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Front Matter
Frontspiece

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Title Page and Credits
Race Contacts and Interracial Relations

LECTURES ON THE THEORY AND PRACTICE OF RACE

Alain LeRoy Locke

Edited and with an Introduction by

Jeffrey C. Stewart

Foreword by Michael R. Winston Preface by Thomas C. Battle

Howard University Press Washington, D. C. 1992

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MOORLAND-SPINGARN SERIES

Howard University Press, Washington, D.C. 20017

Copyright © 1992 by Moorland-Spingarn Research Center and Howard University Press

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. Inquiries should be addressed to Howard University Press, 1240 Randolph Street, N.E., Washington, D.C. 20017.

Manufactured in the United States of America

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Locke, Alain LeRoy, 1886-1954.

Race contacts and interracial relations: lectures on the theory and practice of race / Alain LeRoy Locke; edited and with an introduction by Jeffrey C. Stewart; foreword by Michael R. Winston; preface by Thomas C. Battle.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 0-88258-137-6 (cloth: acid-free paper): $24.95. -- ISBN 0-88258-158-9 (paper: acid-free paper): $14.95

1. Race relations. 2. Racism. 3. United States -- Race relations. 4. Racism -- United States. I. Stewart, Jeffrey C., 1950 -- II. Title.

HT1521.L595 1992

305.8 -- dc20

91-43415

CIP

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For my mother

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Contents
Foreword
Michael R. Winston ix
Preface
Thomas C. Battle xiii
Acknowledgments xv
Introduction
Jeffrey C. Stewart xix
Editorial Practices
Jeffrey C. Stewart lxi
1 The Theoretical and Scientific Conceptions of Race 1
2 The Political and Practical Conceptions of Race 20
3 The Phenomena and Laws of Race Contacts 41
4 Modern Race Creeds and Their Fallacies 63
5 Racial Progress and Race Adjustment 84
Appendix: The Great Disillusionment 105
Index 111

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Foreword
The publication of Alain Locke's Race Contacts and Interracial Relations provides scholars with an unusual opportunity. One of the enduring historical puzzles is how African Americans developed the intellectual resources to cope with one of the world's most sophisticated systems of racial domination. After the defeat of Reconstruction, public policy and private prejudice combined not only to deny the constitutional rights of African Americans, but also to destroy the educational and economic opportunities associated with genuine citizenship in a modern democracy. The imposition of white supremacy in every phase of American life was justified by wide dissemination of racist propaganda and supported by many of the leading white scholars and scientists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

This tide of racial thought was opposed in many of its brutal antiblack aspects by African American intellectuals, but even so intrepid an opponent as W. E. B. Du Bois accepted some of its basic tenets about blood and racial genius in his 1897 lecture to the American Negro Academy on "The Conservation of Races." From the 1920s to the 1940s there was a "Copernican Revolution" in the way social scientists treated the concept of race. Many would attribute this change solely to the emergence of a new orientation in the social sciences opposed to Social Darwinism and biological determinism. More careful investigation, however, reveals that an important element of that change was the reshaping of the national debate about race and public policy by black

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scholars, the black press, and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

What Locke's lectures on race contacts and interracial relations allow us to see is the embryonic formation of what would become a new consensus on race about thirty years later. Here is an early effort to analyze more than the argument and conclusions of racialist social thought. Alain Locke examines the assumptions or predicates of the theory itself, a quite different undertaking from the protests of the emerging civil rights intelligentsia. A striking effort on its own terms, it is all the more remarkable when one considers that Locke was not trained in the social sciences, was preoccupied with axiology and ethics in the field of philosophy, and was to spend much of his career as a leading critic of art, music, and literature. One recognizes in these lectures the extraordinary range of his reading and acquaintance with the relevant social science of his day. There is also in these lectures evidence of prescient intellectual groping. He expresses the hope, for example, that a genuine "science of human society" will emerge in the future and eliminate "false conceptions of race" that are an "obstacle to modern progress and a menace to modern civilization."

In tandem with Locke's dedication to a dispassionate examination of all the social phenomena associated with race is a very subtle understanding of the dynamics of a positive racial consciousness and achievement in a multiracial, multicultural society. In this respect also, he was far ahead of his contemporaries. An additional characteristic of Locke's discussion that should be highlighted is his consistent effort to place race in comparative perspective, citing European and Asian illustrations of some of his more suggestive points.

The Locke lectures on race contacts are also revelatory with respect to the evolution of his thought on historical and political matters. His conclusion, for example, that the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Amendments were "adopted before they were possible in point of fact" and "necessarily lapsed until the practical conditions could catch up with them" placed him in the ultraconservative camp of that era. Similarly, his assurance that he was "not an enemy of imperialism" informs us of how much his views would evolve in the subsequent decades of the 1920s and 1930s.

To make a proper estimate of the influence of Locke's evolving ideas on race and related issues it is useful to recall his role in the early 1930s as one of the founding fathers of the Division of the Social Sciences at

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Howard University. Locke believed that philosophy as a discipline could play an extraordinarily constructive role in the twentieth century as an analytic adjunct of the social sciences. In addition to his placement of philosophy in the social science division at Howard, he was a prime catalyst in the division's conceptualization of problems for nearly twenty years. Locke's colleagues in the division included Ralph J. Bunche, E. Franklin Frazier, Abram L. Harris, and Rayford W. Logan, all leaders in their respective fields. All of them participated in the redefinition of race in the social sciences, shifting the emphasis from the older superficial biological claims to a more complex and empirical social concept of race.

Locke's lectures on race were an early indication of his conviction that "free, independent and unimposed thinking is the root source of all other emancipations." While Locke's own ideas about race shifted several times as the social sciences and humanities deepened our understanding of social heredity and culture, he was throughout his career committed to free inquiry and the forging of what he called "social intelligence."

Although these lectures were never prepared for publication by Locke himself, with all the enhancements and clarifications that he would have grafted on these preliminary and exploratory ideas about race, it is particularly fortunate that the lectures are now being published thanks to the extensive research and editorial work of Jeffrey C. Stewart, whose command of the resources documenting Locke's life and work is unparalleled.

Michael R. Winston

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Preface
Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race, the five Alain Leroy Locke lectures edited by Jeffrey C. Stewart, is the culmination of a project conceived at the Howard University Moorland -Spingarn Research Center (MSRC) during the centennial year of Locke's birth. Locke (1885-1954), the first African American Rhodes Scholar, was first appointed to the Howard University faculty in 1912 and served until his retirement in 1953, with the exception of the period between June 1925 and June 1928. Although the Alain Locke Papers in the Manuscript Division of the MSRC have been the subject of much research in recent years, that research has focused primarily on Locke's involvement in the arts and humanities and their flowering during the so-called New Negro or Harlem Renaissance. Relatively little attention has been given to Locke's other intellectual and scholarly activities.

As a young faculty member at Howard University, Locke had been an early proponent of the university's greater involvement in academic programs exploring the history and cultures of African peoples in Africa and the African diaspora. He proposed the introduction into the curriculum of courses related to these subjects, but his efforts were unsuccessful. He did, however, present lectures that were designed to achieve a broader understanding of cultural diversity. It is the substance of these lectures that is presented here.

The transcripts that form the basis of Locke's lectures in this volume are a portion of the voluminous body of personal and professional

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papers that Locke bequeathed to Howard University upon his death in 1954. The Alain Locke Papers are an exceedingly rich resource for studying Locke's life and his various intellectual pursuits. Jeffrey C. Stewart, a scholar of the life and work of Locke and Locke's contemporaries, was selected to edit the essays because of his extensive knowledge of Locke and the Alain Locke Papers. In 1982, Stewart published The Critical Temper of Alain Locke: A Selection of his Essays on Art and Culture.

Race Contacts and Interracial Relations is one in a series of works undertaken under the auspices of the MSRC and published by the Howard University Press. The series presents works in a variety of formats and is designed to extend to a wider audience the rich resources of the MSRC and the fruits of its public programming. The MSRC is indebted to Jeffrey Stewart for this important contribution to the corpus of black intellectual thought.

Thomas C. Battle

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Acknowledgments
My first acknowledgment must go to John Cell of Duke University. His comments on my paper and Alain Locke's pamphlet, Syllabus to an Extension Course of Lectures on Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations, at a 1978 American Historical Association meeting, led me to reconsider the importance of Locke's theory of race. That sparked curiosity about whether a comprehensive record of Locke's 1916 lectures on race existed, which bore fruit in 1982 when I discovered transcriptions of the lectures in the Alain Locke Papers of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University. Three years later, Thomas C. Battle, director of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, urged me to prepare the lectures for a Howard University publication to commemorate the hundredth year anniversary of Locke's birth. I am indebted to him and to such others as Clifford Muse, former acting director of Moorland-Spingarn Research Center; Caspa L. Harris, Jr., former vice president for Business and Fiscal Affairs; Michael R. Winston, former vice president for Academic Affairs; and William S. Mayo, assistant director of the Howard University Press for helping to get the project underway. I am indebted to Thomas C. Battle for his preface and for his support of the project in its final statges. I also wish to thank Michael Winston for his foreword and for many helpful suggestions concerning the final manuscript.

Because of a preoccupation with other commitments, I was unable to devote full-time attention to the project prior to the summer of 1988. In the intervening time, work began on editing the transcriptions, a

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process greatly assisted by Lawrence Lee Jones. His skill in deciphering words and in suggesting changes and additions was indispensable. Early drafts of my introduction also profited from his reading and suggestions. I also owe Kathi Ann Brown and Fran Wermuth, two students at George Mason University, a debt of gratitude for their assistance in research for the annotations during this phase.

More recently, I was assisted by professors Jack Censer, Marion Deskmukh, Hasia Diner, Prasenjit Duara, and Roy Rosenzweig of George Mason University who either commented on drafts of the lectures or suggested sources of information for the annotations. Special thanks are due Jane Turner Censer who made available to me her extensive knowledge and expertise as a historical editor and read drafts of the introduction. Jeffrey Butler of Wesleyan University was particularly generous in sharing his knowledge of English imperialism and South African race relations. Robert Hall of Northeastern University recommended readings in contemporary race theory, and Renate Reiss kindly agreed to produce a last-minute translation. I am particularly grateful to Walter A. Jackson of North Carolina State University who gave me many helpful comments on the entire manuscript. Members of the Working Group on African American History at Harvard University, especially Evelyn Brooks-Higginbotham of the University of Pennsylvania, provided insightful comments on the introduction. But extra special thanks go to Cheryl Simmons, a superb research assistant, who took the lead in conducting the extensive library research required for completion of the annotations. Special acknowledgment goes to Esme E. Bhan for her support and assistance during the research carried on in the Alain Locke Papers at Howard University. Two other librarians, Moore Crossey at Yale University Library and Kevin Proffitt at the American Jewish Archives in Cincinnati, dug up valuable information for the introduction and the annotations.

At Howard University Press the publication has enjoyed the sound advice, sure guidance, and unwavering support of Ruby M. Essien.

Final editing and revisions were made at the National Humanities Center, whose support, made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, allowed me to finish the manuscript. Steven Goldsmith and other members of the Working Group on Intellectuals and Politics at the Center made helpful comments on the Introduction, while Carmella Franklin gave me useful comments about textural editing. Thanks are due to Linda Morgan of the National

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Humanities Center who typed a portion of the Introduction and to Rebecca Vargha and Jean Houston who tracked down books for me. I am particularly indebted to Jane Tompkins, who lent me her splendid printer during the last days of manuscript preparation.

