Locke had certainly earned the respect of history. He was the first African American selected for a Rhodes Scholarship, taught philosophy at Howard University for nearly four decades and was a crucial figure in the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

 

And yet Locke is little remembered today, a seeming footnote in the long African-American struggle for equality.

 

“He’s under-appreciated and kind of an invisible man,” Stewart said.

 

That could change with “The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke” (Oxford University Press, 2018), Stewart’s meticulous biography that retraces the footsteps of the philosopher/activist from his early days in a middle-class Philadelphia family to Harvard and Europe, and the tightrope he walked as a gay man.