The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

Sometime in the late 1920s or the early 1930s, Alain Locke and W. E. B. Du Bois entered a basement restaurant in Black Washington, D.C., where the future Black psychiatrist Charles Prudhomme was working as a waiter, and sat down for dinner. Each requested a glass of boiling water. Once the glasses arrived, Locke and Du Bois picked up their silverware and placed them in the boiling water. That gesture reflected their opinion that Negro restaurants did not maintain the highest standards of cleanliness. Their concern for cleanliness was not unique. Booker T. Washington, more than a quarter of a century before, had made cleanliness the centerpiece of the civilizing mission of Tuskegee Institute. Cleanliness not only anchored personal hygiene but also symbolized what Washington wanted instilled in the minds of ex-slaves-that their bodies, their selves, were worth preserving, worth investing in for the future, through self-care.

That Locke and Du Bois made such a gesture of self-protection suggests they doubted Washington's ethic of cleanliness had been adopted widely by the Black establishments that Jim Crow segregation forced them to eat in. Working-class, even entrepreneurial African Americans, had not yet, in the language of Washington, thrown off the negative conception of themselves that led them to maintain less than sterling standards of cleanliness in their restaurants. As these three-piece-suit wearing Europhile academics sat down in this modest Washington restaurant, Locke and Du Bois felt a sanitary gulf separated them from most other African Americans in the 1920s and 1930s. There was still work to be done, and their gesture suggests that all three men agreed on at least one thing-that art, science, business, politics, all education, really, had a dual purpose-to instill civilization in an uneducated people and to purify them, like those utensils, of the self-hate acquired in their sojourn in America. Indeed, so fatalistic was Locke about this process, it's a wonder he risked such a meal in a "Colored" establishment at all. Of the three, Locke was the extreme mysophobe, who often refused to shake hands, touch doorknobs, or otherwise make physical contact with dirt. Usually, instead of visiting such restaurants, Locke took his meals at Union Station, its restaurant the only "White" restaurant in Washington, D.C., that allowed Black people to dine in, since it was a federal facility. Locke too might need "purifying" of some of his accommodations to a White supremacist world.