My very special gratitude goes to Marta Reid Stewart, who has been my greatest source of strength, support, and encouragement in this and earlier labors.

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Introduction
The Cultural Equivalent of Race

On the afternoon of 27 March 1916, a terrific rainstorm raged in Washington, D.C. and worried Alain Locke. Having entered the lecture hall in Carnegie Library on the Howard University campus, his wet umbrella in hand, he wondered who would attend the first of his five lectures on the subject of race that afternoon. Last year's audience for the lectures had been small and, even more disappointing, bereft of the more famous people at this well-known black university. He needed to reach a larger audience this time, especially one that included the influential people in the Howard University circle of deans. Locke had been the first African American Rhodes Scholar at Oxford and had joined the staff of the Teachers College at Howard University in 1912 as an assistant professor of the teaching of English and instructor in philosophy and education. He was now anxious to become a permanent member of Howard's more prestigious College of Arts and Sciences. But Locke also wanted to establish a course on race contacts and eventually an institute of race relations at Howard. As William Sinclair, a member of the Howard University Board of Trustees put it, Locke intended to pioneer at a black university the kind of sociology department that Columbia University was beginning to establish. 1

Not everyone at Howard had supported Locke's plans. His five lectures on race contacts had first been proposed in 1914 but had not

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been given, because the board of deans had decided to limit them to only one evening. 2 After Jesse Moorland had donated his enormous collection of books and manuscripts of Afro-Americana to Howard University in December 1914, Locke had proposed that Howard inaugurate a research project to produce a bibliography of the collection and other works of "Negro Americana." 3 That request was not approved. Then in the summer of 1915, the board of trustees denied Locke's request to give his lectures as part of the regular curriculum. 4 Reportedly, the Board felt that Howard should avoid potentially controversial subjects such as race relations and confine itself to teaching the basic knowledge required to create teachers, doctors, and other professionals. But a younger generation of assertive black scholars was emerging at Howard, including Locke in English and later philosophy, Charles Wesley and Carter G. Woodson in history, Montgomery Gregory in drama, and Kelly Miller as dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, all of whom wanted Howard University to become a center for research and scholarship on African American life and culture. Undaunted by the initial opposition, Locke secured approval to present his material in the spring of 1915 outside the curriculum in a series of public lectures, under the auspices of the Howard Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Social Science Club. 5

Delivered again in 1916, the series was a success. As Locke paced the stage for several minutes before beginning, the hall filled as people slowly came in from the heavy rain, hung up their raincoats, and settled into the hardwood seats of the lecture hall in Carnegie Library. The stenographer, a white George Washington University law student Locke had hired to record the lectures, sharpened his pencils and readied his pads while the compulsively punctual Locke looked nervously at his watch. By the time Locke delivered his opening remarks shortly after 4 p.m., the right people were there: Kelly Miller, the dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, and Lewis Moore, the dean of Locke's own Teachers College had arrived. 6

Begun on the last Monday of March and continued each afternoon of the following four Mondays in April, Locke's lectures laid out his new sociological theory that race was not a biological but a historical phenomenon. Racial characteristics were not, as scientific racialists asserted, innate or permanent: "Anthropological factors are in themselves subject to change and perfectly unreliable as clues to any sociological

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meaning of the term `race'[.]" Racial inequalities did exist but were unrelated to biological or anthropological factors, and instead "should be traced to historical causes and regarded as factors of a people's history." Even more dramatically, Locke argued that observers were wrong when they claimed that racism was inevitable and automatic: racism was a variable phenomenon, he observed, changing over time in response to economic, political, and demographic forces. Racism, or race practice as Locke called it, was not an instinctive response of American whites to blacks, but a "cultivated" phenomenon used by elites to foment tension and subjugate the less powerful. Locke not only cited American racial practices, but linked them to European imperialism, to anti-Semitism, and to discrimination against eastern Europeans in western Europe. After debunking common race creeds, Locke concluded his lectures by calling on "Afro-Americans" to develop their own race consciousness, like European ethnic minorities, as a powerful tool of advancement. Although race was an "ethnic fiction," it had survived, and would continue to survive, he told his listeners, because functionally, race consciousness gave groups a sense of "social solidarity" that aided their ethnic competition for power. He drew particular attention to artistic and cultural movements for self-determination in Ireland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland as models for the positive cultural consciousness he hoped African Americans would develop.

Locke's lectures were meditations on the worsening state of race relations in America. By 1916 the white South had segregated most public institutions, had denied blacks the legal right to vote, and had terrorized blacks with lynchings and race riots. When southern blacks migrated north during World War I to take jobs in St. Louis, Chicago, Pittsburgh, and Washington, D.C., they were met by more race riots both during and after the war. Even educated blacks such as Locke found the dining rooms of restaurants and dressing rooms of department stores closed to them in the nation's capital. And as if that were not enough, Woodrow Wilson, upon entering the White House, began to make segregation national by separating black and white workers in the federal government. In 1915 Wilson had D.W. Griffith's racist film of Reconstruction, The Birth of a Nation, shown in the White House. Later that year Colonel William Joseph Simmons of Atlanta, Georgia would revive the Ku Klux Klan after viewing the same film. 7

Racist theorizing was on the rise by 1916 as well. Early twentieth century biological racists argued that immutable differences existed

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among the races, that blacks were biologically and permanently inferior to whites, and that Western civilization would decline if unrestricted intermixture occurred between blacks and whites. Some were Social Darwinists, such as Frederick Hoffman, a statistician working for the American Economic Association, who, in Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro (1896), used the flawed 1890 census to predict that blacks would soon die out in the Darwinian struggle of the survival of the fittest. Others were the intellectual heirs of Count de Gobineau, a nineteenth-century racist, whose theory that too much racial intermixture had brought about the decline of European civilizations was even more popular than Social Darwinism in 1916. His classic work, Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines (1853-55) was abridged, translated, and published in the United States in 1915 as The Inequality of the Human Races. Four years earlier, the Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, a racist history written by Gobineau's disciple Houston Chamberlain, had also been translated and published in America. Paul Barringer, a University of Virginia professor, seemed inspired by Gobineau and Chamberlain when he wrote that blacks were in the process of genetic degeneration into criminal and immoral behavior following emancipation. These works rationalized the effort to segregate and disfranchise the black population, and they even suggested that the white population had a right to quarantine blacks to protect civilization. 8

Nevertheless, contrary views on race, black character, and the societal consequences of racial interaction began to be heard in the first decades of the twentieth century, mainly from the pubescent disciplines of sociology and anthropology. The founders of the American school of sociology, such as Franklin Giddings, Charles Cooley, and Edward Ross, argued that the "inferior" traits of black people were caused by the environment and that blacks possessed the capacity to become more civilized. These sociologists were pessimistic, however, about changing the racist caste psychology of the white South. For these progressives, black character might be "reformed," but not white opposition to integration and to black advancement. William I. Thomas of the University of Chicago argued that the racial antipathy of the whites was tantamount to an inborn instinct, and was therefore fixed and unamenable to rational persuasion for progressive change. 9

Opinion among black intellectuals was divided as well. After Booker T. Washington's death in 1915, most black intellectuals agreed with the demand for black political and social equality, but few agreed on the

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best means of achieving it. Some intellectuals, such as T. Thomas Fortune and John S. Durham, eschewed a racial analysis of the black situation in America and argued that African Americans represented a distinct social class. Although this class was unique because it had been enslaved, it was engaged in the same struggle as other white workers. 10 Like white progressives, these black intellectuals saw black advancement as a question of the freedman's ability to assimilate Anglo-American technical civilization as skilled individuals. Other intellectuals such as Alexander Crummell, John Bruce, and W. E. B. Du Bois believed that African Americans needed a positive conception of race to restore black self-esteem in the aftermath of slavery and Reconstruction. 11 Du Bois, a sociologist with a Ph.D. in history from Harvard University, questioned whether black culture should be sacrificed for the sake of social improvement. In "The Conservation of the Races" (1897), Du Bois argued that blacks shared political and economic values with other Americans but retained a unique spiritual temperament. 12 Race seemed permanent in Du Bois's view: "[I]n our calmer moments we must acknowledge that human beings are divided into races; that in this country the two most extreme types of the world's races have met." 13 Du Bois could not explain scientifically the existence of a distinctive beautiful black culture without positing a transhistorical concept of race: "[W]hile they perhaps transcend scientific definition, [races] nevertheless, are clearly defined to the eye of the Historian and Sociologist." 14 That position logically undercut the environmentalist argument that race differences were mutable and that blacks were thoroughly assimilable into Western society.

Most important to Locke's research, however, was the work of Franz Boas, the father of American anthropology, whose early studies of racial traits and whose pioneer volume, The Mind of Primitive Man (1911), revolutionized theories of race and culture. His paper "The Instability of Race Types," delivered in 1911 at the Universal Race Congress in London, established that physical characteristics of the races changed along with changes in the environment. Based on research he had undertaken for the U. S. Immigration Commission on the so-called new immigrants from southern and eastern Europe, Boas argued that physical traits of immigrants changed after years in the American environment and tended to approximate the American standard. Boas also asserted the mental and cultural plasticity of immigrants undergoing Americanization. Even more profoundly, Boas's pioneer work, The

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Mind of Primitive Man, also published in 1911, deflated the Social Darwinist notion that non-Western societies represented primitive or earlier stages of evolutionary development. Dismissing the Social Darwinist belief in a hierarchical scale of culture on which various races could be ranked, Boas argued that each group possessed a culture, or set of beliefs, values, and practices, that was valid on its own terms. Civilization, according to Boas, was not advanced in isolation through independent inventions as the Social Darwinists claimed, but by the diffusion of ideas from one group or individual to another. Cultural interaction was the key to civilization building, and Boas's work moved anthropology away from studying the physical forms of various peoples to conducting fieldwork among non-Western cultures. 15

In 1916, however, Boas's work was known only to a handful of Americans: the diffusion of Boas's ideas would come through his professorship at Columbia University, where he would train a generation of graduate students, such as Melville Herskovits, Ruth Benedict, and Margaret Mead, who would popularize his work in the 1930s and 1940s. But in the 1910s Locke was the intellectual who most fully comprehended the implications of Boas's theories for African Americans. Locke realized that this material revolutionized racial science by shifting the burden of proof onto the racists and taking from them the sanction of anthropology. Moreover, in these lectures, Locke presented what historian Thomas Gossett has stated was most needed by the "defenders of the Negro" during the World War I era -- "a direct challenge to the intellectual bankruptcy of racist theory. Without such a challenge, one which would make sense to the hard-boiled disciplines of biology, anthropology, sociology, and psychology, the battle to improve the status of the Negro was a thankless and almost hopeless task." 16

This challenge Locke supplied. In lecture 1, "The Theoretical and Scientific Conceptions of Race," Locke utilized Boas's work to argue that anthropology had been unable to isolate any static factors of race. Race was not a fixed, biological entity because the physical characteristics of racial groups changed with alterations in social and cultural environment and even varied considerably within groups. Going even further than Boas had in 1911, Locke asserted that biology had no influence on race types. Race was simply another word for a social or national group that shared a common history or culture and occupied a geographical region. Race was culture, because "every civilization produces

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its [own] type." This formulation actually anticipated Ruth Benedict's Patterns of Culture (1934), in which she described races as so much putty in the hands of culture. 17 In a sense, then, Locke was standing racialist theories of culture on their heads: rather than particular races creating Culture, it was culture -- social, political, and economic processes -- that produced racial character.

