in case he had a flare-up while in Europe. Of course, this explanation made sense. But, at the same time, given that Locke now owned 12 Grove Street, he should have had financial reserves from years of teaching at two universities. So, it is hard to believe that a $200 loan would have broken him. The reality was that money was also a talisman of power in his relationship with these “bright young men,” and Locke was in some respects disappointed, perhaps, in Stafford. Here, too, was a continuing problem for Locke: he could not really trust them. The request for money came out of the blue, after several months of Locke not hearing from Stafford.
After a blissful summer in Austria and a grueling schedule of teaching in the fall, Locke entered 1951 with a sense of renewed commitment to his book. But after a productive spring and summer, a struggle with nervous tension dominated his fall of 1951. Such a bout with nerves was not unusual to Locke; but because of his heart’s weakened condition, it was more serious this time. Only by strictly following his doctor’s orders for four to five weeks of uninterrupted rest in Washington, D.C.—and no travel—during December and January did he keep this assault from triggering another heart attack. His desire to travel to New York was emotional not financial: Maurice Russell was back in Locke’s life and Locke was eager to keep tabs on him, if at all possible, to avoid losing him again. Locke endured a forced diet of love starvation and submerged anxiety precisely when the holiday season freed him to be away from Howard.
Locke’s health was increasingly frustrating. In one respect, he was as mentally alert as ever and, with his newfound maturity, even better prepared to do the work he still planned to do. But his nerves and his body were fragile. Always dependent on a seemingly inexhaustible supply of nervous energy to keep numerous projects afloat, that nervous energy now flagged, leaving him perennially tired, or worse, the victim of epileptic-like attacks when his body seemingly turned against him. Of course, the underlying cause was his heart: over the years, he had carefully managed his heart with cures, rest periods, but most important, by pushing his heart, almost exercising and thus strengthening it with constant work. Now, that regime no longer produced positive results, but rather exhaustion and dissipation.
In such moments of lethargy and frustration with his body, the one thing that continued to bring Locke joy and a smile to his face was Russell. Russell had a smooth, gracious manner that was not fake or hysterical, like that of Douglas Stafford. Russell was calming and sublime, a balm in this late winter of Locke’s affections. Somehow Locke rallied toward the end of January 1952 to resume teaching the winter and spring quarters. He met his classes regularly, with only a few more unannounced absences than usual. And he found that interacting with his youthful students at Howard University was more stimulating than usual, in part because the restrictions on his travel and speaking engagements meant he spent more time and energy around Howard and in Washington. Yet even such minimal exertion took its toll. Shortly after the end of the spring quarter, once the summer heat and humidity of Washington was upon him, his heart collapsed.
Turning deathly ill in June, Locke was rescued from almost certain death by the intercession of friends. Horace Kallen, hearing from others at the New School that Locke was very ill, contacted a friend, Dr. Wolffe, at the Valley Forge Heart Hospital in Fairview Village, Pennsylvania, and got Locke admitted. Another friend, Margaret Just Butcher, played just as critical a role. As Robert Fennell described it, Butcher rushed in shortly after he was forced to bed, came to his house everyday, made all of the arrangements, and took Locke to Valley Forge Hospital herself. “She was a take-charge sort of woman, who would cuss you out in a minute, but who got things done.”15 Once at the hospital, Locke stayed there the entire summer. In the hands of a heart specialist, he received “the most expert care and a somewhat fresh diagnosis” of his condition, which included an assessment that he suffered from a hyperthyroid condition. Wolffe prescribed the unorthodox treatment of isotope iodine treatments to stabilize the thyroid condition that he felt was aggravating the heart condition. As the result of this treatment and thorough rest away from all the distractions of New York and the heat and humidity of Washington, Locke rallied—once again. Once back at home, Margaret Butcher again came to his aid, visiting him daily, cooking his meals, and encouraging him not to take on any responsibilities. He could write with pride in October to William Cooper, secretary treasurer of the National Conference on Adult Education and the Negro, that while unable to attend the upcoming meeting, “I am back on my feet with prospects for staying so (with care, of course) indefinitely.” Nevertheless, he planned to “definitely” retire from teaching next year.
