American writer, teacher and activist Alain LeRoy Locke was BOTD in 1885. Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, his father was one of the first Black employees of the US Postal Service, and his mother was a teacher. He won a place to Harvard College, graduating in 1907, and became the first African-American to win a Rhodes Scholarship, allowing him to attend Oxford University in England. His time at Oxford was difficult: refused entry to several of the colleges, many American students from segregated Southern states refused to share lodgings or attend events with him, and he left without completing degree. (In later life, he commented “In giving me that Rhodes Scholarship, that’s the least Rhodes can do since he stole so much wealth from Africa.”) He studied briefly at the University of Berlin, returning to the United States in 1912 to take up a professorship at Howard University. After completing a doctorate at Harvard, he returned to Howard, where he instigated course on race relations. His efforts to secure equal pay for African-American faculty members led to his dismissal in 1925, though he was reinstated three years later by the college’s first Black president Mordecai Johnson. An early adopter of the Pan-African movement, Locke promoted and mentored Black writers, artists and musicians, and encouraged his students to draw from African and African-American source materials in their own work. In 1925, he guest-edited an issue of Survey Graphic, educating the magazine’s mostly white readership about the goals and philosophies of the Harlem Renaissance. He edited a series of periodicals about Black cultural life, including The New Negro, the Bronze Booklet and Phylon and was a regular contributor to Encyclopaedia Britannica. His own publications included Four Negro Poets, Negro Art – Past and Present and The Negro and His Music, and an admired biography of Frederick Douglass. Building on W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of “the Talented Tenth” – an elite class of educated African-Americans who could lift the fortunes of their race via their achievements – Locke argued that the future of Black self-determination lay with artists rather than politicians or activists. Discreetly gay, he kept his sexuality a secret outside of his friendship circle, and had fraught relationships with many of the key writers of the Harlem Renaissance. He pursued a brief, unhappy love affair with Langston Hughes, and mentored Zora Neale Hurston, only to trash her book Their Eyes Were Watching God in a review. (Hurston later wrote that she would send her toenails to debate Locke on the subject of Black folklore, so low was her opinion of his knowledge of working-class Black life). He was also noted to be grandiose and competitive in the company of other Black men, insisting on his intellectual and cultural superiority. After retiring from Howard, he moved to New York City, dying in 1954, aged 68. Interest in his life was revived via Jeffrey C. Stewart’s biography The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, published in 2018.