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AS A STUDENT AT Harvard College in 1907, Alain LeRoy Locke became the first African American chosen a Rhodes scholar to Oxford University. Born in 1885 in Philadelphia, Locke had excelled at Harvard College, where he won several competitive scholarships and the coveted Bowdoin Prize in English Literature, and then graduated magna cum laude in 1907. Locke had also excelled socially at Harvard, becoming a popular student with his white classmates. But Locke distanced himself from fellow black students who complained that race had shaped their experience of Harvard. In letters to his mother, he articulated his belief that prejudice existed largely in the eyes of the beholders, that blacks interpreted nonracial situations in terms of race, and that blacks complained of race prejudice mainly to cover up fears of inferiority. Even more important, when black Americans had written him upon heating the news that a Negro had won the Rhodes scholarship and had celebrated his achievement as a victory for the race, he had not been happy. He was not going to Oxford as a Negro. "I do not care for this muddling of a purely personal issue of my life with the race problem. I am not a race problem. I am Alain LeRoy Locke and if these people don't stop, I'll tell them something that will make them." And a month later, he continued: "I'm not going to England as a Negro. I will leave the color question in New York and English people won't have any chance to enthuse over the Negro question. The only condition on which I will take up the Negro question again is the race leadership in America. Otherwise, none of it for me. I shouldn't at all be surprised to find myself in the English consular or diplomatic service." Yet, when Locke returned to the United States from England in 1911, he took on the mantel of "race leadership." In his first public address, "The Negro and a Race Tradition" (1911), Locke called on black people to celebrate their "Afro-American" identity and view themselves as part of a racial tradition that extended back to Africa.
The irony becomes a question: What happened at Oxford that changed such an aggressively assimilated man into a race man? Or,...