Locke considered himself a democratic thinker, despite his often being depicted as an elitist. He almost certainly agreed with the claim by John Dewey, in his book The Public and Its Problems, that the best cure for the ills of democracy was more democracy. Applying his democratic commitment to a variety of problems, Locke consistently addressed the main issues of his time. This entailed not only domestic but international contexts. What he saw as the shortcomings of American democracy he had dealt with in “The New Negro” and other places, but he went further than that. From the period between the world wars—when colonialism was his main focus—to the immediate period after World War II, he connected the possibility of a revitalized world order with the elimination of racism and imperialism.
His report on the Mandate System after World War I exposed the hypocrisy that bedeviled the post colonial scheme of assigning African and other colonies to European countries as “protectorates.” Back home, so to speak, in “The Negro Vote and the New Deal,” he argued for the necessity of African Americans valuing their votes in a way that was critical and thoughtful. In “Ballad for Democracy” he addressed how a cultural expression embodied the deepest and most important strains in America’s democratic creed.
In “Color: The Unfinished Business of Democracy,” he again used the pages of the Survey Graphic, as he did with “Harlem: Dark Weather Vane,” but this time he attacked the question of race on a global scale. He further enunciated his principles in “Democracy Faces a World Order,” another instance of a talk to college students bringing out his skills as a speaker. His fullest political thought resides in his three interrelated essays on what he called “intellectual democracy”—by which he meant a self-aware use of pragmatism combined with the analysis of political and social values. “Cultural Relativism and Ideological Peace,” “Pluralism and Intellectual Democracy,” and “Pluralism and Ideological Peace” carve out a formidable argumentative and political legacy for Locke, and they deserve to be read in several contexts: racial thought, democratic theory, cultural pluralism, American pragmatism, and political values. Coming in the last decade of his life, these essays are especially ripe with the wisdom brought out of deep thought and clear hope.