The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Locke was a chameleon who changed constantly to adapt to his context, because he feared becoming outdated, irrelevant, forgotten, a kind of living death he feared more than actual death. Because of that fear, he could never be satisfied with one avenue of success, one voice, one triumph, even those he achieved at the Baltimore Museum of Art or the American Negro Exposition. Despite legions of critics and biographers calling Locke an "aesthete," the truth was that he was so much more-a renaissance man in the finest sense of being a man of sociology, art, philosophy, diplomacy, and the Black radical tradition-though these competencies were often invisible. But he kept feeding them, because he was afraid that art would never be enough for him to be remembered for making a difference in the lives of his fellow men and women, something he hungered to be recognized for throughout his life.

A hidden dimension of this quest for immortality occurred in January 1939, just days before his speech at the opening of the Baltimore Museum of Art exhibition. Locke answered a call from Thyra Edwards, the young Black woman internationalist who organized the American Medical Bureau in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. She was writing to ask him to speak at a meeting about race, war, and the Black role in the fight against fascism. At the Conference on the Relation of the Present Struggle in Spain to Democracy and Its Meaning to the Negro People at the Lincoln Congregational Tabernacle in Washington, in early January, Locke also volunteered to say "a strong word about the relevance of the Jewish issue" to the present struggle. Here was a Black organized radical meeting where, though again an outsider, he could greet old acquaintances like Paul Robeson and William Pickens, the latter having just returned from Spain from a fact-finding mission, and Mary Bethune, his long-time ally and friend.