American educator and writer Alain LeRoy Locke, whose include Four Negro Poets (1927) and Negro Art: Past and Present (1936), championed the Harlem renaissance.

People best remember this philosopher as the chief interpreter. Harvard University in 1907 graduated Locke, a Phi Beta Kappa and the first black Rhodes scholar. He studied at Oxford and the University of Berlin and then received a Philosophiae Doctor in philosophy from Harvard in 1918. Aesthetics strongly concerned this humanist. His philosophy, cultural pluralism, emphasized the determining of values, most especially the respect for the uniqueness of each personality, to guide human conduct and interrelationships.

Locke taught at Howard University in District of Columbia for nearly forty years.