Locke’s improved health that fall of 1952 allowed him to devote more time to his book, The Negro in American Culture, which was overdue. He had renewed enthusiasm for the project because Butcher, sensing that work on the book was his main source of anxiety, volunteered to help him complete the book. How exactly this commitment came about and what its actual terms were remain a mystery. From several undated letters from Butcher to Locke, it appears that Locke volunteered to pay her to help him with the book. In 1952 and 1953, Locke signed several notes for her, presumably for loans. Perhaps, as a way to thank or reward him for that support, Margaret promised to work on the book.
Such support was crucial if Locke was going to finish the book. He was still teaching full-time, and in his spare time, he had to rest lest he have a relapse. As he confided to Barthé in November, “I just find the chores which I used to do for myself most wearying now, they take such a toll of time and energy.” Consequently, he found he had little energy left over to work on the book, despite his best intentions. Aside from an introductory chapter, which had been published in the anthology New American Writing, Locke had not completed any of the other chapters of the book by the fall of 1952. Indeed, Butcher later claimed that she penned that essay from Locke’s fragmentary notes. What is clear is that by September or October, Butcher had begun to work on the book. “I have ‘pulled’ the folder, (just the one) on Negro in Am. Drama to take home to work on. My feeling is that I might best be able to ‘attack’ Chapters 4,6,7,8, as indicated on the revised outline. As you say, I certainly can’t ‘write like Locke’ (I wish I could!) but I can assemble and you can polish.” Locke’s comment that she couldn’t “write like Locke” suggests that there was some tension in the relationship, and further, that she may have been the one who suggested that she write the book as a way to work off the money he had loaned her. Her idea, however, was that if she could pen a first draft based on his notes, he could then edit them into his own voice and not have to expend his limited energy on organizing the material. It also appears from his comment their arrangement was she would ghostwrite the book. Unfortunately for Locke, it appears that Butcher did not finish any drafts that fall.
Despite his restricted regime, Locke continued to get out occasionally to see local performances. “I saw the Bali dancers here,” he continued to Barthé. “They are wonderful, and again were a vindication of a culture and a climate that knows how to live and take life beautifully whatever comes.” This was one of the beliefs he hoped to foreground in his book. Racism, he still believed, like other social evils, did not prevent anyone, even the Negro, from living a life of beauty. But one of his frustrations, and a factor perhaps in his difficulty writing the book, was that “the Negro” in the early 1950s seemed to Locke uninterested in living a life of beauty in spite of social evils. Indeed, the dominant trend of the current generation of Negroes, as he had opined in “Wisdom De Profundis” was away from beauty and retention of ancestral forms of expression. This was as true in Barthé’s Diaspora home as in the United States. “I hope,” he continued in his letter to Barthé, that “the new hotels [in Jamaica] won’t intrude too much on your paradise, and especially that there will be a few unspoiled people left” in the face of the “civilizing process,” the White tourism business that was actually making Jamaica economically viable for the first time since slavery.
Barthé recalled years later that during 1952 he begged Locke to give up his position at Howard and the strain of living a closeted life in Washington, D.C., to come and live with him in Jamaica. Locke refused. He wished to make one final run at finishing his magnum opus. Only by finishing the book would he avoid the judgment of his many enemies—and perhaps his own conscience—that he had failed to produce a single major statement of his theory of the Negro in American culture.
The book was not the only or even the main reason Locke did not take up Barthé’s offer. Of course, there were many reasons why Locke was not ready to abandon the lifestyle of the single, closeted, Black academic in Washington for Jamaica. For one thing, it would mean the end of his professional career as a prominent Black academic, something he seemed to believe he could continue in what he envisioned was an “active” retirement of writing and lecturing. For another, Locke had medical needs that he believed could only be met within striking distance of major American hospitals. Barthé, however, believed that if Locke could have gotten away from the tensions of the academic life, his heart problems would have dissipated. And Locke did admit that such a change might do him much good. As he noted to de Fonseka, “As soon as I safely can plan either to come abroad where a cheaper currency will make life more easy or to Jamaica where a close friend—Barthé the sculptor[—]has a nice place on the North shore of the island with all the salubriousness one could wish except the expert medical care I immediately need.”16
But there was another important reason for Locke not to go to Jamaica: he was still in love with Maurice Russell. One week after his letter to Barthé, Locke would go to New York to spend the evening with Russell, as indicated in Locke’s cryptic itinerary for the eighth of November. “MVS 9:30–12:30 p.m. [sic] Double Irony—discussion of REC celeste give-away Tis not a pity he’s a whore.” The next day was spent with Russell again, and while similarly intriguing—“[MVR woke REC—one hour late. Reference to MHL—new, Dinner: Athens Chop House”—the sum total of the experience was pleasure. “6:30 train to DC Home—in time 4 Blissful sleep.” In his closeted Washington-to-New York romance, Locke had much more of what he longed for here than in Jamaica.
