A Philadelphia Negro
Review by Chitown Kev
The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 932 pp., $39.95
In 2014, the Washington Post reported that the ashes of the eminent Howard University philosophy professor, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, and the primary architect of The Harlem Renaissance, Dr. Alain Locke, had been contained in a paper bag located in Howard’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. The ashes were stored with the papers that Dr. Locke bequeathed to Howard upon the occasion of his death in 1954. Primarily with the assistance of other African American Rhodes Scholars, Dr Locke’s ashes were interred in the Congressional Cemetery on Capitol Hill in Washington D.C.
Prior to the internment of Dr. Locke’s cremated remains, his total body of work, a syncretism of philosophical pragmatism and value theory, social science, literary and cultural criticism and race studies, was increasingly becoming a part of undergraduate and graduate school curricula nationwide. Locke’s contributions to and editing of The New Negro (which featured early works by Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Jean Toomer, and others) is, of course, well-known and has been a staple of black literary studies and even, recently, studies of modernism in literature, art, and culture. In the past twenty-five years, collections of Dr. Locke’s essays have been published as well as critical studies spanning the entirety of Locke’s storied career. A biography of Dr. Locke titled Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher, written by Purdue University philosophy professor Leonard Harris and Charles Molesworth, appeared in 2008. Now Jeffrey C. Stewart, professor of Black Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara, has written, perhaps, the most definitive biography Dr. Locke yet; The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke.
Alain LeRoy Locke was born September 13, 1885 in Philadelphia; the ‘’sickly, tiny baby’’ of Pliny and Mary Hawkins Locke, both descendents of free blacks. Prior to marrying Mary Shorter Hawkins, Alain’s father, Pliny, graduated at the top of his law school class at Howard, had worked for the Freedman’s Bureau in Tennessee, and prior to achieving one of the highest scores on a civil service exam and was selected to be a clerk at the Post Office over several white applicants. Mary was the daughter of one of the black upper class families of ‘’Black Victorian Philadelphia.’’ Stewart paints a vivid picture of the black upper class families that adhered strictly to the morals of the era; an ’’Anglo-American love of class, home, and strict public behavior’’ that, for blacks, carried the hope of fending off attacks from racist whites, especially in the era of increased racist hostilities against black people of the 1870’s and 1880’s.
Shortly after Alain was born, Pliny Locke lost his appointment at the Post Office and began working as a janitor. Mary Locke reentered the workforce as a teacher, had a second child, Arthur, who died as a baby, and Pliny and Mary Locke vied with each other over the affections of their son. Pliny Locke attempted to interest Alain in various ‘’masculine’’ activities; activities that the young Alain strongly resisted, preferring to assist his mother in ‘’‘feminine’ activities such as sewing, making hats’’ as Mary, who earned more money than Pliny, possessed both the ‘’economic and psychological leverage to leave the relationship, gradually became the outsized influence over young Alain’s life. After Pliny Locke’s death in August 1892, young Alain felt freer to ‘’immerse himself without restriction in the decorative arts, religious mysticism, and and sentimental literature’’ and, as a teenager, began to feel his sexual interests in other men without guilt. Locke excelled in his studies at the racially integrated Central High School in Philadelphia and at a sort of finishing school, The School of Pedagogy, which resulted in his acceptance to Harvard.
The intellectual foundations of Dr. Locke’s lifework were laid during his time at Harvard University in the latter days of Harvard’s ‘’Golden Age’’ under the leadership of Harvard’s president Charles William Eliot. Locke thrived in the intellectual atmosphere, studying philosophy under luminaries like George Santayana and Josiah Royce (William James did teach sparringly at Harvard during Locke’s undergraduate tenure there but Locke did not enroll in a course taught by James, although he was influenced by James) and winning prestigious prizes for his papers in philosophy and English. Notably, Locke, generally, avoided connections with his black peers attending Harvard at that time and, generally, avoided the black community in the Cambridge-Boston area. Locke still adhered to the upper class ‘’Black Victorian’’ code he was taught in Philadelphia which ‘’divided the Black community between ‘coons,’ the uneducated ‘herd,’ and gentleman and ladies, the ‘represenative’ members of the race.’’ Locke’s only black friend at Harvard shared Locke’s disdain for the other black students, although it has to be noted that Locke’s need to hide his sexuality apparently played a huge role in Locke’s need to keep the black community at Harvard and in the Cambridge-Boston area at a distance. Locke would not begin to see himself as anything like a ‘’race man’’ until he was selected as the state of Pennsylvania’s choice to become a Rhodes Scholar and to study at Oxford University.
