The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke: An Unfinished Reading of Jeffrey Stewart's Troubled Biography

Abstract

Jeffrey C. Stewart's book on Alain Locke is an unsuccessful endeavor. Stewart characterizes his book as a biography, leading the reader to expect an illuminating, accurate, and truthful account of Locke's life based on and disciplined by adherence to credible evidence and standards of scholarship. However, the life of Locke that Stewart recounts is, to a large extent, an imaginary construction that draws on but ventures far beyond the documentary evidence in narrating Locke's life, his “inner life” especially. Consequently, the chapters have the character of literary fiction—biographical fiction—seemingly plausible at times. Furthermore, numerous scholarly shortcomings and egregious misreadings and misrepresentations of W. E. B. Du Bois add to the book's failings. After reading twenty-eight of Stewart's forty-four chapters and “Epilogue,” this writer refused to suffer Stewart's book any further and ended his reading, his trust exhausted.