Locke’s rekindling his romance with Russell did not mean that Locke was not pursuing other lovers. A monogamous gay relationship, a kind of middle-class marriage between men, was not Locke’s ideal. Locke desired an intense emotional relationship with a special person over a long period of time, but also the freedom to sleep with other people at the same time. A case in point was his pursuit of R.E.C., or Robert E. Claybrooks, on his November 8 trip to New York, while Locke was romantically involved with Russell. A month and a half later, Locke received a letter from Claybrooks, which confirmed Locke was still in the game. As usual, Locke had tried to mentor Claybrooks by suggesting that he read a Nathaniel Hawthorne short story.
David Swann has now been read. It is easy to see how much the premonitory instinct and the element of chance of this story have influenced your life. Naturally, I can see only too clearly where the crux of the tale may easily apply to me now, and where it might, or might not have in the past. In being called David; does it presuppose too much on my part, or on yours?
Claybrooks was intrigued, but also wary. He found himself “old enough and experienced-wise so that I’m on the qui vive, but there lurks in my thinking the thought that there is much I cannot encompass.” Claybrooks’s problem was not the intellectual challenge of dealing with Locke’s formidable mind. “What I am trying to say, Alain, is that you excite me in every other area but a sexual one. It has nothing to do with the differences in ages. Of that I’m certain. Perhaps physical contact was precipitated too soon—I don’t know. But I do know, and this I have withheld until now, an intense feeling of nausea accompanied me after the initial affair, and I know it would be repeated each time, if such were to happen again, until I would be estranged, eaten up with hostility.”17 Once again, Locke had carried a relationship “a step further” than his young friend was “emotionally equipped to take.” The result, once again, was rejection.
Of course, such rebuffs did not deter Locke in the past and did not now. But the reality could not have been lost on Locke. His ability to get and keep lovers was declining. Russell, a strikingly handsome man, may very well have recruited Claybrooks for Locke. The pattern of recruiting, training, and emotionally torturing new assistants, and then inducting them into his sexual menagerie, was not working as effectively as before.
But instead of spending whatever time Locke had alone without Claybooks getting deeper into the writing of his book, Locke instead found, at sixty-seven, that he had little interest in this book. Locke’s involvement with the race issue had been pragmatic, a means to advance himself—to gain recognition, to be esteemed, and ultimately to be loved by the people. But now, as the rewards from proselytizing the race were remote, Locke showed declining interest in a book whose rationale was tied to racial recognition. While “REC” closed his letter with the hope that “some zip has returned to your prose, and that you’ve regained some measure of fluidity,” the reality was that whatever “zip” Locke had regained, he had applied to the game of love. He was turning away from the kind of death-embalming aestheticism that led Marcel Proust to cloister himself in his bedroom for years to write at all hours of the night and day, refusing to see friends or even to leave his house. By contrast, Locke hit the streets whenever his wounded heart would let him. Claybrooks hoped the book was “rapidly assuming larger and larger status, or should be, within your mind.” But was it? Notecards and correspondence from the last two years of his life lack any sustained or even fleeting reflections on race and culture, but are jammed with notes of rendezvouses and escapades. Even after his rejection of Locke’s sexual advances, Claybrooks wrote that he was “ever eager that it [the book] should be a final testimony (in the sense of a probable last, major work) to your intellect and genius.”18 But the book was not enough to make Claybrooks sleep with him. The book, therefore, became a sign of Locke’s decline, his diminished appeal, the face of death. No wonder he avoided it.