Locke can be credited, therefore, with removing race from its biological basis and putting it squarely on a cultural foundation. Boas continued to believe that hereditary factors played a role in race, whereas Locke had extended Boas's observations of racial variability into a thoroughgoing environmentalist view that there were "no static factors of race." 18 Locke saw that races, as products of culture, were constantly undergoing change. Rather than viewing blacks and whites as extremely different types as Du Bois had done, Locke saw blacks and whites as highly assimilative beings: blacks had assimilated Anglo-American culture to a large degree, just as whites had imbibed African American culture. Pre-Boasian theories of culture claimed that an inherited racial genius created Western civilization, a position that Du Bois inadvertently reinforced when he argued that black culture was a product of a black "genius." The ongoing process of cultural exchange and interaction under slavery had made white and black Americans basically similar from a cultural standpoint. Whatever was distinctive about black culture was a product of the particular historical and cultural conditions of black life in America and the cultural characteristics Africans had brought with them on the slave ships.

Yet Locke's theory diverged sharply from Boas's in two ways. First, Locke differed from Boas on the question of the value of race consciousness. Boas believed that the solution to the racial problem required that we deemphasize race in modern life and assimilate ethnic groups totally into the dominant American stock. 19 But Locke wished to retain the concept of race. He did not accept the proposition that race was either a permanent biological entity or nothing at all: people often possessed a race or group sense that contributed to group esteem and power. Second, Locke moved beyond the cultural relativism of Boas to analyze race within the context of modern imperialism. For Locke, race was not simply a theoretical question, but a practical issue affecting social relations in the United States. Although American anthropology under Boas criticized intellectual racism in the early twentieth century, it never produced a comprehensive critique of Western imperialism, which was

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rapidly absorbing non-Western peoples into what Immanuel Wallerstein called the "world system." 20 Locke recognized that for peoples of color in the twentieth century the issue of race was linked to the reality of modern imperialism and saw how that imperialism affected their lives and cultures.

Locke's Race Contacts is exciting because it addressed that issue in lecture 2, "The Political and Practical Conception of Race." Locke placed the discussion of race within the context of European imperialism: race defined one's relationship to power under modern imperialism. Ideas of race might be mythic constructions of reality, but they were rooted in a race practice of discriminatory treatment that had existed since ancient times. As Locke put it, "The practices of race are world old, and only the theory is modern." Imperialism was the practice of race, the domination of one group by another group, which invoked the ancient kinship sense of "blood is thicker than water" or of "us" versus "them" to give European nations a sense of solidarity (the "French race" was a popular construction of the time). Such conflicts in the ancient world had been merely ethnic competition for scarce resources; however, in the modern world they were fueled mainly by economic competition between nation states that used race consciousness to justify exploitation of others. Modern imperialism, then, was a new system of exploitation, one that organized power on the basis of color: only since the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century expansion of Europe through the slave trade had color become the prime indicator of racial status in the modern world. In addition, modern imperialism relied on racial theories to justify its practices: non-Western peoples were defined as culturally inferior and thus deserving of conquest and exploitation. Under such circumstances, even missionaries became insidious tools of imperialism, as they consciously or unconsciously devalued indigenous cultures and created markets for Western goods by bringing a "superior" Christian religion and culture to the "natives." Notions of racial inferiority, therefore, directly fueled the economic development of the West and the underdevelopment of non-Western peoples.

Locke approached race as Karl Marx had analyzed class -- as the vortex of modern social relations. For Marx, classes resulted from the mode of production in a society, and thus were dynamic, changing with changes in the organization of production, such that a people were divided into lord and serf, landlord and tenant, or capitalist and worker depending

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on the mode of production that dominated the economy of a society. For Locke modern races resulted from the praxis of modern imperialism, which defined as "inferior" those races such as Arabs, Africans, East Indians, and African Americans who were unable to free themselves from colonial subordination. Even those peoples such as African Americans who were not directly subject to an empire were subjected to the imperial attitude on the part of Anglo-Americans. Imperialists exploited race differences to sustain political, social or economic disparities between European and non-European colonials. Such disparities were real, as an honest analysis of the conditions of life under colonialism revealed. As Marx himself observed of American slavery, "the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating system . . . [for the] production of surplus-labour." 21 By the early twentieth century imperialists were able to capitalize on race differences to overwork Asians, Africans, and other non-Europeans and wring more surplus labor from them than from European laborers. Such an economic advantage fueled the "race practice" of imperialism. Although Locke did not attempt the rigorous investigation of the economic origins of imperialism that V. I. Lenin provided in Imperialism: The Last Stage of Capitalism (1917), Locke's analysis did anticipate Lenin's acknowledgment in the "Preliminary Draft Theses on the National and Colonial Questions" (1920). There Lenin backed the notion that oppressed colonial and national minorities such as blacks in America had a right to self-determination. Locke's lectures provided one of our earliest analyses of colonialism from the standpoint of the colonized. 22

Locke extended his critique to the subject of race conflict within a society in lecture 3, "The Phenomena and Laws of Race Contacts." Here he looked at the surface issue of color and asked what it represented. What historical forces had made color relationships the way they were? The answer lay beneath the appearance of race conflict, because "all such problems and issues originate, after all, not in the mind, but in the practical problems of human living." In many cases racial categories were simply class categories that had become hereditary. Economic competition between ethnic groups was often the underlying cause of racial conflict and perhaps the key to understanding why racial conflict increased or subsided in relation to poor or good economic conditions. Indeed, one of the reasons for the ebb and flow of racial feelings and conflicts was that elites manipulated race feelings to divide and control

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the working classes. Locke's perception of how economic conflict shaped race relations led to his most important observation about race contacts within a society: race feelings changed over time in response to changes in historical conditions. Racism actually changed, or passed through distinct phases, often in response to varying economic conditions in a society.

Yet in lecture 3 Locke also moved beyond the notion that race was solely a function of economics: racial feelings also changed with the removal of formal social barriers to contact or with dramatic changes in population. Often such alterations triggered a racial response from those peoples who believed themselves to be in control. The relation of race to population suggested that something more than simply class, and perhaps even more than naked political power, was at stake in the reactions of race. Racism was not only a reflection of class interests but also a cultural system that reflected the social psychology of a people. Race feelings often intensified with perceived changes in social status. Ironically, even attempts to reform race relations, such as the passage of laws or amendments to the Constitution, failed to eliminate race problems and instead elicited new racial responses that propelled relations into another phase. Legal recognition of race distinctions sometimes fixed in time an attitude or practice that might otherwise have passed off the map of racial practice. Most important, the dominant group in a society, despite its political and economic power, could not completely control race contacts: the submerged groups could assimilate into or distinctively color the culture of the society despite such restrictive measures as segregation. In an analysis that was again indebted to Boas, Locke observed that cultural exchange between the dominant and subordinate races could not be arrested, with the result that the national identity or "civilization type" produced was inevitably a joint product.

Race contacts were not, therefore, simply a mystification of class antagonism, as many twentieth-century Marxists claimed, but a complex set of responses by groups to beliefs, values, and cultural perceptions that sometimes did not follow economic interest. Sometimes a region such as the South, or a class such as white workers, acted against its own economic interests in a seemingly blind attempt to maintain a benighted racial superiority. The question was not whether racism was a trick played by capitalists on the working classes, but why race was such an effective divisive tactic. Sometimes racial violence or discrimination was a response to the greater intimacy between groups brought on by

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economic consolidation. Locke invoked a rudimentary version of the "psychological strain" theory -- that ideologies take hold in communities or individuals that feel threatened -- to account for the attractiveness of racist attitudes. 23 Such stress had existed since the European expansion of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, which had disrupted traditional hierarchies as the social standing of elites became more tenuous. As had de Tocqueville before him, Locke argued that race prejudice was particularly prevalent in democratic societies, where, in the absence of aristocratic -- and hence, hereditary -- barriers, society created analogous ones in race discrimination. Race revived dormant but deep associations with tribe and nation, especially during periods of group stress. Such feelings spread and infected the entire group when it felt its collective survival threatened. Race, therefore, was really a tribal or national sense that had nothing to do with color.

To support this view, Locke compared American racism with European ethnic conflict in lecture 4, "Modern Race Creeds and Their Fallacies." Racism was a special version of ethnic tension, different in degree but not in kind from the ethnic conflicts that erupted among Europeans. Locke cited European anti-Semitism, French-German tensions in the Rhineland and in the Alsace-Lorraine district, and Austrian discrimination against the Slavic peoples as evidence of intra-European prejudice. In one case Locke related how a Lithuanian could "pass" and obtain service in Austrian restaurants if he could disguise his accent. If the accent revealed the Lithuanian's ethnicity, however, then he would encounter discrimination, "showing after all [that] any arbitrary, artificial factor can control the situation [even though] color by its very obviousness makes the [reaction] more virulent than perhaps any other single factor. Those, therefore, who are subject to a color discrimination are simply the easy victims of a force in human society which operates along lines of other factors wherever there is this conscious indoctrination of race."

Turning to Europe also provided Locke with comparative confirmation of his observation that ethnic tensions lay dormant until they were cultivated, even indoctrinated, in the population by "a certain class . . . interested in its deliberate maintenance [, interested] that the system of racial hatred should not die out even after the growth of it has died down." This situation was definitely the case in the Rhineland and in the Alsace-Lorraine district, which witnessed "a deliberate outcropping of that same kind of [group antipathy caused by external] influence that

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[in its] most virulent form cannot be more virulent than the question of racial [conflict,] proving it seems, our view [that] indoctrination can operate to such an extent that over certain issues racial antipathies can actually spring up between divergent sects or divisions of the same race or the same ethnic strain."

Locke's parallelism between ethnic and racial conflict received unexpected confirmation in 1916. Just six months after Locke delivered his lectures, Madison Grant published The Passing of the Great Race, which argued that the different European regions were populated by different races. 24 Europeans were not of one race, but consisted of the Alpines of eastern Europe, the Mediterraneans of southern Europe, and the precious Nordics of northern Europe and Scandinavia. Advocating that America adopt a strict immigration policy, Grant repeated Gobineau's warning that societies declined when they allowed too much intermixture with inferior race groups. Following the logic of Locke's theory, Grant's book signaled that as competitive industrial capitalism had drawn larger numbers of immigrants to the nation, an intensification of racial feelings and now formalized creeds of ethnic difference had emerged to justify discriminatory practices. Grant's book also signified the changing climate of scientific opinion: Grant made few references to physical characteristics, perhaps in recognition of the decreasing foundation for such analyses in contemporary anthropological circles.

