The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

"Beauty. Its variety is infinite, its possibility is endless," as W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in 1926. He went on to note, however, that beauty is denied the "mass of human beings" who are "choked away from it, and their lives distorted and made ugly." The charge to humanity was a challenge to all of us. "Who shall right this well-nigh universal failing? Who shall let this world be beautiful? Who shall restore to men the glory of sunsets and the peace of quiet sleep?"1

Alain Locke provided one powerful answer to these questions, by asserting something quite radical in the 1920s, something radical today-that Black people are charged with righting this universal failing, by demanding the right to beauty in their own lives, lives distorted in the public discourse of race relations, and demeaned for not measuring up to standards mistakenly described as White. What Locke demanded is the right of African Americans to beauty, to speak of and write about, and carve out realms of beauty unnoticed by most of America because that America itself was lacking in, denied the benefit of, seeing its life as beautiful, ground down daily by a labor unrewarding as much as it is blinded to beauty around us. America was supposed to be the promised land, the place where this "universal failing" of fallen man was righted, where the "glory of sunsets" was to be restored, but instead had become, by 1925, and even more by 2017, a place of unquiet sleep.