The New Negro by Alain LeRoy Locke — Read

When Locke stepped out of the Art Center after the reception for the 1933 Harmon Foundation exhibit that February, he reentered New York dominated by the Great Depression and the real suffering it was producing. While the election of Franklin Delano Roosevelt the previous November had buoyed America's hope that the Depression would soon be over, the nation had suffered through one of the cruelest winters leading up to the presidential swearing-in in March. All around him as he bounded from art exhibition to subway and Pennsylvania Station were signs of how far the city had fallen from the euphoria of a Renaissance he had predicted just eight years ago. Artists had been turned into beggars, veterans into apple sellers, and romantic versifiers into propaganda poets as the smell of death. Black-owned businesses in Harlem were suddenly, almost inexplicably bankrupt.

The art exhibit had been a success in two ways. Locke had succeeded in finding a Negro artist in Richmond Barthé who was comfortable with his homosexuality and adept at expressing it sinuously in sculpture. Barthé also had no difficulty seeing himself as a Negro artist, expressing himself in African-influenced forms, and yet keeping his eye on the goal of all artists to try and create eternal works of art. Locke had also found a new maternal patron in Mary Beattie Brady who, while overbearing and opinionated, allowed him to say what he wanted, without the pathological need to control and censor him in ways Mrs. Mason could not resist. But Brady was also not handing over any money or power to Locke, either. As successful as the exhibition had been, it did not lead anywhere, being the last that the Harmon Foundation would do in which he would play a dominant role. As the cold wind of the worst winter of the Great Depression hit his face, Locke still lacked access to the kind of leverage to foment broad-based cultural production in the early 1930s. So, alone now in a way he had not been in the recent past, Locke focused his attention on polishing his chops at the one thing he could do on his own: be a critic. That, in fact, was the saving grace of being on his own.