The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

A different Locke appeared on the stage of the pearly white Metropolitan Opera House at Broad Street in Philadelphia on October 19, 1937, to speak for the first time to a meeting of the National Negro Congress, a communist-front organization. The difference was in the location as well as the man. Locke had for years traveled thousands of miles to hear opera sung from stages like the one he was standing on in 1937, in the wonderfully ornate former Philadelphia Opera House that when built in 1908 symbolized Philadelphia's cultural coming of age. But now, in the late years of the Great Depression, the building was rented out to any quack radical element that could pay the rental fees-an analogy to what had become of Locke himself, now that his grand vision of a Negro Renaissance of the 1920s lay in tatters. Hard times had hit the Metropolitan and Locke, for America was no longer interested in, nor able to afford, Culture with a capital C. Both the Metropolitan and Locke were struggling to reinvent themselves in times inhospitable to their original ideas, their founding missions.

Invited by John P. Davis, national secretary of the organization, to appear at the second meeting of the National Negro Congress, Locke was not on completely unfamiliar ground. The organization had been started by two of his close friends, Ralph Bunche and Arthur Fauset. But Locke would nevertheless be in unfamiliar company. A. Philip Randolph, the NNC president and head of the Sleeping Car Porters Union, was a union organizer turned intellectual who would later go on to originate the idea of the March on Washington in 1941. Davis was the firebrand organizer of the New Negro Alliance that protested discrimination in hiring in five-and-ten cent stores in Washington, D.C. The NNC also included James Ford of the Communist Party and was in the midst of a power struggle over the extent to which it would follow the line of the Communist Party USA. All of these men were activists in ways Locke usually found repugnant. And yet, here he was, answering Davis's call to "serve as Discussion Leader of the sub-session on ‘Cultural Problems of the Negro.' The subject of the discussion at this time will be ‘Traditions and Cultural Problems of Negro Artists.' "1 But Locke used his talk to do something more powerful: to transform himself into a Black radical cultural critic of the 1930s.