Resistance to Locke’s winning of the Rhodes Scholarship erupted as soon it was announced; that resistance came primarily from...
While Mr. Stewart’s overly psychological (and even oedipal) approach to Locke’s professional and personal relationships seems overbearing at times, such accounts do have the virtue of telling, as best as it can, Locke’s side of the story. Typically in accounts of the Harlem Renaissance, Locke is depicted as little more than a smart, intuitive and manipulative little queen out to undercut people like Hughes and Hurston and even his frequent rivals, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois; simply put, there’s more than a whiff of homophobia in some of the commentary about Dr. Locke. As in the example of 1925 Opportunity magazine dinner which earned Locke the permanent enmity of Crisis literary editor Jessie Redmond Fauset, Stewart acknowledges that there is no ’’excuse for what Locke did to her at that dinner’’ in making the dinner more about new an upcoming black writers than the celebration of the publication of Fauset’s novel that it was originally designed to be. Yet Stewart also points out Locke, himself, was manipulated by Opportunity editor Charles Spurgeon Johnson and that the enmity between Ms. Fauset and Dr. Locke could be traced as far back as Harvard and could have had roots in their mutual affection for Langston Hughes or even back to both of their black Victorian roots in Philadelphia. In the final analysis, Fauset got the better publicity out of the event, at least according to the newspapers of the time.
The psychological approach is particularly effective in describing Locke’s relationship with Fauset’s probable lover, W.E.B. DuBois. Locke and DuBois vehemently disagreed over the role and function of black artistic production; DuBois believed that black art was best utilized as race ‘’propaganda’’ while Locke believed that the sheer beauty of black art would humanize black people to both whites and blacks. Yet not only did Dr. DuBois encourage Howard to rehire Locke as a professor; but Locke and DuBois also seemed to share the idea that many other blacks did not share their own high standards in matters as simple as restaurant cleanliness. The, at times, bitter professional rivalry between Locke and DuBois over ideas is standard fare in accounts of the period but it simply makes sense that Dr. DuBois would also see himself as a ‘’father-mentor’’ type to Locke, a type that may have been as harsh as Locke’s own father.
Stewart’s accounts of Locke’s real, probable, and possible love affairs with other men are rather a mixed bag. Stewart provides the documentary evidence that not only was Locke a gay man; Locke was an effeminate and unapologetically gay man that could not have possibly lived outside of the closet; which is to say that he could not have been public about being homosexual. It is a little tiring to continually read sentences that begin with ‘’It’s not known if _________ was gay and/or had sex with Locke but...’’ construction; if you have the evidence, lay it out (as Stewart does in the case of Langston Hughes, for example). Stewart’s narrative of Locke’s sex life, at times, runs the unnecessary risk of boxing Locke in as a stereotypical hypersexualized gay man (as opposed to a Walter Pater type that idealized homoerotic relationships much more than he acted on his impulses) who lusted after pretty much anything that moved. It would be a fair depiction of Locke if the evidence showed that but in some of these cases, it does not.
The intellectual parts of the biography, accounts of Dr. Locke’s thinking and the ways in which that thinking changed over time, are pretty heavy going but can be digested with some patience. Other than Dr. Locke’s pilgrammage to Haifa, there is little in The New Negro about Locke’s commitment to the Bahai faith, although a lot of material on that topic is readily available. To the extent that I have read the 2008 biography of Locke by Harris and Molesworth, the older volume is a little heavier on the philsophical side than Stewart’s; Stewart’s leans more toward the construction of Locke as an aesthete; both interpretations are a fair reading of a man as complicated Dr. Locke.
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News round up by dopper0189, Black Kos Managing Editor
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In a notorious 1963 essay titled “My Negro Problem–And Ours” Norman Podhoretz, the editor of Commentary, wrote of to “the insane rage” he felt “at the thought of Negro anti-Semitism.” Podhoretz didn’t elucidate why “Negro anti-Semitism,” which manifested itself most visibly in the ravings of the Nation of Islam, should be any worse than white anti-Semitism—which, after all, was responsible for centuries of persecutions, pogroms, and, ultimately, the Holocaust. But in the pages of Commentary magazine, which Podhoretz edited from 1960 to 1995, other writers frequently took up the theme, airing their anxiety that the rise of African-American political activism would undermine the interests of Jewish Americans.
Commentary magazine is now edited by John Podhoretz, Norman’s son. And its June issue, which came online last month and began receiving critical attention this week, is about racial tension. “African Americans Vs. American Jews” announces the cover.
