Alain Leroy Locke was an American writer, philosopher, and educator.
Background
Alain Leroy Locke was born on September 13, 1886 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. His parents were free northern blacks. His father, Pliny Ishmael Locke, a minor clerk in the Philadelphia courts and later a teacher of mathematics, was a member of the first graduating class of Howard University Law School and the first black to take and pass a federal Civil Service test. His mother, Mary Hawkins Locke, was a teacher in the segregated schools of Camden, New Jersey. As a child, Locke was delicate, having suffered an attack of rheumatic fever that left him vulnerable to heart ailments. His father died when he was twelve, and he was thereafter brought up by his mother, to whom he remained devoted.
Education
Locke received his first education in the schools of Camden. To provide him with a more rigorous academic training, Locke's mother enrolled him in Felix Adler's new Ethical Culture School in New York. Locke then attended Philadelphia's Central High School, from which he graduated in 1902. Although Locke wished to attend Harvard, he first spent two years at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, from which he graduated at the head of his class. Despite financial difficulty, means were eventually found for him to enter Harvard, with advanced standing, as a member of the class of 1907. He studied philosophy and English, won an unprecedented number of awards and prizes, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa in his second year. He received the Bachelor of Letters from Oxford in 1910, then did graduate work at the universities of Berlin and Vienna.
Career
In 1912 Locke returned to the United States to become assistant professor of philosophy and education at Howard University in Washington, D. C. He became full professor of philosophy in 1917; the following year he received the Ph. D. from Harvard with a dissertation on "The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value. " In 1918 he also became head of the Howard philosophy department. As such, he added courses in logic and sought to establish a social and anthropological approach to his subject. He remained at Howard until 1953. In 1928 he was also adviser to the new Harlem Experimental Theater and, with Montgomery Gregory, edited Plays of Negro Life (1927), as well as founding the Howard Players. In 1945-1946 he was Inter-American Exchange Professor to Haiti.
Locke had begun writing about racial and cultural matters while still a graduate student. In 1925 he edited The New Negro: An Interpretation, which dealt with the literary and social thought that came to be known as the Harlem Renaissance or, eponymously, as the New Negro movement. He also contributed four essays to the collection, which attracted much favorable attention. Two years later he published Four Negro Poets, his edition of the works of Claude McKay, Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen, and Langston Hughes. Such work led to his appointment as editor of the Bronze Booklet series of black writers, including Ralph Bunche, Sterling Brown, Ira Reid, Eric Williams, and Charles S. Johnson. In 1942, with Bernard J. Stern, he edited When Peoples Meet, an encyclopedic compilation of anthropological, sociological, and economic essays.
Locke was also concerned with music and art. He treated African music, as well as the music of American blacks and world folk music, in The Negro and His Music (1936). His Negro Art: Past and Present (1936) dealt with the pictorial representation of the black, and in The Negro in Art (1940) he analyzed black contributions. (He himself had an extensive collection of African art. )
His most important contribution as a philosopher was probably his essay "Values and Imperatives, " in American Philosophy Today and Tomorrow (1933); but in a curriculum vitae published with the piece, Locke described himself as "more of a philosophical mid-wife to a generation of younger Negro poets, writers, artists than a professional philosopher. "
Locke was interested in Pan-Africanism, and attended and reported on all the Pan-African Congresses from 1919 to 1945. In the latter year he was also elected the first black president of the American Association for Adult Education. In 1950 he was invited to participate as guest professor of philosophy at the Harvard Academic Festival in Salzburg, Austria. He died in New York City, where he had moved after his retirement.
Religion
Locke was a member of the Bahá'í Faith and declared his belief in Bahá'u'lláh in 1918.
Views
As a philosopher, Locke espoused pluralism, and advocated projecting value judgments into the milieu of contemporary problems. He rejected all absolutes, and considered a world without values a meaningless void.