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Alain Leroy Locke, in his graduation gown from Harvard University, 1918.
flipFlip to Jessie Redmon Fauset, circa 1934. 
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Alain Leroy Locke, portrait in doctoral cap and gown, ca. 1918.

Credit: Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of American History: Archives Center.

The son of a Philadelphia lawyer and school teacher, Alain Locke graduated from Harvard University in 1907, then became the first African American to attend Cambridge University as a Rhodes Scholar. When this photograph was taken in 1918, Locke, then a professor at Howard University in Washington D.C., had just completed his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard.  In the 1920s, Locke lived in New York, where he championed “cultural pluralism” and helped nurture and give voice to the “Harlem Renaissance,” a flowering of black arts and literature that he presented to the nation in The New Negro (1925).

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