The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Early in the 1930s, when Locke happened to be in Washington, D.C., on Saturday nights, sometimes he would stop in at his friend Ralph Bunche's house. As the historian Harold Lewis recalled many years later, a small group of young Black social scientists "tended to focus around Ralph Bunche" at Howard University, "not only because he was an attractive (that's not really the word) personality, but also because he was one of the few faculty members who lived on campus in one of the two houses that are long gone." Lewis recalled that "we used to gather there every Saturday night and I recall that Locke was rarely a visitor to the group, but Ralph Bunche, Abe Harris, the economist … several of the younger people, and [E. Franklin] when he came from Fisk was accepted as a member. It had such a different perspective on this whole matter of social change … we thought the future of mankind was tied up with some sort of Popular Front and it wasn't racial."1

Bunche was an "attractive personality," and a highly attractive man. What Lewis and others at those meetings did not know was how close Bunche and Locke were, even though Locke was "rarely" a participant in Bunche's Saturday night meetings. But that Locke dropped by at all suggested Locke realized what was brewing at Bunche's house on Saturdays-a new renaissance of thinking, this time launched by some of the finest young African American social scientists of the 1930s, whose discussions of political theory, sociological controversies, cultural politics, and the prospects for a global revolution were laying the groundwork of a 1930s awakening that would rival in a different way the one Locke had chronicled in the 1920s. After all, the New Negro literary awakening had been launched in fact in Washington, D.C., by Georgia Douglas Johnson, whose Saturday Nighters had featured Jean Toomer. Now, in the 1930s, another generation of radical-thinking young men, albeit educated in elite White universities, and immersed in Marxian economic and modern sociological theories, were convinced their thinking would lead to the liberation of Black people in ways older race theories could not. While other radical intellectuals were meeting and discussing these issues in the early 1930s, what distinguished these men, of course, was that they were African American, forced to teach at Howard University though possessing Ivy League PhDs, and convinced that the Black experience was at the center of capitalist exploitation in America. In particular, they believed that African Americans needed to eschew Black nationalism and race-only theorizing because such nationalist sentiments made it more difficult for the Black masses to do what was absolutely necessary in the historical moment: join with White workers in such progressive labor organizations as the Committee on Industrial Opportunity and challenge capitalism in a Popular Front.