Locke’s first study of the question of race represents one of his most thorough endeavors. The syllabus he printed as a summary and reading guide for his series of lectures—he used the same title, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations, for both the series and the summary—testifies to this with its breadth and depth. As a young professor then recently hired by Howard University, he called upon all his research skills to read through virtually all the important works on the theory of race. Because he was an eclectic thinker, he incorporated and developed ideas from several philosophers and anthropologists; however, his ability to think dialectically allowed him to come away with fresh ideas and formulations of his own. Race was for Locke a cultural term, and in rejecting the biological basis of the main versions of the value system that underlay racial supremacy, he made links between and among race, culture, and value. This triad of concepts formed the bedrock of his interests and his thought for the rest of his life.
He went on to use his hard earned knowledge in subsequent essays, such as “The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture” and “The Problem of Race Classification,” both engaged with then current aspects of the larger problems of racial definition, identity, and values. In “Should the Negro be Encouraged to Cultural Equality: The High Cost of Prejudice” he directly confronted the claims of Lothrop Stoddard, a well-known exponent of white supremacy. In “Slavery in the Modern Manner” he explored a case history of how a set of political forces and arrangements could embody a racist ideology even as that ideology served to conceal the actual causes of dominance and inequality.
In subsequent essays Locke sought out the ramifications of how race was intertwined with other issues. In “Harlem: Dark Weather Vane,” he plunged into the immediate social reality of African Americans, writing in part as a quantitative sociologist. His sociological aims had been focused by the Harlem Riot of 1935, and he used the pages of a popular liberal journal, the Survey Graphic, to spread his views and assessments as far and wide as possible. In his “Foreword” to an anniversary edition of Frederick Douglass’s Life and Times he dealt with the questions of what makes a person into a “race leader,” and what such a transformation held in store for the possible betterment of a racially conscious group.
Locke also treated race in its contemporary forms—“Whither Race Relations? A Critical Commentary”—and in a larger historical and geopolitical framework—“The Negro in the Three Americas.” At every turn Locke would implicitly draw on the main claim he advanced in his 1915 lecture series, namely, that race had no value as a scientific or biological term, but became useful only when approached as a cultural category. Though always dispassionate in tone, Locke’s writings on race contain a sharp and unvarying critique of all aspects of theories of racial supremacy.
The contribution of Locke to When Peoples Meet represents the high-water mark of his polymathic learning, and also demonstrates the fully dialectical aspects of his thought. Co-edited with Bernhard Stern, a sociology professor at Columbia University, the book was intended as a text to be adopted in college courses. Locke’s fifteen interchapters, however, were written at the very highest level of critique, and can be read as a stand alone exploration of his governing category: racial contact. Showing respect for all the contributors, Locke devised a complex argument that gathered their expertise in an effort to reframe and utilize their insights while adding his own.
The assembling of essays by eighty-five various experts produces a constellation of interests and arguments: global politics, world history, regional conflicts, racial difference and definitions, ideological commentary and confrontation, and the dream of a peaceful world order. Threading his way through many complex issues, Locke keeps his eye on the book’s major claim, namely that contact between groups—and the resulting cultural reciprocity—always provides an enrichment in culture and human experience. Locke was a meliorist, but an unblinkered one, and it was through the breadth of his vision that he most proved that hope has a necessary place in the world order.