A hint at a new message surfaced in one of Locke’s shortest and little noticed articles published by Phylon in 1950. “Self-Criticism, the Third Dimension in Culture” was written to sum up a special symposium devoted to Black literature by contemporary young African American literary critics, a symposium that, significantly, Locke had not been asked to contribute to as a participant. The articles by J. Saunders Redding, Hugh Gloster, Lawrence Reddick, and others represented the passing of the torch to younger scholars, and yet Locke did not react defensively or competitively as he had done sometimes in the past. He took the theme of the symposium—criticism of Negro literature by Negro critics—and turned it into a more universal concept: that self-criticism within was the necessary step to cultural maturity of any movement. He applauded the main thrust of the “new criticism,” that Negro literature had been too mired in protest, self-justification, and plaintive calls for racial justice camouflaged—barely—in short story and novelistic forms. The first dimension was to assert one’s right to self-expression, something he had promoted Negro writers doing in 1925; and the second dimension was to “social discoveries of common denominator human universals between Negro situations and others,” which made, as the critics in that volume asserted, Negro literature “sounder and more objective.” But it was “self-criticism” itself that was really needed and the willingness to direct such “self-criticism” back into self-expression to open up areas of creative exploration off-limits to Negro literature so far.19
Here, Locke spoke of the secrets avoided by Negro writers. “I will venture to speak even more plainly on my own responsibility.” There were several “taboos of Puritanism, Philistinism and falsely conceived notions of ‘race respectability’ ” in the Negro community that were powerful “repressions” that brought great harm to Negro literature. Negro writers needed to express that “we are all basically and inevitably human” and that being Negro did not eliminate the full range of human emotions from being expressed in Negro life.20
Why then this protective silence about the ambivalence of the Negro upper classes, about the dilemmas of intra-group prejudice and rivalry, about the dramatic inner paradoxes of mixed heritage … or the tragic breach between the Negro elite or the conflict between integration and vested-interest separatism in the present day life of the Negro? These, among others, are the great themes, but they moulder in closed closets like family skeletons rather than shine like the Aladdin’s lamps that they really are.21
That last line revealed the great, undeveloped theme in Negro literature—the plight and experience of the Negro homosexual in the Black community, caught in a unique “Third Dimension,” between alienation from the White community because of race and alienation from the Black community because of sexual orientation. Here was one of the “closed closets like family skeletons” that even Locke had not been able to explore in print or accept enough “consciously and unconsciously” about himself to be able to fire his muse. Here, Locke was approaching the kind of voice that James Baldwin would use to talk about what lay in America’s “closets” after the publication in 1956 of the first explicitly homosexual novel by an African American writer, Baldwin.
Perhaps Locke’s difficulty finishing his book was that it was not the book he needed to write. He could not continue to write in the closet in 1950 as he had for most of his life. “Self-Criticism” was perhaps Locke’s way of rendering publicly his own “self-criticism” for not facing his homosexuality in print. Obviously, the Knopf book was to be a kind of intellectual autobiography; yet, a key issue that had defined his career, his homosexuality, could not be part of the story. Of course, given FBI surveillance of him and the charge brought against him by the student, Locke felt he had even less opportunity to do that than earlier in his career. But if he could have been frank in public, Locke would have admitted that what had stifled the Negro Renaissance was that he and others criticized in this special issue of Phylon had not written about what mattered most to them for fear—legitimate fear—that such writings would be used to destroy them. Locke, no less than Negro literature, had been blocked tragically by self-silencing. Locke could pursue sex to the end of his life, but not write about it openly; and that lack of openness to others and perhaps to himself now made him unable to write about himself at all.
