The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Rather than escaping during the summer of 1938, Locke accepted the challenge to make American culture what he wanted it to be. He now undertook this work with a kind of military zeal. Black people could only be freed if their avant garde, intellectually weaponized Black artists followed him into battle against the notion that Black people should not be proud to be Black in a discursively White America. His sense of destiny now matched his ability to fulfill his calling without the help of any one person. No longer a lieutenant of someone else's agenda, Locke fulfilled his own agenda believing it was the last best hope for a world historical Black race.

Locke applied himself to what was in front of him-the coming conference on Negro adult education that he himself had put into motion during the spring. Since this adult-education meeting was held at Hampton Institute, housing was not an issue. By holding the conference at a Negro college, Locke not only solved the problem of Jim Crow hotels by putting attendees in Black college dormitories but also made a larger point-that adult education was part of higher education. He also pulled in the White authorities on adult education into the bosom of Black education and forced them to see Negro education as American education, and vice versa.