Alain Locke and the Common Denominators

*A retelling based on the biography of Alain Locke in **Bahá'í Chronicles**. Words in quotation marks are quoted in that biography.*

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Alain Leroy Locke was born in Philadelphia on 13 September 1885, the only child of Pliny Locke, who held a law degree, and Mary Hawkins, a teacher. His father died when he was six. Rheumatic fever kept him at home for much of his early childhood, and he spent the time reading and playing the piano and violin.

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He became the first Black Rhodes Scholar, and in 1918 he earned a PhD in philosophy from Harvard. He played a major part in the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, the flowering that produced Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston and Louis Armstrong. His anthology *The New Negro*, a collection of writings by African American authors, brought him national prominence as a spokesman for African Americans. As a philosopher he promoted what he called "cultural pluralism," the view that cultural groups can keep their own identity and still be part of a broader culture.

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Locke became a Bahá'í in 1918, in his early thirties. He gave particular attention to the Bahá'í principle of the oneness of humanity, and wrote: "The intellectual core of the problems of the peace … will be the discovery of the necessary common denominators … involved in a democratic world order or democracy on a world scale."

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In 1924 the National Spiritual Assembly appointed him to the Interracial Amity Committee. He served on several race amity committees and travelled across the United States to speak at conventions.

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Locke died in New York on 9 June 1954 and is buried in the Congressional Cemetery in Washington, D.C. In 1968 Martin Luther King Jr. said of him: "We're going to let our children know that the only philosophers that lived were not Plato and Aristotle, but W. E. B. Du Bois and Alain Locke came through the universe."

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

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