The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Shortly after his death that summer of 1954, visitors filed in singly or in small groups to Benta's Funeral Home at 157 West 132nd Street in Harlem to view Locke's body lying in the parlor. It seemed incongruous that this tiny Black man, who was perpetually in motion, suddenly lay still in a plain wooden box. Thirty-two years after his mother's wake, at least Alain was not sitting up in his home. Arthur Fauset made sure the arrangements at Benta's were proper and top-notch. More important than the funeral were the people there. There was W. E. B. Du Bois and his wife, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Mrs. Paul Robeson, Charles Johnson-luminaries of Black intellectual culture-alongside Bili Bond Locke's sometime lover, Maurice Russell, the love of Locke's life, sculptor Richmond Barthé, and Mary Beattie Brady, his best ally in the work of promoting African American visual arts-a community that was diverse sexually, socially, racially, and class-wise, but a community nonetheless created by the man now lying in peace in Harlem. He had been the one alienated from Black folks' usual congregations, and kept on the outside by hatred of his kind. He had empowered gay aesthetics to change the discourse of the Negro in America and shifted the image of the Negro from that of a social science object to be pitied, to be seen, at least by the elite thinkers of the nation, as the originator of the only superlative culture America had yet given to the world. He had pulled together these people who did not know one another into a kind of family for himself and other Black queers. Negro art had made this community, and now its architect was gone.

But Locke's work was not done. Locke had formed that community with a higher purpose-to subjectivize the Negro, to spur the Negro to become a shaper of the world around him or her with unflinching confidence and supreme competence to change the climate of hate and defeat. Though he critiqued the language of propaganda his wake minister Du Bois had used, Locke had weaponized art to weaponize Negroes to give them the consciousness that their role was to transform the race through their brilliance.