The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Alain, christened Arthur LeRoy Locke at birth, was a sickly, tiny baby. He was not expected to live. Born on September 13, 1885 (though he publicly gave his birth date as 1886), Locke contracted rheumatic fever at birth, and cried and gasped for breath during attacks. That entire first year the family, especially his mother, Mary, lived with the terror that the next attack would kill him. Mary spent every possible moment with him, leaving household and shopping duties to his grandmothers. In her nurture of her son, Mary found fulfillment she lacked in her roles as teacher, wife, or daughter. He needed her and seemed strengthened by her bathing, stroking, and breastfeeding. Even after the crisis had passed, Mary remained extremely protective of her "one and only." She had nursed him back from death and she kept vigilant watch lest some new, unforeseen illness take him away. By his third year, his health had stabilized even if the economic situation of a relatively modest Black middle-class family had not.

Roy, as he was called as a child, had been born at home on South 19th Street, located at the edge of Philadelphia's Seventh Ward, a Black residential neighborhood. W. E. B. Du Bois, the sociologist hired by the University of Pennsylvania in 1897 to study living conditions in Philadelphia, described the neighborhood in which Locke was born: