Alain LeRoy Locke #1664

Caption from poster__     Alain Leroy Locke      Alain Leroy Locke (September 13, 1885 June 9, 1954) was an American writer, philosopher, educator, and patron of the arts. In a popular publication, The Black 100, Alain Locke ranks as the 36th most influential African American ever, past or present. Distinguished as the first African American Rhodes Scholar in 1907, Locke was the philosophical architect—the acknowledged “Dean” of the Harlem Renaissance, a period of cultural efflorescence connected with the “New Negro” movement from 1919 to 1934. Locke’s importance as the ideological genius of the Harlem Renaissance is of great historical moment, immortalized in the Harlem Number of The Survey Graphic 6.6 (1 March 1925), a special issue on race for which Locke served as guest editor. That edition was entitled, Harlem, Mecca of the New Negro, which Locke subsequently recast as an anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation of Negro Life, published in December 1925. A landmar in black li