At such times of sterility in the past, what helped Locke was to turn to that which was most unlike himself and thereby gain perspective through difference. A case in point was his revision of his earlier dismissive attitude toward the work of the artist Horace Pippin. Locke had known of Pippin’s work ever since his inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art show of “folk” artists in 1938, and his purchase of some of Pippin’s work from the one-man gallery opening in Philadelphia. But when asked to recommend Pippin for a Guggenheim in 1944, Locke made an ambiguous assessment of what the rewards would be of sending Pippin south to do paintings of Negro life. “I’m not sure what it would produce. It might produce great art. It might fizzle.” Locke was uncomfortable with the “primitivism” and “folk” quality of Pippin’s art, feeling perhaps that it was so internally focused as to be unnameable to outside influences. But later, when asked to write an essay for a retrospective on the late Pippin’s work in 1948, Locke had changed his mind. He suggested that Pippin had achieved a new synthesis, and become a new kind of contemporary artist for “combining folk quality with artistic maturity so uniquely as almost to defy classification.”22 Locke was able to get beyond his own middle-class distaste for “folk” art and realize he needed to develop a new paradigm for what was unique about Pippin’s art, and, by extension, what was unique about contemporary Negro art—as it combined the experimental, the new, with the old, the revered, and the traditional, such that a new kind of art emerged from the universal particularity of the Negro experience of America. “Pippin became a blend of the folk-artist and the sophisticated stylist, the ‘primitive’ and the technical experimenter, the genre-painter and the abstractionist, the negro historical folklorist as in the John Brown series and a Blakeian religious mystic as in The Holy Mountain and other symbolic paintings.”23 By meditating self-critically on Pippin, Locke became an “experimenter,” a new kind of cultural critic able to escape, if only for one essay, the “closed closets” of Negro elite thinking about art.
Self-criticism was the third dimension in culture in one last sense. If Negro literature became great, it would have to transcend the kind of narrowness of vision that hampered the larger reach of identity-politics formations. Whether focused on working-class culture, queer aesthetics, or Black consciousness poetry, artists of all stripes had to find a way to tell the story of a particular people in a language that touched the souls of all others. This did not mean avoiding the people’s experience of racism, sexism, homophobia, and class oppression but to render it in its “universalized particularity.” How could those writing about the Negro experience do so in such a way that it became emblematic of the American experience? How could Black writers make the language of the Negro reality convey how tied to the Black experience every American life was? Here, buried in “Self-Criticism, the Third Dimension of Culture,” lay an argument about the “universal particularity” of minority discourse in America that could have energized the Random House book.
Locke reached for something of that universal vision when he came to write a review of his Harvard professor’s book, Domination and Powers, in Key Reporter, the journal of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society. This assignment came as part of a broader request to submit regular reviews in the area of “Philosophy, Religion, and Education” to the journal of Phi Beta Kappa, which had inducted him in 1907 after he was at Oxford. Now, with the perspective of more than forty years spent in the field of race scholarship, Locke returned in this article to his first love—the kind of aesthetically informed philosophy of living that Santayana embodied and was able to express in his writings. Santayana embodied Harvard aestheticism and left the United States to settle in Europe, a move Locke had contemplated many times in his past. Dominations and Powers was the kind of book Locke needed to write—less a summing up and more a burrowing into new territory with a vision strengthened by years of reflection. Locke noted that Santayana had produced a testament to what the life of reason now confronted—a world of hate, suspicion, and unreason as the price the West was paying for “domination” at mid-century. Santayana confronted contemporary readers with the contradictions no less than ironies embedded in the modern world, and modeled, perhaps too late, a way out of the quagmire of nationalism—that of “calm and urbane historical and cultural detachment” toward the crisis of the postwar era. Locke too was speaking out against the threats to freedom of speech and inquiry of a McCarthy-era America in meetings with other philosophers and intellectuals in the early 1950s.
But while Locke welcomed the “wisdom” of Santayana’s book, his review registered there were obvious weaknesses to it. “In spite of the reasonableness of his general position, many readers will find themselves in sharp disagreement with some of Santayana’s obviously temperamental quips and biases.”24 Locke’s challenge to Santayana was similar if more subtle to that he registered against McKay’s life of detachment in A Long Way from Home. Commitment to transform the West was more laudable than detached judgment about it. The review, therefore, registered how far Locke had advanced beyond Santayana even if Locke had not produced the corpus of writings his former teacher had. Locke had not followed Santayana’s path, had not adopted aloofness as his response to modernity, but instead had plunged into the conflicts at the center of the West’s industrial societies in a philosophical practice of engagement rather than detachment. A real breakthrough would have resulted if Locke had been able to take Santayana’s Domination and Powers as a text to react against and written a book for Alfred Knopf that detailed how wrestling with the West’s race question for nearly half a century defined a new role for the American philosopher. Unfortunately, it was too late for that.
