The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke by Jeffrey C. Stewart (review)

258 CLA JOURNAL Book Reviews Stewart, Jeffrey C. The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke. New York: Oxford University Press, 2018. 944 pp. ISBN:978-0195089578. $39.95 Hardcover. Jeffrey Stewart’s long awaited biography of Alain Locke has been well worth the wait. After many years of research and writing, Stewart’s The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke does not fail to impress, either in its bulk or its significance. Hailed immediately by the critics as a work of monumental proportions, The New Negro has already garnered the National Book Award for Nonfiction, the Pulitzer Prize for Biography, and an American Book Award, something akin to the Triple Crown in the publishing industry. More to the point, however, is that this work is a major study of a major figure in a major period in African American life and culture. Its importance is simply inestimable. Although the biography follows the usual chronological approach, Stewart opens the book with a rather bizarre account of the death of Alain Locke’s mother, Mary Hawkins Locke, in 1922 when Locke himself was 37 years old. That she died was not strange, but Alain Locke’s reaction to it certainly was, as he had her corpse sitting up, dressed as if to receive guests for tea, and invited family and friends to drop by the home they shared for a last time in her presence. Despite its strangeness, Stewart argues that Locke’s reaction to his mother’s death illuminates the central presence of his mother in her son’s life and, moreover, that her influence did not end with her death as Locke kept her cremains in an urn on his mantelpiece for many years. Fast forward to 1954 with Alain Locke’s own death shortly after retiring from Howard University and relocating to New York City and another strange story emerges: Hardly was W.E.B. Du Bois’s funeral oration over before attendees raided Locke’s museum-like home for artifacts and keepsakes. Furthermore, Locke’s cremains were moved from pillar to post for the next 60 years and were not interred until 2014. Between the stories of these two deaths, Stewart weaves a narrative of a remarkable and extraordinary life that extends to well over 900 pages. Part I of The New Negro, “The Education of Alain Locke,” covers his birth in 1885 through 1922, and details Locke’s birth and upbringing as the offspring of “Philadelphia Negroes,” a talented, ambitious, often smug, and upper middle class aspirational group of African Americans who emerged prior to the Emancipation and continued to develop their status into the Reconstruction period and beyond. While on the surface it is a glorious and uplifting story of being black in America, Stewart’s focus is often on Alain Locke’s inability to shoulder the legacy of these people, despite his obvious brilliance and drive. Rather than the legacy proving a firm foundation for the advancement of a new generation, Locke often found himself at odds with the people and the project. Moreover, his mother’s coddling and over-protectiveness tended to put young Locke at odds with CLA JOURNAL 259 Book Reviews others, particularly his father and his conservative spare-the-rod/spoil the child grandmothers. Thus, Stewart gives a different meaning to Locke’s often-presumed “privileged” upbringing. Much of this section of the book does focus on Locke’s formal schooling: his stellar academic performance at Philadelphia’s Central High School, his two years of graduate study at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, his matriculation at Harvard where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and his being named the first African American Rhodes Scholar.One stunning detail that Stewart offers in an otherwise unblemished record is the fact that Locke never earned a degree from Oxford, despite his enviable status as the first African American to be named a Rhodes Scholar. The remainder of Part I details Locke’s other educations: his cultivation of friendships and male lovers, his early experiences with European travel,his early forays into theories of blackness,his often prickly relationships with Black Washingtonians and Howard University, his ambivalence toward organized religion and his...