In “My ‘Black Lives Matter’ Problem,” (an implicit allusion to the title of the elder Podhoretz’s essay) Jason D. Hill argues that “the kind of dependency that Black Lives Matter promotes lays the groundwork for personal failure”—a strange claim, since political activism would seem to work against dependency. In another entitled “The Rise of Black Anti-Semitism,” James Kirchik, (formerly a staffer at The New Republic) condemns an “increasingly fatalistic progressivism” which is “willing to make common cause with all manner of illiberal and regressive political forces provided they hew to the party line.” For examples, he cites reluctance of a few figures to condemn Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan.
A third deals with the 1968 New York school strike, where black activists calling for greater community control in hiring clashed with Jewish union leaders who wanted to protect the existing system of seniority.
It’s worth revisiting the history of Commentary magazine to see how tired and troubling the current arguments are. In Norman Podhoretz’s original 1963 piece, he bravely acknowledged the formative force of white supremacy in his own thinking, creating a bedrock racism that was impossible to overcome. “The hatred I still feel for Negroes is the hardest of all the old feelings to face or admit, and it is the most hidden and the most overlarded by the conscious attitudes into which I have succeeded in willing myself,” Podhoretz wrote. Podhoretz’s failure came after that essay, when he failed to realize that the internal racism he rightly admitted to still guided his editorial choices and how he framed political issues. To be sure, Podhoretz wasn’t alone in that failure. Many magazines, not least of all The New Republic, succumbed to a similar politics of racist resentment in the face of black militancy and African-American cultural resurgence.
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Entrepreneur Aaron Dolores won’t celebrate FIFA World Cup 2018by traveling to its host nation of Russia. Instead, he will lead a group of 32 fellow soccer fans to Colombia, where they will immerse themselves in the South American country’s African diasporic communities and fervent soccer fan culture. The trip is Dolores’ latest project under the banner of Black Arrow FC, the lifestyle brand he created to celebrate and strengthen the junction of soccer and Black culture.
“The idea is taking African Americans to Colombia, where they are seeing Afro-Colombians—a lot of people don’t know there’s Black people there,” Dolores told The Undefeated yesterday (June 14).
“Part of what I’m trying to bring to Black people and what we’re doing in Colombia is being, like, ‘Forget what you think about the sport, forget your perception of it. Let’s just use this as a way to have fun to see what we can learn, to see what different experiences we can create.’ And that’s what’s most important.”
Dolores explained to The Undefeated that Black Arrow FC began with a realization of soccer’s cross-cultural appeal during a trip to Europe in 2014 during the World Cup. He named the brand after the moniker that Gil Heron, late Jamaican soccer player and father of artist and activist Gil Scott-Heron, received from Celtic FC fans as the Scottish team’s first Black player.
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The room — brick-floored, plaster-walled, empty — is simple.
The life it represents was anything but.
The newly opened space at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s palatial mountaintop plantation, is presented as the living quarters of Sally Hemings, an enslaved woman who bore the founding father’s children. But it is more than an exhibit.
It’s the culmination of a 25-year effort to grapple with the reality of slavery in the home of one of liberty’s most eloquent champions. The Sally Hemings room opens to the public on Saturday, alongside a room dedicated to the oral histories of the descendants of slaves at Monticello, and the earliest kitchen at the house, where Hemings’s brother cooked.
The public opening deals a final blow to two centuries of ignoring, playing down or covering up what amounted to an open secret during Jefferson’s life: his relationship with a slave that spanned nearly four decades, from his time abroad in Paris to his death.
To make the exhibit possible, curators had to wrestle with a host of thorny questions. How to accurately portray a woman for whom no photograph exists? (The solution: casting a shadow on a wall.) How to handle the skepticism of those who remain unpersuaded by the mounting evidence that Jefferson was indeed the father of Hemings’s children? (The solution: tell the story entirely in quotes from her son Madison.)
And, thorniest of all, in an era of Black Lives Matter and #MeToo: How to describe the decades-long sexual relationship between Jefferson and Hemings? Should it be described as rape?
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Mismanagement, graft and declining fortunes are decimating local finances, while many people who can leave for opportunities in big cities. Bloomberg: South African Towns Are Falling Apart
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Trash heaps line the potholed streets of Edenville in central South Africa, where residents complain that municipal services have ground to a near halt, crime is rampant and jobs are scarce.
It’s a familiar story in scores of other rural towns driven to a state of near collapse by years of mismanagement, graft and declining revenue as companies gravitate toward cities with better services and transportation links. The meltdown has put the nation’s finances at risk, as the National Treasury faces increasing demands to bail out broke councils.