The Key Reporter assignment also synchronized with a request from Howard University to help its effort to win approval for a Phi Beta Kappa chapter at Howard. Locke threw himself in work for the chapter, coordinating the on-site visit of Brown University’s William Hastings and the Phi Beta Kappa committee to campus to interview campus officials and faculty members of Phi Beta Kappa, according to historian Rayford Logan.25 The effort was successful: on April 8, 1953, in a ceremony in Rankin Chapel at which Ralph Bunche returned to Howard to speak on the occasion, the Gamma Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa was installed. It was a moment of deep consolidation of Locke’s four decades of effort to bring the highest standards of scholarly endeavor to Howard University.
But in the period from 1951 to 1953, such service and continued teaching took its toll on the energy Locke had to devote to trying to finish his book, which he would not simply put down and was unable to take up in a sustained way. Locke found that the only effective time for writing was in the mornings. He rose later than usual, predictably after 9, sometimes close to 10. After a light breakfast, he usually had an hour or two of writing—on days he did not teach—before noontime interruptions and the daily search for suitable lunch options began. Since Washington was still rigidly segregated in 1952, the only place Locke found to eat that was suitable to his palate and stomach was Union Station, a bus ride away from his home. After the bus ride home he would take a nap, from which he would awake around 4 p.m. Visitors would normally begin to arrive around 5 or 5:30 p.m. He had only episodic help from Margaret Butcher, whose mother became mentally unstable, limiting how much time Margaret, an administrator in the D.C. public school system, could devote to him. Even more, Margaret may have had some reservations about writing a book for which she might receive no public credit. Locke had, of course, given Margaret money, and it seems that the expectation that she would write the book had been tied to his financial support. Ironically, Locke, who had enlisted a patron to pay Black writers in the Harlem Renaissance who failed, in his mind, to earn the money his patron had paid them, faced a similar situation in 1952: he was a patron anxiously awaiting someone else to produce work he could not produce himself.
Nevertheless, Margaret did make a renewed commitment to the book project in January 1953, aided by an additional assistance Locke provided her. “Stenographer here working on chapter. Will call you Wednesday night or you wire me where you want material sent.”26 Her promise derived from her willingness, she said, to scale back other commitments. “I’m cutting out any extra activities (aside from teaching Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays). … If you can outline what other chapters I can do, and give me either references or materials, I’ll divide the working days. There’s no nonsense on this. It’s now or never.”27 Butcher had finished the first draft of her own dissertation and thus felt comfortable with a schedule that involved teaching three days a week, revising her dissertation, and drafting Locke’s chapters. But what does not surface from the correspondence is what arrangement the two of them had agreed to whereby she drafted the chapters of his book. If the arrangement was still that she was ghostwriting the book that might explain why she did not make any progress on it. After all, the contract for the book was given to Locke alone, and it was a good contract, according to Locke, because “after publication in hard back form by Knopf, the text is to be reprinted in these new popular paper backs in the Mentor New American Library Series, and to be distributed widely they tell me.” Yet he could not write the book, and, apparently, neither could she. Despite her assurances to work on the project, little if any real writing took place that winter and spring of 1953.
Having decided to retire in 1953, after the Phi Beta Kappa chapter was established, Locke got an unexpected reward in his final year at Howard. The university decided to confer upon him an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters. That warmed Locke’s heart and helped him to feel that his years teaching at America’s premier Black university had not been a waste. Indeed, the award helped him to separate from an institution that had anchored him, for better or worse, for forty years. Graduation also meant packing up and moving north to take up full-time residence at 12 Grove Street. In anticipation of the move, Arthur Fauset graciously moved into his own apartment on the second floor and left the entire ground-floor apartment for Locke alone. Robert Martin, Locke’s loyal “Boy Friday” on campus, volunteered to pack up Locke’s office, as well as his apartment, and helped arrange the shipping of artifacts and personal effects to New York. But, as Locke remarked to Barthé, no one could help with the psychological strain. The weather, however, miraculously did help. Just three weeks before he moved on June 13, the humidity that hung over Washington, D.C., lifted and cooler weather descended on the usually steamy city. That made sorting, shipping, and moving more bearable than he had hoped.
