Locke had much to say about esthetics, and he often related esthetic problems to racial or political issues. Though his esthetic views are related to other forms of thought, they form a more or less unified viewpoint on their own. Always struggling to raise the standards and prove the universal content of racially conscious art, he grappled with just exactly how esthetics could help fashion a fuller explanation of racial experience and show a way forward beyond the debilitating limits of racism.
In an early essay on the opening of King Tutankhamen’s tomb, Locke mentions the idea of a cultural renaissance, which would come about because of a revitalized esthetic sensibility, and the model of a fuller expression of group experience by esthetically advanced individual artists became one of his chief templates. As early as the “Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” and “Negro Youth Speaks,” his essays in The New Negro addressed the historical vista of African Americans, invoking generational awareness in order to bring forth an energized literature. Locke saw to it that his writings on esthetics always supplied a general context, which in virtually every case was derived from both his highly developed sense of history and his commitment to the importance of group experience. Such contextualizing offered a way to call writers to a higher goal and larger ambitions.
Locke never abandoned these large ambitions, especially when his work began to deal more directly, and almost exclusively, with African American esthetics, its roots and possible flowering. The Harlem Renaissance—known by some as the New Negro movement, echoing the anthology Locke edited in 1925—galvanized Locke’s belief that, with not only the supportive understanding of intelligent leaders but also the larger group’s unignoreable drive, its folk spirit, and its realistic self-shaping, African American society could shape a newer and fuller cultural legacy.
Eventually, however, Locke would feel that the Renaissance lost its way, trading in what he called “exhibitionism,” and leaving behind any notion of a collective urge toward a genuinely elevated state for African American culture. Though he faced charges of being too prescriptive in his esthetics, he returned continually to the same body of thought. Three essays revisited the esthetic issues raised by the Renaissance: “Our Little Renaissance,” “Beauty Instead of Ashes,” and “Art of Propaganda.” Grouped together, this trio of statements contains an enunciation of Locke’s struggle with being moral without being overly didactic. This provides an air of melancholy, mixing a desire to return to higher standards while lamenting what had come to seem inevitable. To hear the full measure of this melancholy, tinged with a sense of outrage as well, one has to look at Locke’s review of Claude McKay’s autobiography, titled “Spiritual Truancy.”
In “The Negro’s Contribution to American Culture” Locke crafted one of those encyclopedia-style articles that gave his broad views some of their best display. It was when he was able to treat of different fields of cultural expression that he felt the need to shape a general esthetic that was both indebted to the skills of individual artists and reliant upon the broader experience of the group for both its subjects and its resonances.