The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

The year 1929 began on a sour note for Alain Locke. A couple of weeks before New Years, he had learned that the Foreign Policy Association, to which he had submitted a report, "The Mandate System: A New Code of Empire," in December, was so displeased with his report that it would not publish it in its current form, as had been planned previously. The rejection of this work hit Locke like a blow in the stomach, so unaccustomed was he to having his writing rejected outright, especially by influential White people. Worse, over the previous year, he had peppered the press with notices of his trips to Geneva conducting research for the report, fueling expectations that the finished project would appear in print. Now it would not, and its non-publication would heighten a perception he wanted to avoid-that as the heralded philosopher and promoter of the Negro Renaissance since 1925, when his epic anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation, had appeared, he was now, four years later, slipping, having not published a book since Four Negro Poets in 1927. Worried, perhaps overly, about the potential fallout from this failure, he chose his usual weekend visit with Mrs. Charlotte Mason, his millionaire Park Avenue patron, to pour out his frustration and seek consolation from a major personal setback.

As this diminutive, hypochondriac professor of philosophy fidgeted nervously in the drawing room of his psychic, overbearing matron, Locke, a man of almost clairvoyant personal diplomacy skills, confessed he had sensed something bad was going to result from a foreign policy project he had started years earlier. Locke had submitted his report late, after months of nagging by Raymond Leslie Buell. Although Locke knew its members were upset about his tardiness, he had hoped the brilliance of his approach would impress them. Rather than detailing the abuses of the British and French in administering Germany's former colonies under the Mandates System, Locke had opted for a higher ground and a futuristic perspective. The Mandates System had been set up under the League of Nations, because of Woodrow Wilson's insistence in Article 22 of its charter that Germany's and Turkey's former African colonies should be administered with international oversight now that they belonged to the Allies after the World War. The article stated that "to those colonies and territories which as a consequence of the late war have ceased to be under the sovereignty of the States which formerly governed them and which are inhabited by people not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world, there should be applied the principle that the well-being and development of such peoples form a sacred trust of civilization and that securities for the performance of this trust should be embodied in this covenant."1 This "trust" would be exercised by putting these colonies under the administration and control of "advanced nations"-the French and the British-who "by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographic position, can best undertake" to provide the required "tutelage" of "such peoples" as a "responsibility" or "Mandatories on behalf of the League."2 Of course, the "people not yet able to stand by themselves" were the Africans, since, by contrast those other peoples who belonged to the "Turkish Empire" were deemed to "have reached a stage of development where their existence as independent nations can be provisionally recognized." From a social Darwinist perspective, "those of Central Africa are at such a stage that the Mandatory must be responsible for the administration of the territory" to ensure "freedom of conscience and religion" and "prohibition of abuses, such as the slave trade," among others.