The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

In "The American Scholar" in 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson declared the American Mind ought to separate from European models of excellence and immerse itself in the daily life of the common people of America, the true source of its unique culture. In 1928, Alain Locke struggled to find in the "common" culture of the Black folk a source for his modernist reinterpretation of American culture. Shortly after New Year's, he departed Washington on the Southern Railway for Nashville, Tennessee, where he would be teaching at Fisk for the winter quarter. Unlike Emerson, the African American scholar taking such a journey could not but help coming into contact with "the common," as accommodations below the Mason-Dixon line were always segregated. Riding in the dirty coach set aside for Negroes was a reminder to Locke that he was entering a southern world that still regarded Negroes as scum. As the train snaked around the West Virginia mountains, and he settled into the greasy seat shown him by the conductor, Locke may have remembered that a similar trip south had sparked W. E. B. Du Bois and Jean Toomer to write Souls of Black Folk and Cane, respectively. But Emerson never considered that the White "common," working- and lower-middle-class White Americans saw any elevation of the Black "common" as a threat. Locke must have recalled his earlier trip into the South in 1912 with Booker T. Washington, when angry Whites met him and the "great conciliator" at train stations with violence and even death toward anyone who tried to lift the lot of the Negro over theirs. As Locke settled into "Negro mode," that conditioning of himself to the segregated American life, he may have reflected on the series of events that had forced him so deep into the southern "common" once again-not by philosophical choice, as Emerson suggested, but by professional necessity. With no base in Harlem, no control of a Negro public institution, and no access to elite White institutions of higher education in America, Locke, like Emerson after the Divinity School address, was going to have to make his future on speaking, writing, and secular preaching to a "common," but one divided by hate, rivalry, and threats of death to any who tried to change the racial status quo in America. As Locke grimaced inside at the many little insults he endured as he entered the segregated South, he must have wondered at that future. Emerson never confronted the racial division in the American "common" or the racial sickness of the American Mind. But Locke was going to have to confront both in Nashville. Feelings of dread began to grow.

Locke's mood lifted temporarily upon his arrival in Nashville. He was welcomed like a king. Fisk's president invited him to dinner, provided him excellent faculty rooms on campus, and funded a stenographer to transcribe his lectures. The president actually hoped to persuade Locke to stay at Fisk, despite the recently tendered offer from Howard to return. The president's entreaties were flattering to Locke, but he could not seriously consider moving to Fisk permanently. It would force him to make a monthly trek between Nashville and New York if he wanted to keep anything like a national literary life or a love life alive. Moving to Fisk would push him further into a clandestine homosexual life, since Black Victorian strictures were even more dominant at Fisk than at Howard. Though he had been glad to escape New York and Mrs. Mason, Locke began to feel more vulnerable as an isolated Black northerner in Nashville. Suddenly, after two weeks at Fisk, he succumbed to a mysterious illness that sent him to bed. Soon, he wired Mrs. Mason about his condition. Sick, lonely, and second-guessing his decision to come, Locke stifled the urge to return immediately to the East with a catastrophic medical collapse as his excuse. Unwilling to give into the illness, Locke righted himself and sent a second telegram. "Do not worry. Nothing more serious it seems than Southern hookworm"-an apt metaphor, perhaps, for his reaction to the South-and to her. He often rationalized about never vacationing in the South due to its heavily spiced food. Now, his ailment became a way for him to ensure that Mason's love was still focused on him. Her concerned replies convinced him that he was still her "little boy," while also convincing himself that he could survive the South at such distance from her.