It can take weeks for the Edenville municipality to unblock sewage pipes or collect the garbage, and the local economy has ground to a near halt, according to Miriam Matsuso, who lives in the town of about 6,200 people in the Free State province, about 180 kilometers (113 miles) south of Johannesburg.
“Sometimes it does feel as though we as the people living in small towns are forgotten by the government,” Matsuso, 70, who supports her unemployed daughter and two grandchildren on her monthly state pension of 1,695 rand ($128), said outside a grocery store. “Our children have to move to bigger towns just to try and look for jobs.”
More than 60 percent of the 257 municipalities are categorized as dysfunctional or almost dysfunctional, according to the Co-operative Governance Ministry. The parlous state of their finances was laid bare last month in an Auditor-General’s report, which showed just 33 got clean audits in the year through March last year and spending that contravened regulations surged 75 percent to a record 28.4 billion rand ($2.2 billion).
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There are just 178 registered architects in this rapidly urbanising country, where buildings frequently collapse. But more professionals may not be the solution. The Guardian: Is Uganda's 'critical shortage' of architects costing lives?
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Sitting outside the office of her architecture firm in the industrial area of Kampala, Uganda, Doreen Adengo remembers the last major building collapse in the city.
A four-storey building opposite Makerere University collapsed in 2016, injuring dozens and killing four people.
“Pictures of it showed that the structure columns were bigger at the top and smaller at the bottom,” says Adengo. “They found that once the architect submitted drawings for approval, they were kicked off the project.”
Architecture is all the more important in fast-changing environments like Uganda. The country is currently urbanising at a rate of more than 5.3% per year, according to a recent survey by the Commonwealth Association of Architects (CAA). Architects play a critical role in the design of cities, especially nascent ones. “Lack of proper planning often results in problems such as urban sprawl, car dependency and growing inequality,” says Peter Oborn, vice president of the CAA. “When properly trained, [architects and planners] understand the importance of creating mixed-use walkable neighbourhoods together with the value of public open space, culture and heritage.”
In which case, the situation in Uganda is acute: there are just 178 registered architects in the country of over 43 million people, which is 18,700 short of the CAA’s optimal number. The association warned this “critical shortage” could leave Ugandan cities vulnerable as they grow rapidly.
Some would say they already are. Three years before the Makere University disaster, seven people were injured in a similar incident in downtown Kampala; in July 2012 a building under construction along the city’s busy Lugogo Bypass collapsed, killing two workers. The year before that, seven people were critically injured after a building that was under construction collapsed in the city suburb of Ntinda, and in May this year another four-storey building collapsed, injuring two. The most severe incident came in 2008, when 10 people died after a school building – again, still under construction – gave way.
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Across the country, black and Latino adults are far less likely to hold a college degree than white adults. Can better support for colleges that serve a high percentage of minorities change that? The Atlantic: The College-Graduation Problem All States Have
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Near the beginning of his presidency, Barack Obama gave a speech to Congress that laid out a goal for the future: “By 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” At the time, America was 12th, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.
Almost a decade later, and with 2020 not far off, where do things stand? The percentage of Americans between the ages of 25 and 34 who had earned an associate’s degree rose by 7.4 percent between 2007 and 2017—a difference of more than 5 million people, according to the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Still, that puts America at 10th in the world, according to the latest available data.
But even though progress has been made, the data remain quite uneven. A pair of reports released on Wednesday by The Education Trust, an advocacy group for low-income and minority students, break down the attainment data more finely. They found that the share of black adults who hold a bachelor’s or associate’s degree—31 percent—is roughly two-thirds that of white ones—47 percent. And Latinos, at about 23 percent, are just half as likely. Further, the report shows, there is not a single state in the country where black and Latino adults are as likely to have earned a college credential as their white counterparts.
At the root of these differences in attainment rates are social and economic disparities that continue to benefit certain races over others. Still, graduation rates have improved over the past decade, particularly among Latinos, as a report from the left-leaning Center for American Progress shows—and there is a significant difference between the rates of native-born Latino adults and those who were born outside of the United States. (The latter are less likely to have earned a degree.) It’s these race-by-race attainment rates that the report advises policymakers to pay attention to—overall graduation rates can obscure how the educational system underserves certain groups.
Andrew Nichols of the Education Trust, one of the authors of the report, e
xplained to me what these changes in graduation rates mean on the levels of individual lives and of society. “We know the value of a college degree, in terms of what it does for wages, what it does for being less likely to be unemployed. We know what it does for the society—having more people who are able to generate higher tax revenues.”
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