Locke, Alain Le Roy (1886–1954)

US teacher, editor, and author. He first became known as the editor of The New Negro: An Interpretation (1925), an anthology of African-American writers associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He published other anthologies featuring the literary work of African-Americans, as well as books, essays, and reviews that were influential in defining African-Americans' distinctive traditions and culture and the role they might play in bringing blacks into mainstream American society. In The Negro and His Music (1936), he placed African-Americans' music into the spectrum of African and world folk music, while his Negro in Art (1941) was one of the first works to stress the influence of African art on modern Western painting and sculpture.

Locke was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard University in 1907, and was the first African-American to attend Oxford University, England, as a Rhodes Scholar in 1910. He studied philosophy at the University of Berlin, Germany, (1910–11) and attended lectures by Henri Bergson in Paris, France. Returning to America, he taught philosophy at Howard University (1912–17), gained his PhD at Harvard in 1918, and resumed his teaching career at Howard as professor of philosophy (1918–53).