The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre wrote in his autobiography that if his father had lived, he would have crushed him. Allan, soon to rename himself Alain, Locke must have felt something similar about his father's death in retrospect. He never referred to his father publicly. According to his student and later friend, Robert Fennell, Locke always talked about his mother, usually to every class, but never his father. "Sometimes I wondered if he ever had a father," Fennell quipped. Pliny's death allowed Locke to become a child god of a matriarchal universe that included his mother, two grandmothers, and most important, him. This tiny insulated universe was crucial to nurturing his later ambitions. Locke was growing up in what historian Rayford Logan called the "nadir" in American race relations, when Blacks were pushed back into agricultural labor, slapped with segregation in education and transportation, robbed of the vote, and lynched when they protested against such travesties. Bishop Henry Turner of the African Methodist Episcopal Church captured the decade's lesson to Black men when he stated, "There is no manhood future in the United States for the Negro. … He can never be a man-full, symmetrical, and undwarfed."4 At home, however, bathed with the undivided love of his mother, Locke grew into adolescence with a sense that nothing could stop him from being a man, that nothing could dwarf him.

Pliny's death left his mother the head of a poor, barely middle-class family. Her measly salary of $400 a year was just scarcely enough to meet her expenses as the only employed member of the household. Grandmother Locke would follow her son to the grave in 1894, thus easing the burden on Mary, although the $25 spent on a single buggy and simple burial in the family plot was an embarrassment to this proud family. In order to save money, Mary would eventually move the family to a modest home on the all-White but less expensive Stevens Street in Camden. She would also take in boarders periodically, teach night school, and give private piano lessons in her home to make ends meet.