44
The New Negro Lives
Shortly after his death that summer of 1954, visitors filed in singly or in small groups to Benta’s Funeral Home at 157 West 132nd Street in Harlem to view Locke’s body lying in the parlor. It seemed incongruous that this tiny Black man, who was perpetually in motion, suddenly lay still in a plain wooden box. Thirty-two years after his mother’s wake, at least Alain was not sitting up in his home. Arthur Fauset made sure the arrangements at Benta’s were proper and top-notch. More important than the funeral were the people there. There was W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Mrs. Paul Robeson, Charles Johnson—luminaries of Black intellectual culture—alongside Bili Bond Locke’s sometime lover, Maurice Russell, the love of Locke’s life, sculptor Richmond Barthé, and Mary Beattie Brady, his best ally in the work of promoting African American visual arts—a community that was diverse sexually, socially, racially, and class-wise, but a community nonetheless created by the man now lying in peace in Harlem. He had been the one alienated from Black folks’ usual congregations, and kept on the outside by hatred of his kind. He had empowered gay aesthetics to change the discourse of the Negro in America and shifted the image of the Negro from that of a social science object to be pitied, to be seen, at least by the elite thinkers of the nation, as the originator of the only superlative culture America had yet given to the world. He had pulled together these people who did not know one another into a kind of family for himself and other Black queers. Negro art had made this community, and now its architect was gone.
But Locke’s work was not done. Locke had formed that community with a higher purpose—to subjectivize the Negro, to spur the Negro to become a shaper of the world around him or her with unflinching confidence and supreme competence to change the climate of hate and defeat. Though he critiqued the language of propaganda his wake minister Du Bois had used, Locke had weaponized art to weaponize Negroes to give them the consciousness that their role was to transform the race through their brilliance.
While Du Bois gave one of his most poignant and powerful eulogies about his old enemy that decried America for not letting Alain Locke be a philosopher without the burden of race, others in the small crowd slipped away to 12 Grove Street, to Locke’s first-floor apartment, where they entered the beautiful, modernist sanctuary that they had visited when Locke was alive. Gripped by grief or more likely greed, they took objects of art they had eyed while talking with the old man. They had listened to him lecture them for hours about art and the meaning it had, to show the world that Negroes were a great race, but they had not really understood. Instead, his friends took pieces of him to their homes (or maybe to the pawn shop) to admire or profit from. They took for themselves what he intended for the community and proved yet again that his work was not finished.
Fortunately, not everything of value in Locke’s large art collection was on display at his home; most of it was tucked away safely in a warehouse in New York. When asked about the theft, Arthur Fauset, whose responsibility it was to handle the funeral arrangements and execute his estate, blamed the loss on Myron O’Higgins, the other executor named in Locke’s will, because Locke had given O’Higgins the responsibility to arrange for the collection to be shipped to Howard University. Fauset claimed that O’Higgins took a long time to make the trip from Chicago to New York to take control of the collection. “What was one to do?” Fauset replied weakly. “Put it in storage?”1
Others were less kind. “That fool Arthur Fauset” was what Robert Fennell called him. The intermittent theft went on for weeks, apparently, while Fauset waited for O’Higgins to travel to New York. Did Fauset resent that Locke had chosen another person, perhaps a closer friend, to handle the most valuable part of his estate? Why did O’Higgins delay coming to New York to handle what he must have realized was a priceless collection of art? Fennell may have provided a clue. He noted that someone, who was not a friend of Locke’s or his close associates, got a copy of Locke’s will and published it in the Baltimore Black newspaper, the AFRO. Fennell emphasized that such a publication was not welcomed by those listed in it, including Fauset, O’Higgins, William McAllister, the Howard University philosophy professor who had witnessed the will, and others, for such public association with Locke outed them. As Fauset and O’Higgins, so this reasoning goes, worried about how connection with Locke’s public passing colored their reputations, others less concerned about their reputations stole from that estate with impunity. One could characterize this as the problem of homosexual succession, for without a family Locke’s legacy was dependent on the competency of those who suddenly wanted as little public connection as possible with this queer Black intellectual.
Locke’s will was a magnificent act of generosity. He left half of 12 Grove Street to Howard University, the other half to Arthur Fauset. To Howard University he donated his art collection to be mounted in a special permanent exhibition in the university’s Fine Arts building. The rest of his net worth, including two houses he owned in Philadelphia, several US saving bonds, retirement and liability insurance policies, plus approximately $5,000 in cash, were deeded to his estate, to be used to ensure the transfer of his library, papers, and effects to Howard University and set up in a separate collection. Whatever funds remained were to be used for the processing and publication of such papers as his executors, each receiving $500, and Howard University, deemed appropriate. Certainly, this was one of the most generous donations of a professor’s wealth to Howard University. Thomas Dyett, Locke’s long-time lawyer, moved quickly to process Locke’s will in order that Howard could receive this largesse, contacting and working closely with George E. C. Hayes, general counsel for Howard University.2
Just as quickly the process encountered difficulties. First, Locke’s will was in a safety deposit box in a Washington, D.C., bank, requiring a court order to transfer it to New York. Once the will was filed, more drama emerged from Arthur Fauset. The will stipulated that Fauset could live in the house on Grove Street for five years, but he was ready to help Howard sell the property and allow half of the proceeds to go to Howard quickly. But there was a rub. Fauset presented to Dyett a note for $6,500 dollars, which he said Locke borrowed from him for the house’s down payment. As it turned out, the safety deposit box also contained a note that Fauset owed Locke (and now his estate) $2,000. Anxious, perhaps, not to have to come up with that amount from his own finances, Fauset proposed that the two amounts be allowed to cancel each other out—an “exceedingly generous offer,” as Dyett noted. As Dyett also noted, there was no proof that Locke still owed Fauset this money, now that “one of the parties is dead.” But, as Fauset claimed, the two of them were to settle up this amount, but never got around to it because Locke to the very end believed he would not die.3
All of these negotiations and transfers lasted into 1956, when Fauset brought another problem to the attention of Dyett and the chief counsel of Howard University, who were collectively trying to liquidate Locke’s assets and bring them to Howard. Not long after Locke passed away and Myron O’Higgins had finally removed his apartment’s remaining art objects, Fauset rented it out to Michelle Dougherty, a White woman. Dougherty complained to Fauset that the door to her apartment was difficult to open and needed repair, but he did not attend to it. One day, Dougherty claimed, coming home with groceries, she struggled with the door and when pushing it, it gave way, and she fell to the ground. Afterward, she informed Fauset of her injuries, as he relayed the story to Dyett, and demanded financial compensation. These demands grew until Fauset had to bring them to the attention of Dyett and Hayes, especially since Dougherty refused to accept the $500 Fauset offered and threatened to sue. The complication emerged that this suit could be made against Howard University, as co-owner of 12 Grove Street, because Fauset had neglected to renew the liability insurance on the house after Locke had died. Fauset claimed that a transfer of the policy and the departure of the original insurance agent were responsible for a bill not being sent to the house. But as Hayes noted, it was most “unfortunate” that Fauset had been so neglectful, especially when one considered that Fauset was a “real estate” man. As executor of the estate and co-owner of the property, his first responsibility was to keep it free and clear.
Fauset quickly sought buyers for the 12 Grove Street property, but as late as 1960, Dougherty was still living there and still was set on getting a large compensation, especially once she learned Howard University owned the property. Although Fauset assured them she would not be a problem, and even Hayes believed that Howard could not be sued, Miss Dougherty brought suit in the United States District Court in Washington, D.C., for $50,000 in damages—against Howard University and Fauset, six years after Locke’s death. Fauset was doing a good job confirming Fennell’s assessment that he was a “fool.”4
A deeper irony pervaded the whole struggle between Dougherty, Howard, and Fauset. Fennell remarked that Locke had only rented out apartments in 12 Grove Street to Whites. “Niggers will break things up,” Fennell recalled Locke’s quip. But what Locke could not have foreseen was that a White person threatened the transfer of his wealth to those at Howard whom Locke wanted to benefit from a life of paid lectures and wealth accumulation. In reality, Whites and African Americans were no different when it came to wanting to be rewarded for the stupidity of landowners.5
Irony continued to dog Locke’s legacy. Once his art collection arrived at Howard, James Porter rushed to put the stunning collection of African art on view. An exhibition in 1960 brought attention to the gift precisely at a time when international attention was focused on the emergence of African nations from European colonialism. While the collection was beautifully hung, it was not secured. A beautiful collection of African ivories disappeared. After this temporary exhibition and the fiasco of lost treasures, Locke’s art collection was locked away. Nevertheless, a priceless African staff disappeared. A few university administrators cruised through the collection of African American–centered art and selected a piece to adorn their offices. Upon their retirement, sometimes the piece could not be found. Queen-like aesthetes James Porter, as an art historian, and James Herring, as director of the Howard Gallery of Art of the Art Department, had made careers out of dismissing the importance of Locke’s African-centered philosophies of art and bore the responsibility for this loss of art, since they were the campus authorities on art. Their bias against Locke and the African art that predominated in his collection may have made it difficult for them to take seriously the securing of Locke’s collection. Yet Howard’s rank and file acquired his art because of its spiritual value to them. Theft, whether in Harlem or in Washington, D.C., showed Locke had not been wrong. Art spoke to the people; and when given a chance to have it, to hold it, to display it in their personal space, they did, and incorporated its subject-enhancing power into their lives.
