Alain LeRoy Locke

Alain LeRoy Locke was an American writer, philosopher and educator who became known as the philosophical architect, the acknowledged Dean, of the Harlem Renaissance. In 1907 he was the first African American named a Rhodes Scholar, and his subsequent career as a philosopher gave the Harlem Renaissance's flowering of Black art, literature and music its theoretical grounding. He is frequently listed among the most influential African Americans in history, and Martin Luther King Jr. named him, alongside W.E.B. Du Bois, as proof that philosophy's line of great thinkers did not end with Plato and Aristotle.