The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

"I find myself an excellent sailor," Locke noted in his second letter to his mother from on board the Kaiser Wilhelm. He was thrilled to be leaving behind America and sailing into an unknown future abroad. He had "eaten 5 meals a day-not having missed one[.] I feel the trip is doing me lots of good."1 Locke looked forward to escaping the American race problem and immersing himself like other American aesthetes in the art and culture of Europe. While an Anglophile, Locke was also interested in Paris, Berlin, and Rome, cities associated with a new artistic modernism and avant-garde of pre–World War Europe. Europe was alive with a creative ferment his professors and fellow students had spoken of incessantly at Harvard. Now he was going to experience that Europe firsthand.

Locke also contemplated the possibility of not coming back. Before he left for England, Oswald Garrison Villard had advised him that it might be best to remain in Europe if he could make a good living there given the racial situation in America. Locke's letters from the Kaiser Wilhelm suggest that he was already thinking that a literary career in Europe might allow him permanent residence abroad. Life in Europe also promised a more tolerant sexual life, since homosexuality appeared to be more tolerated in European nations than in the United States. Even England, which had been rocked in 1895 by the Oscar Wilde trial, was less legally and morally repressive than the United States. And Oxford-Wilde's university-was well known as a haven for male homosexuals. Perhaps at Oxford he would find social and sexual acceptance that went beyond Harvard's. Perhaps such freedom would fire his muse and enable him to move beyond literary criticism to creative writing. Locke welcomed his trip to Oxford as a wonderful possibility of a cosmopolitan life abroad.