In lecture 4 Locke abandoned the purely descriptive posture of the social scientist and began to critique racial creeds. Just as Marx had observed that the dominant class seeks to stabilize its position by creating an ideology that rationalizes its position, so too Locke knew that racial creeds not only justified dominance but encouraged subordinate groups to accept such dominance. Exposing the faulty reasoning of the predominant race creeds of his day had the long-range effect of demystifying the claims of intellectual racists. But Locke also believed that race creeds would persist in society as long as the practice of racism was successful and profitable in competitive industrial societies. Although like some early twentieth-century Marxists, Locke believed that the competitive industrial system would ultimately make racial segregation economically anachronistic, he also knew that the virus of racism had spread so completely in the United States that it would continue to exist despite countervailing economic pressures. Racial attitudes would remain for a long time, even though they might eventually die out once society transcended the exploitive competitiveness that characterized

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the period of European expansion and imperialism. Were not blacks condemned to lose in competition with other groups for the rewards of American life, because they lacked the political and economic power to alter prevailing American practice? Certainly Locke was no revolutionary, and he did not advocate the overthrow of the American social order. He noted that society typically sought a modus vivendi between contending groups: the currently accepted American solution was segregation, which even some blacks, such as Booker T. Washington, tried to turn to their advantage. Political and legal equality would be realized, Locke believed, but only after historical conditions had become more favorable to blacks than they were in 1916. What could blacks do besides wait for change or attack the American social order?

Locke's answer to that question appears in his last lecture 5, "Racial Progress and Race Adjustment," and followed two lines of analysis. The first suggested that the resolution of racial divisions came when a society develops a "civilization type" that melds the various social races or social groups. Because "every civilization tends to mould its own type," there was evidently an American type: Boas had argued that the physical characteristics of immigrants changed in the American environment and moved closer to those of the typical American. Locke argued that Jews and blacks were successfully assimilating the dominant culture's mores, values, and behaviors, and he recommended that African Americans continue to assimilate in order to progress. Cultural conformity was a must for the survival of any minority, Locke argued, and he seemed to nod to Booker T. Washington in using the word "adjustment" to characterize race progress as dependent on the African American's willingness to adopt American middle-class values. Locke's notion of a "civilization type" also embodied the Enlightenment's ideal of progress toward a cosmopolitan "civilization" that transcended national and racial boundaries. In such a world, willingness to assimilate, in terms of the exchange of cultural values, would become the key to "culture-citizenship."

But Locke rejected total assimilation as a solution to America's racial problems. Comparing Japanese and African American attitudes toward Western assimilation, Locke commended the Japanese for taking the technical insights of the West without repudiating their own traditions. Locke was a pluralist, who believed in the right of a culture to pursue its own development, to be taken on its own terms, and to resist being crushed into unity and conformity. Like Johann Herder, Locke saw the value of belonging to a group and preserving one's own culture. 25 The

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values of the minority group were neither strictly commensurate with nor always inferior to those of the dominant group in a society, and they should not be trampled in the rush to assimilate. In a passage that showed some indebtedness to W. E. B. Du Bois, Locke called for a conservation of the best attributes of the race, by instilling in the "representative classes" a sense of race solidarity and loyalty. Racial pride for the group, Locke suggested, was the social analogy of self-respect for the individual: it was a powerful ideological tool for building group esteem and solidarity in competitive societies. That race was a biological fiction should not prevent African Americans from appropriating its more legitimate, social meaning -- as social race, as a metaphor for group or national identity -- to empower their own development. Locke argued that this stimulation of race pride was not paradoxical, but actually the key to stimulating the self-respect of the group to strive to meet the common standard of the society as a whole. For in an analysis that paralleled Marx's distinction between a class in-itself and for-itself, Locke argued that African Americans could not simply remain a race held together by common condition; they must become self-consciously a race for-itself, bound together by a common consciousness of its real position as a group in modern social relations.

What distinguished Locke's recommendation of race consciousness in 1916 was his emphasis on the arts and letters as the vehicle for African American racial progress. Drawing again from European examples, Locke argued that "[t]he Celtic [and] the Pan-Slavic movement[s] in arts and letters -- movements by which the submerged classes are coming to their expression in art -- seem to be the forerunners of that kind of recognition which they are ultimately striving for, namely, recognition [of an] economic, [a] civic, and [a] social sort; and these [movements] are the gateways through which culture-citizenship can be finally reached." Like European minorities, African Americans could compensate for their thwarted political aspirations for self-determination by empowering themselves through a cultural ideology. Through art blacks could build social solidarity and race consciousness, without overtly threatening the white power structure. Moreover, by developing their cultural productivity, blacks would contradict the notion that African Americans were a people without culture, whose only choice was complete assimilation. Here, then, was Locke's theory of the social use of art to attain culture-citizenship, which would become the basis for his advocacy of the New Negro Renaissance of the 1920s.

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Locke's recommendations showed his pragmatism, just as his rejection of assimilation showed his pluralism. As did William James, Locke saw the world as an open pluriverse in which humanity had the ability to shape its world. Thus, while he drew the outlines of a science of racial interaction, he rejected, again as did James, any determinism, especially a racial determinism which, on the one hand, bound blacks to biology, and on the other, stultified black activism because of the socially unyielding power of racism. Despite his appreciation of Marxism and his recognition that racist ideas and attitudes followed social practice, Locke was unwilling to rule out the possibility that even blacks, though seemingly powerless, could not alter the social situation through their own actions. Indeed, his analysis had shown that assimilation and exchange between blacks and whites had continued, even flourished, under segregation despite attempts to control contacts between the races. Culture did not always follow power, but often was an indirect way for the racial minority to subvert and sometimes to control the racial majority. The American slave, for example, had shaped the master's language, folkways, and general culture in the antebellum South and had contributed significantly to the American "civilization type," even though it was generally unrecognized and unacknowledged in Locke's day. 26 But by arguing for the creation and recognition of a distinctive African American culture, even when Locke's own analysis reflected the over-whelming assimilationist stance of most black people, Locke was acting like a good pragmatist and inventing a racial tradition whether or not one existed. For pragmatically, blacks needed a culture to enhance their status and bolster their competition with other groups through art. 27

Locke's pragmatic approach to the problem of race reminds us of James's approach to the problem of war in "The Moral Equivalent of War": Locke offered a cultural equivalent of race to his audience, both as a way for blacks to empower themselves and as a substitute for the more pernicious forms of race feeling and practice. 28 Just as James sought to create a substitute for the martial spirit that he felt would also remain in humanity, so too Locke envisioned a racially enriched art and culture as a healthy substitute for the vicious aspects of a racial instinct he believed would be around for a long time.

Unfortunately, Locke's innovative approach to race had little immediate impact in 1916. When he concluded his final lecture, there was little response from the Howard community, which was actually more concerned with other issues. During the second week of Locke's lectures,

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a student strike had erupted on campus and had consumed the attention of the faculty, the deans, and the board of trustees for nearly two weeks. This strike was a dress rehearsal for the more serious protest of 1925, when students again rebelled against what they believed was arbitrary discipline at Howard. With Booker T. Washington dead, the New Negro was in a protest mood, and Du Bois and the NAACP dominated African American thought. Locke's posture of scientific objectivity, on the one hand, and cultural expressiveness, on the other, was not the political fashion. As his friend Montgomery Gregory teasingly wrote to him after his lectures, "We wished for the sociological expert with his personal disinterestedness and notebook!!!" 29

Of all those who attended, Kelly Miller may have been the person who most appreciated Locke's contribution, although even he had been only sporadically in attendance. Miller had written a scathing critique of President Wilson's policy of segregation and had lectured before the Washington, D.C., Mu-So-Lit Club in 1915 on the impact of World War I on race relations. 30 Miller sympathized with Locke's advocacy of increased race consciousness and respected the scholarship Locke had reviewed in compiling the lectures. Miller had approached Locke about lecturing in a course on sociology Miller planned for the fall, which would include lectures by Robert Park, the Chicago sociologist, whose work Locke had reviewed in his lectures. 31

But Locke declined the invitation. Now that the lectures were over and his pamphlet, Syllabus to an Extension Course of Lectures on Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations, had been published, Locke was moving on: that fall he would be in residence at Harvard University, where he would earn his Ph.D. in philosophy within two years. Advancement for him lay in the direction of increased academic prestige, not continued lecturing on the widening influence of imperialism and capitalism on race practice. In the postwar years, he would be known as the dean of the New Negro Renaissance, but not for his pioneering sociological theory of race. Although an abbreviated form of the lectures would be given at Fisk University in 1928 and ideas from the lectures would inform his anthropology and sociology articles published in obscure journals, the lectures would remain unpublished and unnoticed for the rest of Locke's professional life.

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Alain Locke 1885-1954

St. Clair Drake has said that a man proposes the kind of revolution his temperament permits. 32 Yet the cultural revolution Locke proposed seems paradoxical given his sociological analysis of race. After showing that race was a myth, both as a physical homogeneity and as a predictor of social behavior, Locke appears to resurrect race as a source of liberation from oppression in America. Perhaps even more paradoxical is his choice of art as the avenue for this racial salvation. After documenting that racial attitudes are largely reflective of racial practice, which is driven by economic and political forces, how could Locke believe that art and literature could alter black existence in a racist society? Even more mysterious, Locke never published his bold sociological lectures. Why did Locke not develop them further into a full-length book later in his career?

Perhaps Locke's biography will help resolve some of these paradoxes, for the five lectures of Race Contacts may have been an attempted resolution of a series of personal yet ideological conflicts that had roots in what Erik Erikson calls the psychosocial predicament. 33 Locke delivered these lectures when he was thirty years old, at a time when he was fashioning a mature social role for himself as well as defining his intellectual identity in America. Locke appears to have been struggling not only with the problem of race in modern society but also with the problem of social role for a black intellectual. How was a Harvard- and Oxford-educated black intellectual to improve the black situation, to realize his own potential for individual success, and to prosper in American society?

Locke had been a brilliant student in elementary and secondary schools, inspired partly by the model of achievement of black Philadelphians. That city had produced Henry O. Tanner, internationally renowned artist; Richard T. Greener, the first black graduate of Harvard College; and Dr. Caroline Still Anderson, the first woman physician of Philadelphia. Locke's parents were school teachers, increasing the weight of tradition behind his decision to become an educator; also, a professional career was this class's chief defense against prejudice: to succeed proved oneself the equal of whites and brought esteem to the race. Race representativeness meant that blacks should always put their best foot forward and present a genteel view of black life to the world.