A different type of disappearance occurred with regard to the collection of Locke’s personal effects. A rumor circulated that amid the hundreds of boxes of correspondence, unpublished essays, and drafts of speeches, a curious box was found by the head of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Dorothy Porter, James Porter’s wife. In that box, reputedly, Locke had collected semen samples from those with whom he had had sex. It was his way of proving to himself—and perhaps to others whom he showed the box and its contents—that he had slept with men who denied it afterward. An interview with Porter late in her life confirmed that she had thrown the box out, in an effort to protect him—and especially the university—from scandal. Other items, such as photographs, graphic material, and explicit items were discarded as well, in an understandable act of concern for how such information could be used against him and Howard University. But irreplaceable information about Locke’s lovers and his habits, information that could prove or disprove rumors and innuendoes, vanished. Mrs. Porter also did not realize the dream of Locke’s will to have a room devoted to his collection like the one given to Jesse Moorland and Arthur Spingarn. Instead, Porter dispersed his books throughout the library’s regular circulating collection, perhaps believing they would be more accessible to students that way.
Fauset, however, had the most difficulty of anyone in fulfilling the mandate Locke gave him. That extended even to the question of what to do with Locke’s ashes after he was cremated. Apparently, Locke did not want his body to be buried. Margaret Butcher, who had clashed with others around Locke in the past, traveled to New York for the funeral and stated she thought that Locke’s ashes should be buried in Philadelphia.6 Butcher fulfilled her commitment to Locke in another way, publishing a book based on Locke’s writings and her own work with him in his last years, titled The Negro in American Culture, two years after his death. But Fauset, claiming authority from Locke to handle this part of his passing, refused to let her have Locke buried. Perhaps Fauset, another Black Philadelphian, worried that a burial in Philadelphia would draw unwanted attention to Locke as a gay man. That Fauset was defensive about this aspect of Locke’s identity was revealed when he described homosexuality as a disease, and thus of very little importance in a biography of Locke.7 The struggle for power between Locke’s homosexual business partner and his heterosexual pseudo-god daughter represented a power struggle between traditional patriarchy and a gay fraternity laying to rest the most out member of its community.
Butcher and Fauset wrangled back and forth, apparently for days, over the proper burial site for Locke’s ashes. Eventually, Butcher gave up and left New York to return to Washington. Fauset, unable to make a firm decision, kept the ashes with him. In a repeat of what had occurred thirty years earlier when Locke kept the ashes of his mother on the mantle in 1326 R Street, Fauset kept Locke’s ashes in his residences until, in 1983, he passed away. Fauset’s niece, Conchita Porter Morison, kept the ashes but later gave them to Reverend Sadie Mitchell, associate at St. Thomas Church, who put them in a bag on which was written the inscription, “Cremains given to Locke’s friend, Dr. Arthur Huff Fauset. Arthur is deceased.” She kept the remains intending to give them to Howard, but never did.8
Instead, Locke’s ashes languished in her possession until sometime in the 1990s when J. Weldon Norris, a musician and later historian of music at Howard, visited St. Thomas in connection with a concert. He was eating dinner with friends when a lady walked up to him and said, “Dr. Norris, could you please do me a favor?” When Norris heard she wanted to give him the philosopher’s remains, “all our forks stopped in midair,” he said. Norris transported the ashes to Howard University, where Locke’s papers reside in the manuscript division of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center.9
By then, Howard University had recovered from the shock of receiving materials that it thought might embarrass the institution. Dorothy Porter, deceased by the 1990s, had acted responsibly in beginning the processing of Locke’s papers in the early 1960s, when a new generation of young people imbued with a sense of racial self-consciousness as a positive attribute of their identity emerged at Howard and on college campuses demanding an education relevant to their Blackness. Race, African art, and African consciousness were suddenly revived and thriving among Black youth in America, and Locke’s constellation of interests—African art, African Diaspora consciousness, Black literature—were in vogue again, even if the students knew nothing about Locke’s homosexuality. This new youth movement was angry, curious, and, though frequently homophobic, looked back to the generation of the 1920s as their forerunners.
