Alain LeRoy Locke Is Born
What Happened
On September 13, 1886, Alain LeRoy Locke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A prodigy who graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Harvard in 1907, Locke that same year became the first African American selected as a Rhodes Scholar — though Oxford colleges initially refused him admission because of his race. After doctoral study at Harvard he built his career at Howard University, and as editor of the landmark 1925 anthology The New Negro he became the philosophical architect of the Harlem Renaissance — the movement that transformed Black art, literature, and identity in America.
Why It Matters Today
Locke gave the Harlem Renaissance its intellectual framework, arguing that cultural self-definition and artistic excellence were the engine of Black liberation. His idea that a people must first imagine itself before it can demand its place shaped a century of Black thought, from the Renaissance to the Black Arts Movement. The first Black Rhodes Scholar and the 'Dean' of the Renaissance, he forced open the doors of American philosophy itself.
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