The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

When Locke arrived in Washington the third week of September 1924, he found two letters. One, from Claude McKay, encouraged him to get professional help with his problems. "You know if you're neurasthenic," McKay wrote, "you ought to see a psycho-analyst-if you cannot help yourself. … Dr. A.A. Taunenbaum of New York is a fine understanding chap. He's a friend of mine-slightly neurasthenic himself[,] which makes him a better and more sympathetic analyst." McKay closed the letter with the advice that "you'd better to destroy this letter."1 Locke did not. He did not seek psychological help. While abroad, he had shared with McKay that sometimes he became so disturbed that the only antidote was random sex, which did not really cure the problem of his neurotic tension. It was also dangerous, aggravating his paranoia about discovery as a homosexual. McKay, however, did not know about Locke's falling in love with Langston Hughes. The other note was more important. "I am sending this to Howard University in case you go directly to Washington," Paul Kellogg, the Survey Graphic editor wrote, "just as a bit of welcome and an expression of renewed interest in the project."2 Kellogg had not known that Locke had been working feverishly on his introductory essays during his last days in Europe.

The two notes were connected. Having fallen in love and been rejected, Locke returned to the United States an exposed wire. Work on the New Negro had been a balm in San Remo; now, work on Harlem provided a cladding to cover his damaged but pulsating interior. Partly, it was Harlem itself-a teeming city within a city filled with Negroes from all over the world who did not judge him, as he felt judged in Washington. Harlem attracted "the African, the West Indian … the Negro of the North, the Negro of the South … the peasant, the student, the business man, artist, poet, musician, adventurer and worker, preacher and criminal, exploiter and social outcast"-the last a reference to himself-such that finding one another in its non-punitive environs, a race bonding and community emerged. In Harlem, Black people escaped the normative gaze of a White society, because they immersed themselves in a Black majority. Surrounded by the successful and the criminal, Locke felt at home in Harlem, because he was a little of both.