But Washington was not done with him, yet. In January 1953, the FBI had reopened its investigation of Locke and on May 21 hauled him back into FBI headquarters to interview him. Seriously ill, withered, and frail, Locke nevertheless was ready for the questions, giving himself a spirited defense while admitting he had belonged to some of the organizations cited by the US Attorney General, the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), or the California Committee on Un-American Activities. The list of organizations that the FBI presented him this time was much longer, but Locke’s answers were more to the point, stating repeatedly that he had not knowingly joined or remained in any organization that advocated the overthrow of the government.
The FBI was especially interested in Locke’s participation in a series of Black radical organizations begun or headed by Paul Robeson, William Hunton, or Max Yergen. According to FBI transcripts of the interview:
Locke continued that he had been a board member of the Council on African Affairs at the invitation of the executive secretary by the name of [William] Hunton who was formerly a Howard University professor and a member of the National Negro Congress.28
Locke told them he had met “an old friend of his named Max Yergen” who told him the Council was being launched to promote the study of “African culture and arts.” The FBI seemed to garble its transcript of the interview, for it recorded Locke as saying that he was “quite disappointed when Ralph Bunche was placed on the board of the council … and was quite pleased at a later time to be included as a member of this organization.” But apparently things turned sour when a struggle for control of the Council erupted between Yergen and Paul Robeson, leading Locke eventually to resign from the organization. Similarly, Locke claimed he had resigned from the National Negro Congress after the defection of A. Philip Randolph, who claimed communists had infiltrated the organization. He admitted to being an honorary member of the Southern Negro Congress, because he supported its “professed principles of getting intelligent youthful voters to strive for civic and economic equality” and had given lectures at the George Washington Carver School in New York at the “request of Miss Gwendolyn Bennett,” formerly a colleague at Howard University. His lectures at the Carver School took place in the fall term of 1943, after his return from Haiti, and led to lectures at the Philadelphia School of Social Science and Art in 1945. But Locke asserted that he “separated all of his connections with” such schools once he realized they were “Communistically inclined.”29 They were so listed by the Attorney General of the United States.
Clearly, Locke had not been cowed by the scrutiny. He had continued to participate in Leftist organizations and educational ventures after his interview with the FBI in 1942. The month before his second interview Locke had been quoted in the Washington Post as being highly critical of the campaign, launched by Illinois senator William E. Jenner and Wisconsin senator Joseph McCarthy, to “probe into what students should be taught in” college. “How are we as teachers going to face issues of the contemporary world when we are not completely free to give our students any guidance?” Locke might be unafraid, but the FBI was closely monitoring public activities.
Locke’s defense of academic freedom and his associations with radical organizations were not the only and may not have been the real cause of his being interviewed a second time in May 1953. The reopening of the investigation of Alain Locke may have occurred because someone in Baltimore, Maryland, whose name was blacked out in FBI documents, had accused Locke of being a homosexual. Locke did not know that, but he would not have been surprised. Baltimore was hardly a better environment for Black gay men than Washington. His friend Richard Long wrote Locke that the president of the Baltimore Black college at Morgan State suspected every unmarried male teacher might be gay. That last interview at FBI headquarters must have confirmed for Locke it was time to leave Washington, D.C., and its environs for safer ground in New York.
This informant contextualizes Locke’s decision not to allow Douglas Stafford to room with him while the latter was stationed in military school in Washington, D.C. Stafford wrote that he would not be in Locke’s way, not be a bother, nor cramp his older friend’s freedom or lifestyle. But Locke wrote back quickly to state that it was out of the question. Not only would it have been complicated, given that Margaret was still taking care of Locke on a weekly basis, but Locke could also not risk having his gay lifestyle marked by a living arrangement with another man in Washington. Once again, what might have been a satisfying companionship with one of the brightest of the young men he knew was squashed by at least the threat of it being used against him.
