Alain Locke (Alain LeRoy Locke) Biography

American philosopher and cultural critic, born in Philadelphia, educated at the Philadelphia School of Pedagogy, Oxford University, the University of Berlin, and Harvard. Among other academic appointments, he was Professor of Philosophy at Howard University. Throughout his teaching and writing career he promoted African-American culture and the arts, most notably as editor of an anthology of writing by Langston Hughes and other contributors associated with the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925). His many other books include A Decade of Negro Self-Expression (1928), The Negro in America (1953), and The Negro in Art (1940).