Alain Leroy Locke

Born Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

An influential writer and philosopher, Alain Locke compiled his anthology of African American art, poetry, literature, and history in The New Negro (1925), which became a founding document of the Harlem Renaissance. Locke had received both his undergraduate and Ph.D. degrees from Harvard University; he was the first African American Rhodes Scholar and joined the Howard University faculty in 1912. His studies in Europe focused on cultural pluralism, leading to a series of seminal lectures in 1915 challenging the dominant Darwinian concept of race as fixed and biologically determined. Locke argued instead that race was malleable and determined by one's social and cultural environment-a position widely accepted by the mid-twentieth century. As an intellectual with a strong sense of independence, Locke was criticized by many African Americans as being elitist and was reproached for his opposition to Marcus Garvey's nationalist movement.