On June 8, 1953, the Monday before Locke moved out of his forty-year residence on 1326 R Street, NW, Washington restaurants began to desegregate their dining rooms. Three African Americans, who had been forced to leave a Washington restaurant, sued the restaurant for violation of their civil rights; and their lawyers discovered that a neglected 1873 District law still on the books required any “licensed restaurant, eating house, barroom, sample room, ice cream saloon, or soda fountain room” to serve “any well-behaved and respectable person.” The action brought an end to the racial barriers at all of Washington’s better restaurants, but too late to do Locke any good. “I found it quite an irony,” he wrote Mrs. Biddle, “that Washington became more livable just ten days before I left. What many hours and energy were lost in trips twice daily to Union Station for meals during over twenty five of those years is both hard to imagine and contemplate.”30 Regardless of the long-standing ties to the nation’s capital, it was good for Locke to leave behind its legacy of racism and its sexual constriction.
Locke’s arrival in New York was filled with optimism. Once Locke moved in he turned the first-floor apartment into a shrine to the new, more modern Alain Locke. Stafford, after a visit, confirmed as much, “I much prefer Grove Street. While the R Street location was fine given that it certainly reflected you, I found the object spatial ratio overwhelming at R Street. Now, at Grove Street, I come away with clear impressions of the art objects and can appreciate it more than I ever could on R Street.”31
After getting settled, Locke spent July and August back at Valley Forge Hospital under Dr. Wolffe’s care. Consequently, Locke faced the fall with renewed health, but not enough for the kind of “active retirement” he had envisioned. Even in New York, Locke found the daily grind of work on his book strenuous, while Margaret Butcher was further away and swamped with responsibilities. The book lay fallow.
Living in New York gave him freedom and time to do “some of the things that gave him joy,” as Arthur Fauset recalled. He continued to go to Small’s Paradise “on Friday nights,” which Fauset called a “Bohemian retreat,” and would relate “some of the stories” and “laugh about what had taken place that evening” with Fauset. Thus, “no matter how ill he was he could usually get a great deal out of the hours that he would spend in a place like that.” Small’s Paradise was his home away from home in the fall of 1953 and the winter of 1954, where he could mix openly with his gay friends and laugh with younger folk about the foibles of life behind his particular “veil.”
On June 4, 1954, Locke’s doctor at Mt. Sinai Hospital requested he come in for a checkup. Fauset recalled:
I walked with him through the street, through Grove Street and to 8th Avenue where the subway was. … It was in the day time and we, well of course, we had to walk. We had to take the bus or the train at 8th Avenue in order to get to the hospital. And I remember how sad I felt because I realized that Locke perhaps would not make that walk again. And, he was not in shape to make the walk then. But, there was no transportation, at least no transportation in that direction, we, [had to walk] from our home on Grove Street slowly but not with too great difficulty, to the subway or bus. And we went on then of course down 50th Street there where Mt. Sinai is and we then went into the hospital.32
Locke did not want to go to the hospital. After the initial examination, a younger doctor was ready to release Locke to go home. But because of his youth, he had to get clearance from the senior doctor on staff. When that doctor examined Locke, he stated, “Oh, I didn’t know that this man was as ill as he is. I didn’t know his condition had deteriorated. We can’t release him.” Locke was very upset because he wanted to get out of the hospital and had told Fauset he was coming home. According to Fauset, “the next time I saw him—I went up to where they were going to bed him and stayed a few minutes and left—after he was in the hospital … he was fixed in a way that nothing else that I have seen affects me. It reflects my thought that he was tied down in a hospital.” Remarkably, even though Locke was very ill, he had been able to “navigate himself and more or less do everything that the average person does” at home.33 Now he was trapped in the hospital and unable to return home.
Fauset thought that if he could get Locke admitted back at the Valley Forge Hospital, where the radical treatment of Dr. Wolffe had saved Locke before, that maybe he could survive. Fauset reached Dr. Wolffe, who agreed to take him. But by then it was too late. On June 9, five days after he was admitted to Mt. Sinai, Locke was dead.
Until the end, Locke was optimistic and looking forward to future projects, and wanting most of all to live.