Born into Philadelphia’s black elite, Alain Leroy Locke was the only child of Pliny and Mary Hawkins Locke, a successful attorney and well-liked public school teacher, respectively. In 1902, he graduated from Central High School in Philadelphia, second in his class. He also attended Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, a program for Central graduates who wanted to become elementary school teachers.
In 1907, Locke graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University with degrees in English and philosophy. The same year, he became the first black Rhodes Scholar. He formed part of the Phi Beta Kappa society and used his Rhodes Scholarship to further study philosophy at Oxford University and the University of Berlin. When Locke returned to the U.S. in 1911, he joined the faculty of Howard University as a professor of philosophy and English.
Locke returned to Harvard in 1916 to work on his doctoral dissertation, The Problem of Classification in the Theory of Value. In it, he discusses the causes of opinions and social biases, and that these are not objectively true or false, and therefore not universal. In 1918, Locke received his Ph.D., and he returned to Howard as the chair of the department of philosophy, a position he held until his retirement in 1953. He became a distinguished member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.
Locke promoted black writers, artists and musicians, and he encouraged them to look to Africa as inspiration for their work. In 1923, Locke began contributing essays on a range of subjects to the journal of the National Urban League. He edited the March 1925 issue of Survey Graphic with a special on Harlem and the Harlem Renaissance, which helped educate readers about the flourishing culture there. Later that year, he expanded the issue into The New Negro, a collection of writings about blacks living in the United States.
His most well-known work, Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race, focused on how blacks and whites could come together and live in a multiethnic society. In this work, Locke declared, “The race issue has not only been solved but…has performed a social function in society because it has blended two heterogeneous elements into a homogeneity of which either one in itself would have been incapable without the collaboration and help of the other.”
Locked established the Associates in Negro Folk Education, which published scholarly books on black subjects geared toward adults. It wasn’t until 1935, when he was 50, that Locke published his first article on philosophy. In 1942, he co-edited an anthology on global race relations, When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and Culture Contacts, which is considered the best legacy of his later work.
Locke decided he wanted to teach adults how to live in a democratic and multiethnic society. In 1945, he became the first black president of the American Association for Adult Education (AAAE), a program that provides leadership for adult growth and development. He moved permanently to New York City where he taught at the City College for New York.
He was preparing to retire while working on The Negro in American Culture. Unfortunately, Locke would never get the chance to complete the work; he died in 1954 from complications of heart disease due rheumatic fever he had suffered as a child. His legacy lives on, though, as he is considered one of the most important black intellectual leaders of the twentieth century.
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