Several publishers took advantage of this new interest in identity by reissuing Locke’s book, The New Negro, in paperback, which gained a new audience in the Black Studies courses that proliferated through American colleges and universities during the late 1960s and early 1970s. Even Bronze Booklets from his moribund Associates of Negro Folk Education were rediscovered, republished, and reread. Locke’s publishing enterprise made visible to a new generation that it had a self-conscious aesthetic and intellectual history. A unitary system of knowledge that included art, poetry, fiction, social criticism, music, and history existed that race-conscious intellectuals in the past had created for what became known as the Black consciousness movement in the 1960s. When Michael Winston and Thomas Battle took over leadership of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, they featured Locke’s writings and papers as the nearly invisible forerunner of this movement.
Even some enemies became converts. James Porter applied for a grant to travel through Africa, where he became energized by his intimate exposure to African art. When he returned to the United States, his art began to reflect a more abstract approach to the figure based on such African principles of design as elongation and simplification of forms. Porter never acknowledged that Locke’s theory had been borne out in his own practice—that exposure to African art could reinvigorate a moribund Negro American artist. But he did not have to. As he relinquished the chairmanship of the Howard University Art Department in the 1960s, the Black Arts Movement shaped the aesthetic vision of those who came after him at Howard, including Ed Love and Jeff Donaldson, the latter who launched with others the AfriCoba Movement. Under their leadership, the Art Department moved away from the assimilationist orientation that success for the Black artist meant insertion into the American mainstream and toward a global African Diasporic perspective on aesthetics. Donaldson went to Africa and brought back beautiful works of African art. Artists and art teachers at Howard gathered together Locke’s donation of African art to Howard, secured them, and beautifully displayed them along with Donaldson’s pieces from Africa in a permanent exhibition in the Fine Arts Department at Howard University. Locke’s African art had found a home.
But where was Locke? Until recent years, no one knew. A White Rhodes Scholar, Jack Zoeller, and a Black Rhodes Scholar, George Keys, visited the Alain Locke Papers and discovered Locke’s ashes in the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center manuscript division. They sensed an anomaly: Locke’s remains stood on a shelf in a library and not interred. After a fundraising effort among several Black Rhodes Scholars (John Edgar Wideman, the writer, and J. Stanley Sanders, the lawyer, the first two Black Rhodes Scholars after Locke in 1963), Keys and Zoeller worked with Kurt Schmoke, the former Baltimore mayor, and Howard University to bring Locke’s remains to the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. Alain Locke was finally buried on September 13, 2014. Oxford and Howard, two institutional lovers Locke was most ambivalent about during his life, provided a final resting place for his remains.
But did Locke want to be buried? No evidence suggests that he did. Indeed, the evidence suggests that he preferred not to be interred. Robert Fennell stated that Locke and Fauset had a pact that whoever died first, the other would handle the deceased’s funeral arrangements. Fauset had resisted Margaret Butcher’s attempt to bury Locke in Philadelphia. Was Fauset resistant to Butcher’s desire to have Locke buried in Philadelphia because Fauset did not want Locke buried in Philadelphia or buried at all? It seems the latter, since Fauset, who easily could have buried Locke in New York or Washington, kept possession of the ashes until his death. Part of Locke’s decision to cremate his mother was to keep her remains close to him, not hidden away underground to be forgotten. In asking Fauset to cremate him, Locke may have wanted to remain above ground, in the midst of living beings, an influence. Locke knew he would be dead, but he did not want to be buried. But Howard, by now the mature spouse Locke never had, stepped in and did the right thing. As E. Ethelbert Miller put it, “We can’t have Dr. Locke up on the shelf.” Appropriately interred in a dignified ceremony, Locke, the lifelong vagabond, finally came to rest.10
Toward the end, Locke could not see actually what he had done. He had made the discourse over Black aesthetics central to intellectual discussion of Black politics in ways it had never been before. He had nurtured two generations of Black writers, had birthed a discourse of the necessity of Black visual artists that ensured their visibility and created an interdisciplinary space for Black literature, art, theater, and dance that made each critical to the humanities and American Studies, by exposing the criticality, epistemologies, and social implications of Black art creativity in his essays and exhibition catalogs. He had launched a new cultural anthropology of modernity in his Harlem issue of Survey Graphic and The New Negro: An Interpretation, by showing how Black people assimilated White culture through migration north, but put the acquired cultures to their own uses. In the process, Locke defined the relevance of cultural pluralism to an understanding of how difference was lived inside of America, rather than as a project of “primitive” peoples outside of it. Perhaps most profoundly, he defined identity as constructed in response to space, becoming a philosopher of spatial analysis as much as cultural pluralism, because he made visible how African Americans redefine urban space through a unique approach to assimilation. Locke found something other observers like Melville Herskovits had missed but learned—that Black migrants to Harlem in the 1920s not only assimilated mainstream American popular culture but directed it toward their own racial purposes, because they had the aesthetic facility to stylize mainstream culture in their own way—wear commercial White clothing in a Black style, to play standard American tunes and create jazz, that is, be independent aesthetic innovators on the level of form wherever they went in the United States and throughout the “Three Americas.”
