Alain Locke 1885 – 1954
Alain LeRoy Locke was an American philosopher, the first African American Rhodes Scholar, and the principal philosopher of the Harlem Renaissance. After graduate studies at Oxford, Berlin, and Harvard, where he wrote a dissertation on the theory of value, he taught for decades at Howard University. His edited volume The New Negro, published in 1925, became the manifesto of a generation of African American artists and intellectuals, while his philosophical writings on cultural pluralism and the role of values in human life developed a distinctive American pragmatism. He was the first Black president of the American Philosophical Association.
Key facts
- Nationality
- American
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Pragmatism
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Alain Locke:
“Self-respect is the deeper source of all profound culture.”
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Attributed to Alain Locke:
“Cultural pluralism is the condition of any genuine democracy.”
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Attributed to Alain Locke:
“The pulse of the Negro world has begun to beat in Harlem.”
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Attributed to Alain Locke:
“The mind once stretched by a new idea never returns to its original dimensions.”
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Attributed to Alain Locke:
“Values are the lenses through which we perceive a world worth caring for.”