“What Difference Does the Difference Make?” So Alain Locke asked his teaching assistant, Horace Kallen, in a Harvard philosophy section in 1906. Though Locke sometimes tried to escape his racial background in college, Kallen believed that Locke could not hide his heritage, and instead should resolve to embrace it.
Locke would go on to become the first African American Rhodes Scholar, a professor at Howard, and intellectual godfather of the Harlem Renaissance. In this paper, I argue that Locke’s undergraduate interactions with fellow African Americans and with Jews like Kallen helped shape his understanding of race and culture, which he displayed in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.
Though he had friends from high school in his freshman class, Locke met many new people while at Harvard from 1904-1907. He remained mostly uncomfortable with the small Black student population, which he perceived as clannish and uncouth. He even referred to them as “niggers” in letters to his mother. At the same time, though he mostly enjoyed his interactions with faculty, he disliked when professors like Josiah Royce, whom he otherwise appreciated, insisted on discussing the “race question” with him.
Locke also had extensive contact with Jewish students. Locke knew Jews while growing up in Philadelphia, and held some prejudices towards the Jewish faith. But at Harvard, he met new kinds of Jews: universalists who followed Felix Adler’s Ethical Culture, such as the young philosophy student Morris Cohen, along with modern cultural nationalists like Henry Hurwitz and Kallen, who formed the Harvard Menorah Association (the predecessor of Hillel) in 1906.
Through examining Locke’s private documents and published work, I show that these encounters with African Americans and Jews at Harvard provided Locke with a new vision for Black culture in the United States.
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