The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

The 1934 trip to Greece rekindled Locke's love of philosophy by kindling his affection for a philosopher. We do not know if there was sex or even the promise of it. But Locke found something in T. V. Smith that quickened his desire, and he pursued Smith for several years. Smith could write on ethics, stump speech for Roosevelt, and stamp through the ruins of Athens with insight and aplomb. He was philosopher as sophisticated cosmopolitan, a bit like Locke, without being the original thinker Locke was. But he was warm in ways Locke never was and gave him a new sense that philosophy mattered and could enrich rather than clog his cultural criticism. As Horace Kallen put it after the 1935 conference both Smith and Kallen attended at Howard: "I have always liked Smith immensely as a person." So did Locke.

Of course, philosophy had always been the invisible architecture in Locke's cultural criticism. But there was something about that trip to Greece that gave him the confidence to produce a more thoroughgoing philosophical critique in 1935. When he began writing the first drafts of his adult-education booklet, The Negro and His Music, finished later that year, he utilized his very sophisticated value theory from his dissertation to argue the Black experience held special potential for the development of fine-art music. Black folk music, he would argue, even from those unschooled in formal music theory, contained within it a "pre-aesthetic" quality that came from how Africans traditionally engaged their environment, their daily lives, in terms of the aesthetic, the music, the dance. Rather than a genetic disposition, Black people carried from Africa an aesthetic valuation that continued to survive despite the radical change in context.