The Philosopher of Unity: Alain Locke

A retelling drawn from Bahá'í Chronicles, which gathers the accounts of the servants of the Faith. Phrases in quotation marks are words preserved in that record.

Some lives show that the highest learning and the deepest devotion to human unity can dwell together in a single mind. Alain Leroy Locke was such a life. Born in Philadelphia in 1885, he rose to academic heights that few of his generation — and almost no Black American of his era — were permitted even to attempt. He became, the record notes, "the first Black Rhodes Scholar," carrying his brilliance from the United States to the University of Oxford at a time when the colour of his skin made that achievement a battle as much as an honour. He went on to earn a doctorate in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. By any measure of the world, here was a perfected scholar.

He did not keep his gifts for himself. Locke became the central intellect of the flowering of Black art and thought that the world remembers as the Harlem Renaissance. In 1925 he gathered the new generation's poetry, fiction, and essays into a landmark anthology, The New Negro, and through it he gave voice and shape to a whole movement, gaining national prominence as a spokesman for African-Americans. A philosopher by training, he taught a vision he called "cultural pluralism" — the idea that the distinct gifts of different peoples are not threats to be erased but treasures to be woven together.

It was around the time of his Harvard doctorate, in his early thirties, that Alain Locke became a Bahá'í. The encounter reordered the aim of all his learning. The oneness of humanity, which the Faith proclaims as the pivot of this age, was not for him a slogan to be repeated but a problem to be thought through — the great intellectual labour of his life. He brought to the cause of human unity exactly what he had brought to philosophy and literature: rigour, breadth, and a refusal to settle for the easy answer.

And he gave that learning to the practical work of building unity where it was hardest. In 1924 he was appointed to the Bahá'í community's Interracial Amity Committee, and he served on a succession of "race amity" committees through the years that followed, travelling and speaking at conventions across the country. This was the Faith's pioneering effort to draw Black and white Americans together into genuine fellowship in a society scarred and divided by prejudice — and Locke, one of the most accomplished minds the nation possessed, lent that effort his voice, his scholarship, and his name. He could have spent his brilliance entirely on his own renown. He spent a great part of it instead on the slow, difficult, unglamorous work of bringing estranged peoples face to face.

The cast of his thought is captured in a single line the record preserves. The real task before humanity, he wrote, "the intellectual core of the problems of the peace," would be "the discovery of the necessary common denominators… involved in a democratic world order." It is a sentence that could stand as a motto for the Feast of 'Ilm. For Locke, the noblest exercise of the intellect was not to win arguments or to prove one people superior to another, but to search out the common ground on which a divided world might at last be made one. Knowledge, in his hands, was a tool of unity.

He died in New York in 1954. He left behind a body of philosophy, a generation of artists he had nurtured, and the example of a mind of the first rank devoted to the most important question of the age. The boy from Philadelphia who had become the first of his people to study at Oxford, and a Harvard doctor of philosophy, had used every gift to serve the truth that all the peoples of the earth are one.

This is the lesson the Feast of 'Ilm sets before us. Learning is a gift; but it fulfils its purpose only when it is turned outward — when the trained mind bends its whole power not to the praise of self or tribe, but to the discovery of what unites the human family. Alain Locke perfected his learning, and then offered it, entire, to the oneness of humankind.

This is a retelling. For the fuller account, see Bahá'í Chronicles.

editors, B. C.. *Bahá'í Chronicles*. https://bahaichronicles.org/dr-alain-leroy-locke/