Jeffrey Stewart.
JEFFREY STEWART: ALAIN LOCKE BIOGRAPHY
THE NEW NEGRO: THE LIFE OF ALAIN LOCKE (2018)
Winner of 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.
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In the prize-winning The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, Jeffrey C. Stewart offers the definitive biography of the father of the Harlem Renaissance, based on the extant primary sources of his life and on interviews with those who knew him personally.
Alain Locke (born 1885) was an American educator, writer, and philosopher. In 1907 he gained the distinction of being the first African-American to be awarded a Rhodes Scholarship. His arrival at Oxford University was marred what by what seems now to be extraordinary racial discriminination. Several colleges refused to admit him, and several American Rhodes Scholars from the southern states refused to live in the same college or attend events with him. He was finally enrolled at Hertford College, where he read Latin, Greek, Philosophy and Literature. He went on to study at the University of Berlin. Locke received his Ph.D in Philosophy from Harvard University and went on to become the Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Howard University, the historically black university in Washington DC. A compelling advoicate for human rights and racial equality, Locke was the father of the Harlem Renaissance in black literature.
The Times Literary Supplement wrote of the book: ‘Stewart creates a compelling portrait of Locke ... as well providing rich contextual background and insights into the cultural and political debates out which his subject emerged.’
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Jeffrey Stewart (born 1950) is an American historian who is Professor of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He was educated at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Yale University. He has curated exhibitions on black history at the Smithsonian’s Ntional Portrait Gallery and at Rutgers University. He has had a longstanding interest in Jazz. In 2015 founded Jeffrey’s Jazz Coffeehouse in Santa Barbara; this operates in conjuction with his History of Jazz course.