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Cultured individuals contradicted prevailing white opinion that all blacks were uneducated and ill-mannered. By attending Harvard, Oxford, and the University of Berlin, Locke distinguished himself and his race and fulfilled the goals of the black middle class. 34

Indeed, when Locke arrived at Harvard College in 1904, he epitomized his suggestion in Race Contacts that successful minorities must assimilate the civilization in which they live. Majoring in English literature and philosophy, Locke was an Anglophile whose dress, manners, and demeanor made him a Black Victorian. 35 Intellectually, Locke still believed in an Arnoldian hierarchy of culture, that those who could appreciate the best that had been thought and created were superior to those who could not. Yet the paradoxes of being African American in the midst of Anglo-American culture were beginning to present themselves. He took courses from such professors of English as Barrett Wendell, who, though a Francophile, argued that modern literature had been a series of national literatures based on national traditions since the Renaissance, and that despite its current inferiority, American culture needed its own indigenous tradition. That concept inspired Locke to begin to imagine what a black literary tradition would look like and to think through how African Americans could make a distinctive literary contribution to American culture. Locke understood early in his career that if he wanted to become a black critic, he needed a black tradition to stand behind him. In the socially integrated world of Harvard, Locke began to develop a theory of the importance of loyalty to one's racial tradition for African American writers. Wendell, with his notions that the nineteenth century was a period of nationality in literature, encouraged Locke to think creatively about how he could create conditions for the emergence of an African American tradition in literature. 36

Locke's study of philosophy as a Harvard undergraduate strengthened his sense of purpose without removing the creative tension between assimilationism and nationalism in his thought. From George Herbert Palmer, Locke imbibed the notion that the self cannot realize itself in isolation, but must devote itself to a higher, universal cause in order to achieve a larger selfhood. Locke's philosophical mentor, Josiah Royce, inspired him to give primacy to transcendental unity over empirical multiplicity in his view of philosophy and social reality, and to consider differences, even racial ones, as primarily matters of degree rather than of kind. And Horace Meyer Kallen, a Jewish graduate assistant in a course in Greek philosophy that Locke took as a senior, exposed

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him to the pragmatic pluralism of William James, as Locke did not take a course from James as a Harvard undergraduate. Kallen, who saw himself as the heir to William James, recalled having a series of conversations with Locke about the significance of racial differences, dialogues that began at Harvard and continued into the following year when both were at Oxford University. The phrase "cultural pluralism," or the right of ethnic groups to maintain their cultural distinctiveness, apparently emerged out of their conversations during 1907-08. 37

But Locke does not appear to have fully embraced cultural pluralism at Harvard College. Kallen recalled that Locke would not give up the idea that different ethnic groups would ultimately assimilate into a universal "Man" (or what Locke himself would later call the "civilization type" of a society in Race Contacts). Although Locke never completely abandoned the hope that a "New Man," as de Crevecoeur had put it, 38 might emerge out of the interaction of races in America, he did become more sympathetic to the notion of cultural pluralism, especially after he went to Oxford as the first African American Rhodes Scholar in 1907. At Oxford, Locke confronted blatant and unyielding racism for the first time in his life. Rhodes Scholars from the southern United States succeeded in having him barred from the traditional Thanksgiving Dinner celebration held by the American Club at Oxford. Locke developed a deep resentment for these southerners and for some of the British, who were also very color conscious. Even though he enjoyed more cordial relations with his English undergraduates, most of the English elite not only snubbed him but also other colonial students. Here was the "Imperial Training School" Locke referred to in lecture 2 of Race Contacts. And here was the reality of difference, not as an abstract philosophical principle, but as a relentlessly enforced practice of dominance and subservience that made his Oxford years painful ones. 39

Such experiences undermined the credibility of the black bourgeoisie's faith in assimilation as the key to success. The English, in his eyes, were no more cosmopolitan than the ignorant American southerners: both used power to block access to material and spiritual resources and justified such action by claims of inherent superiority. Contact with colonial students at Oxford, such as H. E. Alaily, president of the Egyptian Society of England; Pa Ka Isaka Seme, a black South African student of law; and Har Dayal, an idealistic revolutionary from India, helped Locke to place his experience and the black problem in a larger context. Not only were they responsible for his knowledge of

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imperialism and colonialism, but they may have introduced him to socialism and anticolonialist critiques of imperialism. Har Dayal, whom Locke met in connection with the Oxford Cosmopolitan Club, became a Marxist revolutionary in exile from India. Others, such as his close friend Seme, were intellectual nationalists, who saw themselves as developing culture and nationalism among their people when they returned home from Oxford. These intellectuals were painfully aware of the disparity between European and colonial social development, yet sensitive to the destruction of their native cultures under colonialism. As men of culture, their decisions to affirm their cultures was an effort to save their personal psyches as well as articulate the conditions for a national rebirth of their people. Embracing race consciousness and placing his own experience within the context of world wide imperialism, Locke began to conceive of a future role for himself as a leader of his own people. 40

Fed up with Oxford and the English, but unwilling to return to the United States, he left England in 1910 and settled in Berlin, where he attended the University of Berlin, and traveled throughout eastern Europe. At the university, he continued the study of Kantian philosophy that he had begun at Harvard, but most important, learned the fundamentals of modern sociology from the lectures of Professor Georg Simmel that he attended at the university. Locke also studied the works of Professor Gustav Schmoller, who was sympathetic to the Social Democratic movement in Germany. It was in Germany that Locke was more thoroughly exposed to the techniques and ideology of modern sociology and to the concept of class conflict that emerged in his later lectures. Under the influence of these German social scientists, Locke moved away from the notion that social groupings were derivative of human nature to the notion that races and nationalities are products of social forces. Europe also stimulated his appetite for the study of race contacts when London hosted the first Universal Race Congress in July 1911. Locke appears to have attended; he cited Franz Boas and Felix von Luschan, who lectured at the conference, in Race Contacts. 41

Although Locke traveled in eastern Europe, where he observed some of the European ethnic conflict he discussed in lecture 4, he was unable to finance a research trip through Europe, Africa, and the Middle East to study race contacts. Lacking an income in Europe, Locke returned to the United States in 1911 and began to build his reputation as a black spokesperson. In "The Negro and a Race Tradition" (1911), a public

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lecture delivered to both the American Negro Historical Society in Philadelphia and the Yonkers Negro Society for Historical Research in New York, he recommended that blacks develop a race consciousness based on their cultural ties with African civilization. As he stated later in lecture 5 of Race Contacts, blacks had a right to a cultural sense of belongingness that extended to all of the black diaspora; they should not sacrifice that right in the struggle to win acceptance in white America. 42 By calling for a race consciousness among blacks, Locke worked within lines of reasoning well established among educated blacks. Certainly, John Edward Bruce, cofounder of the Yonkers Society and an elder statesman of American black nationalism, found Locke's views consistent with his own. 43 Du Bois had urged race consciousness in his American Negro Academy address, "The Conservation of the Races," as early as 1897. But Locke was much more skeptical about the permanency of race differences or the presence of race consciousness in the black population than either Du Bois or Bruce. Locke's advocacy of the race ideal was an accommodation to his African American audience: he knew his comparative perspective on race attitudes would not be popular, but advocacy of race loyalty would. In the words of Arthur Fauset, Locke's friend and colleague, "Locke made himself into an Africanist." 44 Like a good pragmatist, Locke voiced the sentiment of raciality as the key to black advancement in America: blacks must use the myth of race to promote their development, just as nineteenth-century Europeans had used it to promote their own.

Moreover, his ideology of race consciousness was quite consistent with Booker T. Washington's conservative plan for black self-development under segregation. This was no accident: he was professionally indebted to Washington as well as intellectually sympathetic to the program of the "sage of Tuskegee." Washington had given his blessing to Locke's comparative study of race contacts in 1910 and then had invited the Rhodes Scholar to accompany him on a train trip through Florida in the summer of 1912. Through Washington's intercession, Locke secured his position at Howard University in the fall of that year. Locke praised Washington's leadership role in the black community but also began to realize, especially after his abortive attempt to return to Germany in 1914, that he needed a more comprehensive ideology. Washington's faith that black self-development could flourish under segregation was challenged by Locke's growing understanding, gained in Europe, that blacks would be severely constricted by imperialism,

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capitalism, and racism even if they achieved the maximum progress possible under segregation. 45

He returned from Europe in the fall of 1914 to articulate more forcefully his critical feelings about imperialism and race practice. In "The Great Disillusionment," another address before the Yonkers Society on September 26, Locke argued that World War I was a race war, which had broken out between two arms of Anglo-Saxon civilization, England and Germany, over the spoils of empire. 46 Locke was the first African American to argue that imperialism caused the war (a position on which W. E. B. Du Bois would elaborate in more detail in his Atlantic Monthly article, "The African Roots of the War," eight months later). 47 But Locke's most important point was that the war destroyed the ideological justification of imperialism, that is, that imperialism was necessary because it brought a morally superior Anglo-Saxon civilization to "barbaric" peoples. The war proved that the Europeans were just as barbaric, if not more so, than those they had colonized. Rather than a history of unlimited progress, as Social Darwinists had claimed, the story of Anglo-Saxon imperialism was now revealed for what it was -- a greedy grab for wealth and power. No longer could a European nation claim it had a divine right to rule, and no longer did peoples of color owe the West any allegiance for its supposed moral and cultural superiority. He urged his listeners to view their distance from European culture as an asset rather than a liability.

After "The Great Disillusionment," Locke renewed efforts to gain approval for the Race Contacts lecture series by Howard University. Originally, he had begun drafting the lectures in the spring of 1914, but only succeeded in giving them in April and May of 1915 after students of the NAACP campus chapter and Deans Miller of the College of Arts and Sciences and Moore of the Teachers College agitated for them. 48 Continued student interest in the lectures enabled him to repeat the series in March and April of 1916, which was a victory. Probably no other school in America would have allowed him publicly to criticize imperialism and missionarism, on the one hand, and racial ideology and segregation, on the other. But Locke never won approval to teach the course as part of the regular curriculum, even when he volunteered to do so without additional compensation.

Why Howard refused to approve Locke's courses on race relations remains a mystery. However, the answer may lie with its president. From its founding in 1867, Howard's presidents had been mostly conservative

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white ministers who rejected the notion that Howard University was a black institution. The Reverend S. M. Newman, the president in 1916, was particularly discouraging of the idea that Negro or race studies should be developed at Howard. In addition, the American Missionary Association influenced some members of the Howard Board of Trustees, which might explain why Locke apologized in lecture 2 for his view that missionary work was a tool of Western imperialism. Others, such as the young African American Dean Kelly Miller, were enthusiastic and encouraging; even William Sinclair, the Philadelphia physician and board of trustees member, lobbied for Locke's work. But it would be eleven years before Howard University would have its first black president and institutional motivation to develop race studies. In 1916 Locke had to remain content to publish privately his syllabus of the lectures as a pamphlet, after which he took a leave of absence to do graduate work that resulted in a Ph.D. in philosophy from Harvard University. 49

When Locke returned to Howard in 1917, he found the university had mobilized to train officers for segregated units in the Army. America's entry into the war had unleashed a wave of patriotism that swept both black and white communities. Locke's criticism of the war ceased and, in his address to the Howard University freshman class in 1918, he suggested the aftermath of the war might contain new opportunities for the educated black elite. The war had weakened the authority of older aristocracies, he argued in "The Role of the Talented Tenth," with the result that leadership positions in the future might be filled on the basis of merit and talent, rather than blood and race. Even though Locke had declared earlier that the war was a fight for the spoils of colonialism, he, like Du Bois, hoped that black participation in the effort would be rewarded with freedom for Germany's African colonies and better treatment of Negroes in America. 50 But the Treaty of Versailles, the Red Scare, and the violent Red Summer of 1919 dashed these hopes. The Allies refused to extend President Wilson's principle of self-determination to Germany's African colonies; instead, the Allies divided them among themselves. The Bolshevik Revolution in Russia in 1917 and the Third International's 1919 call for workers to seize power around the world frightened the U. S. government. When bombs exploded at the homes of government officials in the spring of 1919, many Americans reacted hysterically and supported the ensuing anti-communist campaign to root out the internal enemy. Anyone expressing unconventional

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opinions was persecuted as a revolutionary. That summer, gangs of white youths and ex-servicemen attacked blacks in American cities, especially those cities that had experienced large immigrations of black people during the war. In Washington, an irresponsible publicity campaign by the Washington Post sparked several days of rioting, during which blacks fought back with unexpected ferocity. Washington remained divided into armed camps for almost two weeks, and in the aftermath of the riot, race antipathies and prejudice hardened. 51

