The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

A metamorphosis in Locke's public role began to occur in 1931, putting another spin on the title, "Beauty Instead of Ashes," his declaration of independence from Du Boisian aesthetics in 1928. In the ashes of the collapse of the Hughes-Hurston-Locke triangle under Mrs. Mason's patronage lay an exquisite corpse waiting to be reborn-that of a more independent, self-sufficient, self-activating Locke who had been buried for the last four years while he squirmed under Mason's domination. In basketball language, a man who had depended on a dominant coach and a celebrated team was now going to have to get his own shot, with new, less experienced players. But that would be a blessing, a "saving grace," as Locke would put it one year later in his retrospective review of a different kind of crash-not the stock market-but the patronage scheme with Mason, Hughes, and soon Hurston.

Another catalyst of metamorphosis had emerged earlier in 1929. The underlying motivation for the Mason patronage scheme had always been desire: Locke's love of Langston Hughes. As that love withered and began to atrophy in 1929, another infatuation blossomed the same fall that brought the Stock Market Crash to America. Ralph Bunche, newly minted with an MA in government from Harvard, came to teach at Howard University, likely the result of Locke's maneuvering. Locke had been an unofficial advisor of Howard's new president, Mordecai Johnson, since 1927 when he rehired Locke and sought his advice on how to recast Howard as a leader in modern higher education. Locke wanted to build a powerhouse social science division, where Locke, uniquely in American higher education, had philosophy housed. Locke always saw philosophy as a science and wanted it to sit atop a social science division staffed with the top Negro scholars from prestigious White universities like Harvard. Bunche had already caused a stir at Harvard, so impressing his professors in government that they offered him a graduate fellowship to stay on campus. But a sixth sense in Bunche told him to come to Howard, the nation's most powerful Negro university, and join forces with Locke to remake the field of what today is called Black Studies.