The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke
by Jeffrey C. Stewart
Summary
Jeffrey Stewart follows Alain Locke from a Philadelphia childhood into a string of firsts that still define him, the first African American named a Rhodes Scholar in 1907, three years at Oxford's Hertford College, then further study in Berlin, an education built to prove that a Black intellectual could hold his own inside the whitest institutions Europe and America had to offer. The book follows Locke into a philosophy career at Howard University beginning in 1912, a post he held, with one forced interruption after he pushed for equal faculty pay in 1925, until his retirement in 1953.
Stewart centers the book on 1925, when Locke turned a special Harlem issue of Survey Graphic magazine into The New Negro, the landmark anthology that gathered Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Countee Cullen and other Harlem Renaissance writers under one cover and gave the movement its own defining name and intellectual framework. The book follows Locke's quieter private life as well, a gay Black man who lived largely discreetly given the laws and prejudices of his era, and his conversion to the Baha'i faith around 1918, a commitment Stewart traces through the rest of his life.
Stewart writes to restore Locke to the center of a movement popular memory has often credited mainly to its writers and performers rather than to the philosopher who organized and named it, and reading the book means following an intellectual biography as much as a personal one, dense with the era's ideas about race, culture and art. It suits a reader who wants the Harlem Renaissance understood through the mind that gave it a coherent argument rather than through its most famous poems and novels alone.
Historical Context & Significance
The New Negro won both the 2018 National Book Award for Nonfiction and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography for Jeffrey Stewart, a Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, an unusual double recognition for a single biography.
Locke died in 1954 at sixty eight, largely out of wide public memory for decades afterward. His ashes made a sixty year journey before finally being interred at Congressional Cemetery in Washington in 2014, a headstone naming him herald of the Harlem Renaissance, and Stewart's biography arrived as part of that same recovery, restoring the philosopher behind a movement whose writers and artists had, in the decades since, become far better remembered than the man who first gave it a name. That year's finalists were Max Boot's The Road Not Taken, on Edward Lansdale, and Caroline Weber's Proust's Duchess.