Not surprisingly, Locke, by now a middle-aged professor at Howard University, ceased public discussion of the radical aspects of his theory of race in the aftermath of the war and rioting. At age thirty-five in 1920, Locke had reached the "settling-down age," as Daniel Levinson, the social psychologist describes it. 52 To be a radical would have committed Locke to a vagabond life: there was little future for him at Howard or any other black school in the 1920s if he continued to stress a theory that emphasized the persistence of race and class conflict in a modern capitalist state. There were limits to how critical Locke felt he could be and still perform the role of a black educator. Locke decided to leave radicalism to the students he taught, although even this strategy did not prevent him from getting into trouble: in 1925 he was dismissed from Howard when his support for a fair faculty pay scale and for student demands to end compulsory chapel and ROTC led him to be branded a malcontent by Howard's white president, J. Stanley Durkee. Fortunately, Locke was able to earn a living as an author and a lecturer of the New Negro Renaissance, until 1927, when he was reinstated by the new black president of Howard, Mordecai Johnson. 53

But Locke had gotten the message by 1919: so completely did he drop his critique of American racism that he did not publish anything of significance between 1919 and 1922. Indeed, as Arnold Rampersad has suggested, Locke entered the black literary scene of the 1920s without a clear professional identity: he had not carved out a sphere of research as W. E. B. Du Bois had done. 54 In fact, however, unknown to others Locke had defined a research area. What Locke did in the 1920s was to shift gears professionally, to deemphasize the controversial political and sociological side of his theory, and put into practice the aesthetic program he had outlined in lecture 5 of Race Contacts -- that African Americans should develop a race consciousness based on black art and literature. When a critical mass of black writers began to emerge, Locke wrote a series of articles on contemporary black literature that culminated

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in "Harlem: Mecca of the New Negro," a special issue of the Survey Graphic magazine, published on 1 March 1925, that contained Locke's essays, along with poems, short stories, and essays by black writers of the 1920s. Locke would follow that immensely successful issue, which he had also edited, with a book-length anthology, The New Negro: An Interpretation, published in December 1925. By writing about Harlem and the New Negro, Locke found a public identity as the spokesperson of the New Negro literary movement of the 1920s. 55

The quickening of literary activity among blacks in the mid-1920s was, of course, consistent with Locke's earlier recommendation that blacks develop a race consciousness. "Each generation," he wrote in the Survey Graphic essay, "Enter the New Negro," "will have its creed and that of the present is the belief in the efficacy of collective effort, in race cooperation. This deep feeling of race is at present the mainspring of Negro life." 56 Locke reinvoked earlier analogies between European and African American nationalism to explain the significance of Harlem: "Without pretense to their political significance, Harlem has the same role to play for the New Negro as Dublin has had for the New Ireland or Prague for the New Czechoslovakia." 57 Although Locke did not abandon his Hegelian expectation that this "secondary race consciousness" would ultimately be merged into the "general civilization type," his cultural advocacy of the 1920s emphasized the kind of race nationalism in black literature and culture that he had outlined in lecture 5 of Race Contacts.

In pushing the practical implications of his theory into the forefront, Locke did not completely jettison the insights of the rest of Race Contacts: rather, those perceptions about American race practice undergirded his more literary positions. Like a good social historian, Locke credited the Great Migration of poor blacks into the urban North as the most important factor in the intellectual change of black life: it was the masses who were "leading and the leaders who are following." 58 Similarly, he dismissed the fiction of segregation that "the life of the races is separate" and rejected the notion that the missionary-like philanthropy of white-black relations could be perpetuated in the modern era. 59 He reassured his audience that this new movement was not separatist; instead, it was "a constructive effort to build the obstructions in the stream of his progress into an efficient dam of social energy and power." 60 Ideas continued to follow social practice, as Locke's earlier scientific analysis of race had predicted. The changed social conditions

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of black life had produced a New Negro, who was now on the verge of a true self-consciousness: "Hitherto it must be admitted that American Negroes have been a race more in name than in fact, or to be exact, more in sentiment than in experience. The chief bond between them has been a common condition rather than a common consciousness; a problem in common rather than a life in common. In Harlem, Negro life is seizing upon its first chances for group expression and self-determination." 61

Indeed, the New Negro image was only the most recent of literary images that changed over time and reflected the alteration in the social conditions of black life in America. In "The American Literary Tradition and the Negro" (1926), Locke utilized this theory of the changing nature of racial attitudes to offer one of the first outlines of the changing image of blacks in American literature. 62 Sensing what later historians would document, that the earliest encounter with Africans reflected more an attitude of strangeness than racial repression, Locke charted the shifting images of blacks in American literature as a road map to the functions Africans and later African Americans performed in southern and northern societies. 63 No monolithic stereotype, the black image had changed dramatically from the colonial to the postbellum periods, and would certainly change again after the New Negro period. Now the contemporary period promised that African Americans could begin to define their own image through literary productivity.

Despite Locke's literary pursuits, he continued to follow developments in anthropology and race scholarship, and found time to publish articles in the 1920s that echoed concerns he had voiced in 1916. His 1923 review of Roland Dixon's The Racial History of Man reiterated his criticisms of pseudoscientific studies that crudely attributed cultural accomplishments of groups to their physical characteristics. 64 His 1924 article "The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture" renewed the argument that environment and not heredity was the cause of perceivable differences between groups. 65 But "The Concept of Race as Applied to Social Culture," published in The Howard Review, did not revive his earlier analysis that such false conceptions of race were fueled by the practice of European imperialism.

Instead, Locke developed the cultural side of his theory of race in the 1920s -- that race had a cultural basis, that culturally created differences between groups existed, and that such differences could be recognized without capitulating to racists. Locke could then argue that three hundred

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years of American history had produced a distinctive African American culture that was itself undergoing change. In the 1920s he sought to bring others around to this position. For example, Locke enlisted Melville Herskovits, a Franz Boas student and a prolific critic of pseudoscientific racists, in his effort to bring scholarly recognition to the idea that a distinctive black culture existed in America. Initially, the attempt backfired: when Locke asked Herskovits to document the distinctive cultural life-style of Harlem blacks for the special Harlem issue of Survey Graphic, Herskovits stated in his article that he could see no difference between black and white New Yorkers. Although Locke disagreed with this position, he published the article anyway and continued to discuss the issue with Herskovits. Historian Walter A. Jackson credits such discussions with Locke (and others) with moving Herskovits away from his stark assimilationist position toward an appreciation for African American distinctiveness and a desire to research the persistence of African influences in black American life and culture. 66 Eventually, Herskovits published "The Negro in the New World" in 1930 and his magnum opus, The Myth of the Negro Past, in 1941, which argued for the survival of African cultural forms, even in Harlem. 67

Locke's own seminal contribution to this debate came in 1928, when he published "The Negro's Contribution to American Art and Literature." 68 Like Herskovit's later work, Locke's essay credited Africa as the source of the "basic imaginative background" of African American creativity. But like Guy Johnson in Folk Culture on St. Helena Island, South Carolina (1930), Locke emphasized how completely African and Anglo-American cultures had been syncretized in African American folk culture, although Locke gave more credit to African cultural survivals than did Johnson. 69 Even more provocatively, Locke suggested that much of southern culture was African American and thus symbolic of a kind of cultural victory over the European American: "It is just as important, perhaps more so, to color the humor of a country, or to influence its tempo of life and feeling, or to mould its popular song, dance and folk-tale, as it is to affect its formal poetry or art or music." 70 Having called for a greater African American contribution to American culture in 1911, Locke recorded his recognition in 1928 that such a contribution on the folk level had already occurred. Much of Locke's earlier theory made it possible for him to be flexible as a spokesperson not only for the Negro Renaissance, but also for the view that social change was leading inevitably to greater integration and cultural blending in America.

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But Locke's ascendancy in cosmopolitan literary circles came at a price. Committed as a publicist of the Renaissance to write for a popular audience and to garner white support for the fledgling movement, he left out the hard-nosed criticism of white paternalism and the revealing analogies between race and class conflict that had peppered his earlier work. Locke seemed to fall into doing a history of race contacts rather than a scientific examination of their contemporary operation. Even worse, some of Locke's articles, such as "The Negro's Contribution to American Art and Literature," seemed to lend credence to the notion that blacks possessed an intrinsic artistic nature. To account for the particular aesthetic creativity of black Americans, he argued that "it was the African or racial temperament, creeping back in the overtones of his half-articulate speech and action, which gave to his life and ways the characteristic qualities instantly recognized as peculiarly and representatively his." 71 Locke's movement away from criticism of white paternalism and toward an essentialist view of racial character may have been influenced by his increasing dependence in the late 1920s on the financial support of Charlotte Mason, a white millionaire, who, in addition to being a fierce anti-Marxist, also believed that blacks and Indians were noble primitives who could reform Western civilization. 72 Perhaps buoyed by the attention he gained as a spokesperson and encouraged by the financial support he received for his artistic projects, Locke abandoned the skeptical disinterestedness of his earlier lectures for increasingly optimistic predictions of the future benefits of this new cultural appreciation from whites. During the 1930s, as conditions worsened for blacks in the midst of the Great Depression, Locke would come under criticism, somewhat unfairly, for having argued that art and literature would liberate black people from white oppression. 73

Moreover, Locke could not long maintain the precious equipoise of The New Negro between race consciousness and the promise of integration into the American middle class. Dedicated to striking a balance between the desire of black writers for access to the mainstream and the need of black people for a race tradition, he found that such artists as Countee Cullen, Claude McKay, and Wallace Thurman rebelled against his brand of racial idealism. 74 As some writers turned to writing Harlem nightlife stories almost exclusively, the serious connections with political self-determination Locke had hoped to maintain all but evaporated. 75 Compared with the political nationalism advanced by Marcus Garvey in the early 1920s, Locke's New Negro arts movement must have

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seemed a relief to educated whites. Even his call for broader recognition of African American folk culture was a relatively benign recommendation for a black intellectual of the 1920s. It was certainly not as threatening as a direct critique of segregation and its economic and political underpinnings. Bereft of the political anger and sociological criticism of Race Contacts, Locke's writings of the late 1920s lost some of their edge.

When political opinion shifted to the left in the 1930s, Locke began to resuscitate his earlier analysis of race. But first he was criticized by such younger black social scientists as Abram Harris, Ralph Bunche, and E. Franklin Frazier at Howard University, who, inspired by Marxism, shifted the African American debate from race to class, and from middle-class discrimination to the problems of the black working class. Indeed, many of these Young Turks, as historian James Young has called them, viewed the emphasis on race in the writings of black intellectuals as an obstacle to the kind of interracial working class unity they believed essential for changing the American situation. 76 Unaware of Locke's earlier lectures on race, the Young Turks generally regarded Locke as a misguided proponent of racial art. But Locke's theory helped him to sympathize with the new Marxist analysis and to move from a racial to an integrationist aesthetic. Given his belief that the racial climate of opinion shifted over time, Locke rationalized his changing views as a natural evolution. With a fundamental theory that accommodated racialist and integrationist observations within it, Locke could shift with the dialectical winds of race practice in America. Thus, when he founded the publishing company The Associates in Negro Folk Education in the 1930s, he published Ralph Bunche's Marxist critique of race, A World View of Race, in a series. 77 Although he believed Bunche over-stated the case that race was not a factor in modern life, Locke supported Bunche's efforts and published his work. Locke encouraged this new generation of historians, economists, and sociologists in his retro-spective reviews for Opportunity magazine during the 1930s, even though he cautioned them to appreciate the influence of race and culture if they wished to understand truly the situation of minorities in America and the colonial world. 78 Like other social scientists, Marxists need a concept of race and a concept of culture, just as modern anthropologists need an understanding of the global, political, and economic context of contemporary culture contact.

