Alain Locke's relationship to philosophy is, as Leonard Harris has remarked, one of the “enigmas” of his life (Harris 1989, 10). On the one hand, Locke was drawn to philosophy early in his undergraduate education. At Harvard he quickly chose philosophy as his major, taking classes with William James and Josiah Royce, thus getting a grounding in American pragmatism. Jeffrey Stewart recounts the story of Locke meeting the then giant of American philosophy George Herbert Palmer, going on to say that Locke's “choice of courses with Palmer suggests that he may have been attracted to philosophy because of its vision of a universal discourse that all men, regardless of race, could participate in” (Stewart 2018, 64).
After Harvard, Locke continued his education at Oxford from 1907 to 1910 as the first Black Rhodes Scholar. He then went to Berlin, staying there from 1910 to 1911. He took classes...