Survival in the American social order had forced him to abandon some of these insights in favor of others to remain afloat. Nonetheless, in the concept of the New Negro, he put his finger on the often ignored but absolutely crucial feature of the African American experience—the capacity of an oppressed people to reinvent itself time and again in the most mean circumstances one could imagine. Even more than identifying it in the Black experience, he embodied that principle in his own intellectual life, reinventing himself almost every half-decade with a new voice, a new set of concerns, and a new array of insights into the American character as well as the African American experience. In that sense, his theory of culture is confirmed by all that came after it—the bebop jazz era, the Black abstractionism of Norman Lewis, Alma Thomas, and Mark Bradford, cool jazz, rhythm and blues, hip-hop—even if he was not sympathetic to those movements on the level of taste. He realized that Black creativity erupted every ten years or less in new iterations of formal inventiveness. He found such creativity alive on the streets of Harlem, where nestled in the capital of capitalism, New York welcomed artists who refused to succumb to its soul-defeating logic.
Locke’s failure was his success. Although Harlem never lived up to his prognostications, his idea that Black aesthetics was alive on the streets of urban communities of the American North and could be tapped to vitalize those communities remains pregnant with possibilities. His innovation of starting art centers jump-started community renewal by giving artists work through the WPA and bringing art instruction to beleaguered children and adults. In the twenty-first century, his theory that aesthetics could catalyze a social, economic, and even political renaissance of Black communities is not so much wrong as untested. Art could interrupt the logic of internalized self-destruction if that is desired. The question Locke never faced is, is it desired? If the answer is yes, his formula has a chance of success. Locke was naive in many ways about the workings of racism, how it structured not only African American life but also his life, his opportunities, and his failures. But what he refused to do as so many others had done when facing the “racial mountain,” as Hughes memorably put it, was be defeated by it.
Locke learned an inconvenient truth—that the New Negro could not achieve his or her goals without White resources. He underwent a painful journey to learn how to gain White patronage without succumbing to its psychopathologies. With his relationship with Mrs. Mason, he gave up the independence the New Negro was supposed to have in order to acquire some of the power that she had—with disastrous consequences. But Locke became one of the most innovative nonprofit entrepreneurs of culture in the twentieth century by transitioning to institutional from individual patronage and advocating for Black intellectual agency without abandoning the need to dialogue with White administrators and their institutional agendas.
Locke’s psychosocial skill as a harmonizer of divergent interests, perhaps gained as a young child from a household of strong-minded, disagreeing parents, became a way to create collaboration across difference that moved the ball forward in adult education and progressive community education. That skill allowed Locke to go outside of academia and find support for elite, trained, Black radical scholarship to reach a wider public, a still unrealized aspect of Black Studies today. Dying a few days after the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision desegregating American education, Locke perhaps passed away believing that segregation would end and his racial adult-education efforts would no longer be necessary. But sixty years later, a transracial educational system still is needed to deliver accessible scholarly knowledge to segregated adults.
Hidden to those who filed in to pay their last respects to Locke was that lying there was a radical philosopher, who tied his aesthetic theorizing to a radical critique of race and class in modern society. His original theory of how race is shaped by economic and demographic flows of modern society remains an underdeveloped theory of the sociology of modern life in the West. That theory allowed him to accommodate and improve the theorizing of Black Marxists in the 1930s like Ralph Bunche and Richard Wright, and to join with others, like Arthur Fauset, John P. Davis, Doxey Wilkerson, and Thyra Edwards more radical than he, to knit Black aesthetics to calls for revolution.
Locke evolved from seeing art as an alternative to politics to seeing art as a space of political imagination and a path to revolutionary freedom. His participation in numerous anti-fascist and pro-communist spaces in the 1930s and 1940s, and even in the last years of his life, drew the FBI’s attention and harassment. This was particularly frightful given that Locke was a closeted homosexual and vulnerable to threats to his career and livelihood from the FBI. But he did not run and hide. Instead, he fenced with the FBI to the very end of his life and refused to stop associating with known radicals and their organizations. In the end, the most profound product of the Harlem Renaissance was not the books, poems, or short stories, but people like Locke, the New Negroes themselves.
Locke and an unidentified group of friends at a nightclub, New York, ca. 1953. Courtesy of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Howard University.