Locke elaborated on these insights when he finally published his theory of race and imperialism in When Peoples Meet: A Study in Race and

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Culture Contacts (1942) with Bernhard Stern. 79 In the chapter introductions of this reader in anthropology, Locke used his theory of race to elucidate the discussion of world imperialism. The distinguishing characteristic of this book was, as E. Franklin Frazier himself acknowledged, "that it avoided the tendency of some authors to view culture as something abstracted from economic interests, and the opposite tendency of other authors to view problems of race and culture contact as solely economic phenomena." 80 In effect, Locke was a harmonizer between the Marxist and cultural pluralist perspectives on race. Unfortunately, Locke's commentary on these issues remained brief in When Peoples Meet; he merely updated his earlier analysis from 1916. And he did not expand his theory of race into a full-length monograph on the subject. His concept of the historical phenomenon of race did shape the analysis of "The Negro in the Three Americas," a lecture series he delivered in Haiti in 1943. 81 Here he sought to integrate the notion that New World slave societies were settled under different social and economic conditions with an analysis of how differences between Latin and Anglo-Saxon cultures shaped New World societies. Locke appears to have been working on a synthesis of his cultural and sociological analyses in the study of black people in North American culture when he died in 1954. 82

In the end, Locke felt most comfortable with the idea that cultural pluralism was the most accurate "rationalization" of his life and work. 83 Cultural pluralism better served his purpose as a platform of constructive action than his critique of the world system of imperialism. For Locke, the arts projected a healthier image of black identity and capabilities than the harsher view of black life presented by political and sociological perspectives. In choosing to emphasize art and race consciousness over the social sciences and Marxism in his professional life, Locke had creatively answered the question that dogged most black American intellectuals of the early twentieth century: in the face of vicious and unyielding white racism, "What could the Negro do?"

Contemporary Relevance

No contemporary thinker has blended together in one statement or theory the many diverse insights Locke offers in Race Contacts. Perhaps this is because it is impossible to reconcile satisfactorily all the conflicting perspectives in Locke's theory. Certainly, Locke does not seem to have

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done so. But rather remarkably, much of what Locke said in 1916 has become accepted by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists over the past thirty years. Many of his insights have become integrated into the body of educated thinking on race in America. Perhaps most important has been the decline -- shall we hope extinction -- of the belief in the social relevance of the biological sense of race, and with that, correspondingly, a rather complete acceptance of the cultural idea of race. Indeed, except in those areas where race is used to define a medical population, that is, a group of people defined by their heightened susceptibility to certain diseases, race as a biological construct has been thoroughly discredited.

But Locke's most important insight was that race relations change and pass through definitive stages or phases in relation to political, economic, and demographic change in society. In The Origins of the New South (1951) and The Strange Career of Jim Crow (1955), C. Vann Woodward used a similar argument to answer those who saw race as the central theme of Southern history. 84 Without knowing it, Woodward followed in Locke's footsteps when he observed that segregation was a new stage in Southern race relations and not the automatic outcome of slavery, that racial feelings intensified with the sudden removal of formal barriers (emancipation), and that a class and power conflict between whites (the Populist Revolt) was the cause of the turn towards segregation and Negrophobia in the South at the end of the nineteenth century. The argument of Woodward's student, J. Morgan Kousser, that the installation of disfranchisement during the Populist era was proposed mainly by the elite, confirms another of Locke's insights -- that race feelings are not automatic, but cultivated deliberately by elites to maintain political control. 85 These historians have substantiated what Locke proposed theoretically in 1916 -- that racism changes over time. Perhaps Locke's work will encourage further investigation into how and why race feelings react to changes in American social relations.

Essential to this line of historical inquiry is the insight Locke advanced in 1916 that racial conflict is not primarily a response to the color or culture of a targeted group, but rather the result of economic and political competition for survival and status in competitive societies. This view of American racism was outlined in Oliver Cox's classic study, Caste, Class and Race (1948), which argued that economic processes were more important than racial and cultural differences in causing American race conflict. 86 The cause of race conflict, Cox suggested, was not color

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but ethnic competition between different class groups. More recently this view has been elaborated into a split-labor market theory by sociologist Edna Bonacich, who argues that most ethnic antagonism arises when one group can sell its labor cheaper than another group, and that other group has the resources to fight back with violence or other "caste-like measures." 87 Such an analysis tends to move the discussion of race relations away from a focus on the concept of race and toward the idea that race is merely the battleground of largely class-based interests.

Locke's insight that race is essentially an ideology that masks other interests has also become increasingly popular of late with intellectual historians of race in America. Whereas Winthrop Jordan, in his classic study, White Over Black (1971), analyzed racism as a psychological reaction to color and a permanent feature of black-white relations, more recent studies, such as David Brion Davis's The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770-1823 (1975), have approached race as a vortex in which issues range from the possibilities of moral perfectionism to the problem of discipline of forced laborers, white and black. 88 Davis's work suggests that fears about the aftermath of emancipation were driven as much by the moral problem of coercion in a so-called free society as by fear of contamination by "untouchables." Locke's voice can be heard here as well: race is most often the way multiracial societies resolve conflicts over power and labor that are not primarily racial concerns.

What distinguishes Locke's work from some of this recent historiography is his unwillingness to jettison the concept of race once it has been demystified. Several studies of the South, such as Steven Hahn's The Roots of Southern Populism (1983), Jonathan Wiener's Social Origins of the New South (1978), and Jay Mandle's The Roots of Black Poverty (1978), reduce racism to being nothing more than class consciousness. 89 The implication is that even avowed Southern racists were not motivated by racial feelings, but by unacknowledged (and perhaps unconscious) class reactions. More subtly, Barbara Fields, in her festschrift essay, "Race and Ideology in American History," has acknowledged the power of racial ideology even as she has described race as subordinate to class in understanding American history. 90 Locke would agree that race is often disguised class conflict; but he also argued that once class issues have been transformed into racial concerns, the latter often have more emotional power than class feelings alone. For Locke, not only does the

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concept of race grip the modern mind too tightly to be dispensed with, but also racial ideas are stirred by a practice of racial discrimination grounded in political as well as economic struggle. Moreover, although class may be the ultimate cause, race is often how colonized peoples experience exploitation -- an insight put to telling use in The Highest Stage of White Supremacy (1985), John Cell's comparative study of segregation in the American South and South Africa. 91 As Cell writes, "Racism is indeed what Lenin called false consciousness. It is nonetheless real and powerful." 92 In this schema, race as a category may be used as a metaphor for group power: just as class defines one's relationship to the means of production and hence one's access to economic power, so race may effectively define one's relationship to a group, whose changing size, resources, and reputation affect one's life experiences.

Indeed, some historians and sociologists who accept the economic aspects of race conflict nevertheless are beginning to argue that race remains a useful concept, because it describes aspects of human reaction that are not completely accounted for in a strictly Marxist analysis. In Race Relations in Sociological Theory (1970), for example, John Rex argues that the victims of colonialism are in a different relationship to the bourgeoisie than the white working class. 93 Those on the periphery of the world system of capitalism stand in a different relationship to world imperialism than those at its metropolitan center. Rex also notices something Locke described in Race Contacts: the treatment of peoples of color is quite different on the frontier, that is in South Africa, than it is in Europe -- the case of East Indian laborers in England. As was Locke, Rex is open to the notion that cultural issues play a role in the behavior of groups toward one another in an economically charged situation. And Rex retains belief in the primacy of class in race conflict: "It is not solely because of the bonds of ethnicity that, say, East Indians in Guyana remain a distinct group, but because men united in this way have been assigned a particular role in the economic, political and legal order." 94 Where Rex diverges is in his insistence that racial conflict is different in kind from ethnic conflict. Rex labels as racism only that conflict that has an explicit or implicit theoretical justification on racial grounds (what Locke called a "race creed"). Locke's conception was broader: the root of racism was in its practice, not in its theoretical justification, which was characteristic only of its modern form.

Locke's lectures are also relevant to the current debate over the role of culture in social relations. One of the most interesting perspectives on

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this cultural dimension of race appears in an essay by J. William Harris, a professor of history at the University of New Hampshire, who has also suggested that race can be most profitably viewed as a cultural system that serves some as yet undetermined function in American society. 95 His work supports Locke's suggestions in lecture 3 of Race Contacts and later in "American Literary Tradition and the Negro" and "The Negro in the Three Americas" that an integration of the insights of sociology and culture may hold the answer to why racism persists even when it does not serve the economic interests of those who practice it. Such a perspective helps direct our attention to the largely unconscious set of rules, reflexes, and attitudes that dictate the social etiquette of race relations.

Locke harnessed in one theory what are often regarded today as two mutually exclusive positions: one, that race relations are merely a subset of a more comprehensive set of problems confronting modern society, and two, that a distinctive African American culture exists that should be studied and promoted in order to enhance African-American identity and group power. In terms of the latter, probably the best contemporary expression of Locke's social view of the origins of black culture can be found in Houston A. Baker, Jr.'s Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (1984), which defines a blues aesthetic that is grounded not in biological genealogy but in the material conditions of the black experience of America. 96 Baker has produced a synthesis of elements contained in Locke's Race Contacts and The New Negro: the social history of the black experience of America has crystallized into a distinctive vernacular culture that now shapes the symbol systems of black and white American discourse. Similarly, Locke's notion of a modernist black culture is alive in the art criticism of Richard Powell, whose catalogue to the exhibition The Blues Aesthetic: Black Culture and Modernism (1989) examines black culture in terms of a blues aesthetic that is available to both black and white artists. 97

But the blending of a materialist and a culturally pluralist vision of the African American presence in American society is Locke's distinctive contribution, a reflection perhaps of the disciplinary union of sociology and art in his theory. His achievement is all the more remarkable because a division in approach has existed between sociological and aesthetic perspectives on race: that split has characterized those who have theorized about race in American intellectual history. That split has also reflected a difference of opinion between those assimilationists,

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whether Marxist or conservative, who believe that race is best down-played in American life and those cultural nationalists who believe that race remains an important tool for the liberation of the black community. But for Locke, race is not simply a tool for understanding the black community, but also a tool for understanding the American identity. For it is precisely the promise of American life that a new race -- or what Locke would call the "civilization type" -- called the American would emerge out of the blending of immigrant races. While race has often implied a politics of divisiveness and disunity, Locke finds in the poetics of race a unifying force: not the "melting pot," but the diversity of cultures persisting in harmony is the promise of American democracy for Locke. Race becomes not only a tool for empowering African Americans, but also a tool for understanding the highest aspirations and potentials of the American character. Race is a constitutive force of the American identity.

