X-Nico

unusual facts about Alain Locke



Carrie Williams Clifford

Clifford's and her family moved to Washington D.C. around 1910, where she maintained friendships with W. E. B. Du Bois, Charles Chesnutt, Georgia Douglas Johnson, and Alain Locke, and hosted regular Sunday evening gatherings with persons such as Mary Church Terrell, William L. Hunt, Amanda Hilyer, Harry T. Burleigh, and Will Marion Cook.

Georgia Douglas Johnson

Soon after her husband's death, Johnson began to host what became forty years of weekly "Saturday Salons", for friends and authors, including Langston Hughes, Jean Toomer, Anne Spencer, Richard Bruce Nugent, Alain Locke, Jessie Redmon Fauset, Angelina Weld Grimke and Eulalie Spence— all major contributors to the New Negro Movement, which is better known today as the Harlem Renaissance.

New Negro

In several essays included in the anthology The New Negro (1925), which grew out of the 1924 special issue of Survey Graphic on Harlem, editor Alain Locke contrasted the "Old Negro" with the "New Negro" by stressing African American assertiveness and self-confidence during the years following World War I and the Great Migration.

Nigger Heaven

It also split the black literary community, as some, e.g. Langston Hughes, Nella Larsen, and Wallace Thurman, appreciated it, while others like Countee Cullen, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Alain Locke regarded it as an "affront to the hospitality of black folks".


see also

Alain LeRoy Locke

The Dilemma of Ethnic Identity: Alain Locke's Vision of Transcultural Societies. Lewiston, New York: Edwin Mellen Press, 2005.