Alain LeRoy Locke

Alain LeRoy Locke was an American writer, philosopher and educator, known as the philosophical architect, or Dean, of the Harlem Renaissance. Born in Philadelphia in 1885, he graduated from Harvard in 1907 and that year became the first African-American Rhodes Scholar; at Oxford several colleges refused him before Hertford College admitted him. He took his PhD in philosophy at Harvard in 1918 and chaired the department of philosophy at Howard University, where he taught the first classes on race relations. In 1925 he expanded a special issue of Survey Graphic into The New Negro, a collection of writings by African Americans that became a landmark in Black literature.