Locke may have also balanced contrary views of race on one intellectual beam because as a black intellectual in 1916 he felt compelled to articulate both a theoretical and a practical perspective on race. On a practical level, race was the experienced reality of a black intellectual living in the segregated American world of 1916. He may have felt that something, anything, had to be tried to allow for the practical survival of blacks. Some may argue that race has become anachronistic in the 1990s when segregation has been repudiated, at least ideologically. Yet, as a social observer, Locke remains prophetic: his notion that race and ethnic consciousness would recur and persist has been borne out both in the United States and in the Soviet Union of the 1990s, to pick only two examples. The resurgence of anti-Semitism and Baltic nationalism in the Soviet Union and of racism and black consciousness on college campuses in the United States is occurring at a time of changing economic conditions, most notably the deepening of a world-wide recession. Even more pointedly, chronically unemployed skinheads in the recently unified Germany have violently attacked African emigrant workers under the guise of keeping the German identity pure. Increasing competition for scarce resources will stimulate the search for scape-goats by displaced classes and entrenched elites who find themselves challenged from within and without. Since the political benefits of encouraging conflict often outweigh the rewards of corrective social change, it seems likely that race baiting and provocation will continue. Yet even as we seem to enter what appears to be a new phase of race

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relations, we should keep in mind Locke's advice not to elevate the phenomena of race into laws. Observing the contemporary scene in this country, Locke might still conclude, as he did at the end of lecture 3, that "we shall have to come [to a] position in race problems [analysis where we] regard some of the reactions of our present situation in America as indicative of a final stage, and welcome them as such, because they seem to be born of the very last effort of society to stem the inevitable when they confront [the reality of progressive change.] But, of course[,] they can only have that sense of jeopardy when they are confronted by an apparent and what may be an actual realization that the fetish of the distinctions is about the only thing that is left." Let us hope so.

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Editorial Practices
These lectures, originally titled, "Race Contacts and Inter-racial Relations: A Study of the Theory and Practice of Race," were first given in April and May of 1915; Locke delivered them again in March and April of 1916. Much later, as a visiting professor at Fisk University, he revised and delivered them in the spring semester of 1928. While Locke may have given these lectures at other times during his career, the only existing transcriptions in the Alain Locke Papers of the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C. are of his presentations in 1916 and 1928. I have selected the 1916 transcriptions as the source text because they are the earliest and most complete version of these lectures: all five of the lectures in the 1916 version have survived, whereas only two of the 1928 lectures remain. The source text for "The Great Disillusionment," which is included in the appendix, is a hand-written original from the Alain Locke Papers.

My aim in editing these lectures is to retain as much fidelity to the transcriptions as possible. Thus, the original document has been presented as it exists, but with a number of emendations in brackets. The major problem with the transcriptions is their incompleteness: they were typed by a stenographer who missed, or omitted, many words, phrases, and sometimes sentences from Locke's lectures. With such large gaps in the transcriptions, some intervention by the editor has been necessary to make the lectures readable. Moreover, it is apparent that Locke wished to amend the documents: the 1916 transcriptions

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contain suggested words, phrases, and alterations in punctuation in Locke's handwriting in the body of the text and in the margins. Yet these corrections do not come close to rendering the entire text readable. In fairness to the author and the reader, some intervention by the editor is warranted to make the text readable. Where it has been necessary to change the text or delete words for readability, the changes and the deleted portions have been put in endnotes. While this procedure means a fair amount of notes in the text, I believe the distraction is outweighed by the reader having full knowledge of the changes I have made to the text.

My most important intervention has been to add missing words and phrases to fill in the gaps in the transcriptions, and to identify them as my own by placing them in roman letters and in brackets. In some cases, I consulted Locke's privately published Syllabus to an Extension Course of Lectures on Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations (1916) to obtain the sense of a passage. When it seemed that the syllabus supplied the exact phrase or sentence that was missing, I have borrowed it from the Syllabus, inserted it into the text where it fits, and indicated it with double angle brackets, << >>. Where Locke had written in missing words, or crossed out typed words and supplied his own written substitutions, I have included Locke's interpolations directly in the text, setting them off from the stenographer's words by placing Locke's in italics. In addition, someone else, probably the stenographer himself, has inserted words in the text and on the margins of the transcriptions. Where these words appear to supply a missing or better word, I have included them in the text and placed them in brackets and italics. Where there have been gaps, but the sentence made sense without interruption (perhaps suggesting that the gaps were the stenographer's pauses), I have silently continued the sentence without indicating the gaps. In a few cases, Locke has quoted from published sources, but the quotations have been incomplete or inaccurate. In those cases, I have consulted the published works, supplied the missing words or corrected incorrect words and indicated such insertions with double slashes, // //, and an endnote.

Other problems with the transcriptions exist as well. Even when a complete sentence was written down by the stenographer, some of the sentences remain confusing or even incomprehensible, because the word choice, word order, or syntax is wrong. Without attempting to improve the text, I have occasionally supplied an additional word or

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phrase in brackets when needed to clarify the meaning of a sentence. In the few cases in which the word supplied by the stenographer has been confusing, misleading, or disruptive of the syntax and another word has been clearer, I have supplied the needed word, placed it in brackets, and moved the original word to an endnote, where it can be consulted by the reader. Wherever a change in the word order or syntax of a sentence has been essential to clarify the meaning of a sentence or passage, I have changed the word order and placed the original version in an endnote. When a word has been changed or the word order altered, the note indicating that change in the text comes immediately before the change, except in those cases where the change occurs at the beginning of the sentence. In that case, the note follows the first word of the sentence.

In addition, the transcriptions contain numerous repetitious words and phrases, which detract from and sometimes obscure the meaning of a sentence. Where such repetitions have conveyed the rhythm of Locke's lecture style, I have retained them, but where superfluous words and short phrases have detracted from the clarity of a sentence, I have deleted them and placed them in a footnote. If a word or phrase has been deleted, the footnote occupies the space vacated. In a few cases, individual words have been circled, apparently by Locke, who, in proofreading the documents, may have discovered that inappropriate words had been introduced into the text. Where my own reading has confirmed that such words are inappropriate and were meant to be deleted, I have silently deleted them.

Locke was a notoriously poor speller; moreover, the stenographer appears not to have been familiar with many of the names of those persons to whom Locke referred; hence, there are many spelling mistakes in the transcriptions. For example, Locke habitually spelled the last name of the American anthropologist Franz Boas as "Boaz." I have silently corrected such errors; I also silently changed Locke's occasional English spelling and placement of punctuation into standard modern American usage. Both Locke and his stenographer appear to have had a penchant for idiosyncratic spelling, one of which was the habit of making two words out of one, as in the case of "promise-full": I have silently corrected these and deleted the unnecessary hyphens in such words. For the sake of grammar, I have made minor stylistic adjustments: for example, I have changed "concept" to "conception," where appropriate, replaced "in" with "into," where needed, and indicated these changes with brackets. I have also added or dropped the

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plural on verbs to ensure grammatical agreement with the subject of the sentence. The titles of books have been italicized.

The transcriptions contain idiosyncratic punctuation, being littered with dashes, where commas, parentheses, semicolons, or periods would normally be used. In most cases, this use of dashes is excessive even by 1916 standards. While the version presented here contains more dashes than usual in a document such as this, I have silently changed many dashes into commas, parentheses, semicolons, and periods to regularize the punctuation. Similarly, some sentences run on for several pages without punctuation of any kind. Where the absence of punctuation is not confusing, I have not added any. But when necessary for clarity, I have added commas or other punctuation, indicating that they are mine by placing them in brackets.

In general, I have retained the original paragraph breaks, and hence the manuscript as it appears here contains both more long paragraphs and one-sentence paragraphs than usual. To make the text more readable, however, I have occasionally introduced paragraph breaks or ignored those in the transcriptions and indicated the change in a footnote. Sometimes, very long sentences have been broken into shorter ones by adding a period (in brackets) and beginning the next sentence by capitalizing the first letter of the following word.

Individual lectures have posed special problems. The transcription of lecture 1, "The Theoretical and Scientific Conceptions of Race," was the most problematic. It had two first pages, one of which was torn, but contained Locke's handwritten emendations: I used that copy. The second page of the document was missing, which I indicated with a footnote. More generally, the first lecture, a review of anthropological research on race during Locke's time, was the most difficult to reconstruct. Not only were many words missing, but also even after words were supplied, the first lecture reads awkwardly, perhaps attesting to Locke's first-night jitters or to the complexity of the subject matter Locke was discussing.

The second lecture, "The Political and Practical Conceptions of Race," is much clearer and more focused, in part, perhaps, because Locke seems personally engaged in the discussion of the political uses of race under imperialism and missionarism -- especially when discussing his experiences at the "Imperial Training School" Oxford. By contrast, the third lecture, "The Phenomena and Laws of Race Contacts," warms slowly to its argument after ten pages of Locke's justification of a scientific

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approach over the impressionistic analyses of more popular observers of race behavior. The reader's patience -- as well as the editor's -- is rewarded, however, for this lecture contains the heart of Locke's insights into the workings of race within a variety of social settings. As does the transcript of the first lecture, that of "The Phenomena and Laws of Race Contacts" contained many gaps. My reconstruction of this lecture relies more than the others on the published syllabus for clues to missing words and phrases. That syllabus also helped considerably in the reconstruction of lecture 4, "Modern Race Creeds and Their Fallacies." The transcription of the fifth and final lecture, "Racial Progress and Race Adjustment," required the least effort to edit. Not only did it have the fewest missing words, but it remains the clearest and the most straightforward presentation of the lectures.

The scholar who wishes to compare the original 1916 transcriptions of the lectures will find the surviving parts of the manuscript in the Alain Locke Papers at the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University in Washington, D.C.

EDITORIAL SIGNS [roman] Encloses conjectural words or passages supplied by the editor.
italics Indicates handwritten words or passages on the transcriptions supplied by Alain Locke.
[italics] Indicates handwritten words or passages on the transcriptions supplied by someone other than Locke.
<< >> Encloses excerpts inserted in the text from the pamphlet, Race Contacts and Inter-Racial Relations: A Study in the Theory and Practice of Race: Syllabus of an Extension Course of Lectures privately published by Locke.
// // Encloses excerpts inserted in the text from quoted sources.

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Race Contacts and Interracial Relations

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1: The Theoretical and Scientific Conceptions of Race
Ladies and Gentlemen: Ever since the possibility of a comparative study of races dawned upon me at the Races Congress 98 in London in 1911, I have had the courage of a very optimistic and steadfast belief that in the scientific approach to the race question, there was the possibility of a redemption for those false attitudes of mind which have, unfortunately, so complicated the idea and conception of race that there are a great many people who fancy that the best thing that can possibly be done, if possible at all, is to throw race out of the categories of human thinking.

At the same time, even if it were possible to eliminate the concept that has been the center of so much social thinking, let us not presume, at least at the outset of a study professing a critical basis, that it would be desirable. I will grant you that the social thinking that has clustered about the concept of race has been in most instances very paradoxical and in other instances pernicious[.] And yet I cannot see how we can keep what is good and wholly eliminate the evil unless it should be through a scientific scrutiny of the various meanings of race; to try, if possible, to discriminate among them and to perpetuate, for better thinking in the future, those meanings -- those concepts -- which are promising and really sound. 99 I am fundamentally convinced that the term "race," the thought of race, represents a rather fundamental category in social thinking and that it is an idea that we can ill dispense with. In fact[,] the more thought of the right kind [that] can be centered in it, the more

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will the term [race] itself be redeemed, in the light of its rather unfortunate history. The only way to treat the subject scientifically is to regard it as a center of meaning. To 100 [develop a rational] concept of race [is] one of the unworked opportunities of social science, particularly because it is in the field of the social sciences that we must hope for a clarification of the idea and for the arrival at a final clear meaning.

What is race? That is the question which takes us back to the very root of the trouble. Race is not one thing -- it is