The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Ocean values-what Herman Melville called the consciousness freed from earthbound concerns to explore what is liminal and transcendent in human life-were Locke's values as he made his way home. Such values explained why he was so attracted to ocean travel-it was freeing. Of course, when he talked about his transatlantic travel to his friends, he spoke of needing to get away to "shake off the academic dust." But the real dust was his Black Victorianism, heightened in the United States, transported with him when he went abroad, but loosened in Europe and in Africa. It was loosest on board, where he could put intellectual pretensions aside and wallow in the purely social status that came from traveling on luxury liners. There, in 1924 between Europe and America, he could relax, gaze out over the white froth churning behind the HMS Tyrrhenia, and allow his mind to go. Slowly, however, as he approached New York, he began to lower the mask-the racial mask that hid his multifarious personality of professor, diplomat, and homosexual aesthete behind the persona of the race man. That transformation happened every fall when he returned from a summer abroad and occurred this January as well.

But there was something else this time. After six months abroad, presumably on a racial mission-to Africa, no less-people would want to know what his errand into European and African civilizations had yielded him, and them. He must try and relate what had happened to him during these last six months on sabbatical to a discourse on race that was only part of his motivation and part of his experience on the trip. What would he say to Charles S. Johnson, Eugene Kinckle Jones, Arthur Schomburg, his colleagues at Howard, friends like Cullen and Hughes, about Africa and what it meant to the American Negro? What did his trip to Africa mean to him? Why had he spent so much of the trip in Europe, rather than in the Motherland? He didn't really know. He had no firm answers. He must try and discover a way to turn this recent "sabbatical," another expatriated absence from the cultural and political scene in America, into some kind of personal capital or fall further behind.