The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Locke arrived at Harvard shortly after his nineteenth birthday with letters of introduction from his Central High teachers, much as his grandfather Ishmael Locke had arrived in Philadelphia with his own letters sixty years earlier. For Locke too, the letters served to introduce him to the important educators of his new community and to ensure that he would not be regarded as just another Black man. Unfortunately, when Locke arrived the second week of September in 1904, the luminaries of Harvard's faculty had not yet arrived. Only younger professors were around to monitor the freshmen entrance exams he was required to take. In his first letter to his mother, he noted: "strange to say they are not pleasant fellows-sour as crab apples. I had fun asking them where the ‘big boys I have letters to' were and I wish you could have seen the expressions on their faces. I did it just for effect."1

Locke had fashioned a pose of the young upstart genius to reassure himself that he could handle himself in the big leagues. The remark and the letters signaled to those who might think otherwise that he was somebody to be taken seriously. First impressions mattered most. His strategy was a protective armor, for beneath the attitude of total self-confidence, arrogance, and self-possession hid considerable doubts: Would he be accepted? Would this 4´11˝, ninety-five-pound man be taken seriously? Would he be segregated from and marginalized by a Boston elite that shunned close and intimate association with Blacks? Beneath Locke's tough veneer was a tender-minded boy who would confide to his mother at the end of this first letter: "I'm awfully glad to have these letters of introduction-its such a cold formal place that it would seem forbidding if I did not have them."2