The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Where does an elitist, mildly Afrocentric impresario of the arts go in 1924 to get backing for his Negro awakening, given his penchant for alienating Black support? The answer lay there waiting for him after he arrived from Europe. Early in 1924, a short note came to Howard University asking for the name and address of a philosopher on "your staff whom I met in Paris a couple of months ago whose name I forgot."1 The man who sent the note was Albert Barnes. When Locke met Barnes in 1923, he was a millionaire industrialist on one of his whirlwind trips to purchase European modernist and African art and engage anyone who listened in long, convoluted conversations about both. Barnes had built a mansion in Merion, Pennsylvania, and assembled one of the largest collections of modern and African art in the world. He had formalized that collection as the Barnes Foundation in 1922 to thumb his nose at the Philadelphia art establishment, which he believed was dominated by mindless bluebloods who knew nothing about modern art and looked down on him as uncultured arriviste. Like Locke, Barnes was born poor in Philadelphia but had graduated from Central High School at the bottom of his class and attended graduate school in chemistry, in Germany, without obtaining a PhD. He also shared with Locke a capacity for duplicity. After years of study, Barnes lacked the ability to create new chemical compounds. So he teamed up with a German chemist whom he brought to the United States and encouraged to create a silver nitrate compound called Argyll, which Barnes later took credit for inventing. Barnes went on to build a company in Philadelphia to manufacture and distribute the compound, which made him millions. Barnes also had a visionary conception of what the corporation should be: he invested in the psychology of his workers and required them to attend classes on William James and John Dewey at his factory. Barnes wanted to overcome the alienation typical of the American workplace and foster the kind of creativity among his workers that would make them his equals. In practice, however, Barnes contradicted this philosophy with a dominating personality that ran the factory and everything about it with an iron will.

Gender and race shaped his notion of power. Barnes's two closest assistants-young White women-were described by one man as his "shadows," women who never articulated an idea that had not already been cleared by Barnes. Most of his workers were African Americans dependent on him for a livelihood and forced to participate in his educational programming whether they wanted to or not. Ever since his mother took him at the age of eight to a camp meeting outside of Philadelphia where he heard the itinerant preaching and religious singing of African Americans, Barnes had been convinced that Blacks had greater spiritual capacity than Whites. On the other hand, according to Arthur Fauset, who worked at the Barnes Foundation, Barnes "was sadistic: he loved to demonstrate his power, and fought to make blacks love it and him. One of his favorite sentences was ‘I told them [the white Philadelphia elite] that if they didn't let me have that place for the museum, I would take my house and rent it to Negroes and see how they like that.' "2 As the philosopher Bertrand Russell, who worked at the Barnes Foundation in the late 1930s, put it: Barnes "liked to patronise coloured people and treated them as equals, because he was quite sure that they were not. … He demanded constant flattery and had a passion for quarreling. I was warned before accepting his offer that he always tired of people before long."3 Clearly, Barnes and Locke would be well matched in the coming contest over who would be the voice of African art in America, since gender and race were issues of power for Locke as well.