Alain Leroy Locke
Alain Leroy Locke was a prominent African American philosopher, writer, and educator known as the "Father of the Harlem Renaissance." He played a crucial role in promoting and celebrating African American culture and art, advocating for racial equality and the recognition of African American contributions to society. Locke's influential work helped shape the cultural and intellectual landscape of the 20th century.
3 Key excerpts on "Alain Leroy Locke"
eBook - ePub- Chris Murray, Chris Murray(Authors)
- 2005(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...Alain Leroy Locke (1886–1954) African-American Cultural Historian Tommy L. Lott Alain Locke described himself as ‘midwife’ for a new generation of African-American artists and writers. A scholar devoted to the development of a group-conscious school of African-American art and literature, he believed African-Americans had already contributed many native elements to the national culture in the areas of music, dance and folklore, but did not think full recognition would be granted until they also contributed to art forms such as the novel and drama in the literary field, or painting and sculpture in the fine arts. He organized support for African-American writers and became directly involved in the promotion of African-American art by arranging exhibitions, including some that were of African art. Locke died before completing his magnum opus, The Negro in American Culture, which would have provided a single authoritative source for his aesthetic theory. In two scholarly treatments, Negro Art: Past and Present (1936) and The Negro and His Music (1936), he presented his view of African-American cultural progress, tracing the development of various forms of folk expression from their early manifestation in antebellum plantation life to their twentieth-century transformation. His analysis displays several basic rudiments of his aesthetic theory. Various stages of cultural development are represented by means of an historical schema that indicates progress in each phase by reference to folk forms having entered a process of transformation into high art. The uneven development of music and art is explained in terms of African retentions. Noting that advancement had occurred in those areas of cultural expression where there had been an early start in well-developed folk art forms, he concludes that faster progress has been made where African retentions were strongest...
eBook - ePubAn American Friendship
Horace Kallen, Alain Locke, and the Development of Cultural Pluralism
- David Weinfeld(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cornell University Press(Publisher)
...He actively participated in this project in his efforts to memorialize Locke. In December 1955 Kallen wrote to Arthur Huff Fauset, Locke’s friend and chair of the Alain Locke Memorial Committee. He praised the committee’s choice of celebrated Black writer William Stanley Braithwaite to author Locke’s biography. Kallen lauded Locke’s accomplishments: “What Booker Washington had been to the Negro and the American idea in the field of material skills and material achievement, Alain Locke was in the field of the spirit.” Locke “spoke to generations of young Negroes embittered by the exclusion from equal opportunity in the arts and sciences because of their color, and coming to resent not only the un-American prejudice which maintained the exclusion, but also the color which called forth the prejudice.” 17 Kallen saw Black artists and intellectuals “filled with self-hatred even more than with hatred of the prejudice.” Locke’s message was “to replace self-hatred with self-respect, to accept the Negro genius as Negro and to devote their talents and powers to recovering its historic and cultural past and to renew and develop it as Negro Americans into a figure of integral strength and beauty.” Locke’s vision of the New Negro “gave a new turn, a spiritually healthier and more hopeful turn, to the aspirations and labors of the younger generations of new talent.” He contributed “a chapter of spiritual importance in the history of American culture.” 18 The next year, Kallen published a volume based on lectures he delivered at the University of Pennsylvania in 1954. Cultural Pluralism and the American Idea: An Essay in Social Philosophy consisted of a lengthy essay where Kallen updated cultural pluralism, followed by responses to Kallen’s essay and finally Kallen’s “reprise” to his critics. Kallen referred several times to Locke...
eBook - ePub- Cary D. Wintz, Cary D. Wintz(Authors)
- 2013(Publication Date)
- Routledge(Publisher)
...All the Negro intellectuals were stirred only by the political and economic significance of Africa and deplored often in undisciplined invectives her exploitation by the European overlords. But Locke discovered a cultural heritage that may have given the American Negro his basic attributes for artistic expression. The heritage as a factual record of continuity was severed by slavery. Wrote Locke: We will never know and cannot estimate how much technical African skill was blotted out in America. The hardships of cotton and rice-field labor, the crudities of the hoe, the axe and the plow reduced the typical Negro hand to a gnarled stump, incapable of fine craftsmanship even if the materials, patterns, and artistic incentives had been available. But we may believe there was memory of beauty; since by way of compensation, some obviously artistic urges flowed even with the peasant Negro toward the only channels of expression left open — those of song, graceful movement and poetic speech. The memory of beauty! What an exalted declaration of a heritage that was to sprout impoverished as a plant for nigh three centuries, until under some miraculous bestowal of fertilization it was to blossom and flower — and that flowering due largely to the beneficial spirit of Alain Locke. That is too much to claim for this man, you will think, whose memory we are this day honoring. But show me another who had the intensified and cultural dedication to exercise the shaping influence that was his. In saying this, I do not intend to minimize the knowledge and the desire of many who sought to encourage and inspire their compatriots, but their efforts ran in less exalted channels, channels that ran through the temporary realities of material things and affairs. Locke’s was that enduring field of the imaginative representation of human emotions and actions, symbolized and pictured in narrative and rhythm, which constitute a flowering of the human soul that approaches nearest to the divine...
