Making History: Alain Locke Memorial Lecture with Donald Brown (Harvard)

well good afternoon everyone good after to southern you know where you actually it's call and response so good afternoon everyone excellent thank you and welcome to Rhodes house we are absolutely delighted to have all of you here and and I appreciate that even on a rare beautiful sunny day you have joined us in Rhodes house for what I know will be a really really interesting presentation and conversation and the kickoff event of a series that is called making history Christian Cole Alain Locke and Oscar Wilde at Oxford so today it this is the Alain Locke memorial lecture and we are delighted to have one of our own Rhodes Scholar Donald field Brown as he's known field back from Harvard to join us and to speak about Allen log so Allen pictured here I love that this is actually from my office so this hangs in my office was the first african-american Rhodes Scholar and later the Dean of the Harlem Renaissance and a new book by Jeffrey Stewart which has won the the National Book Award is you know really asks us to inspires us to rethink his influence and to recognize his prominence in the african-american story and in the broader American story and this Alain Locke is one of the three Trailblazers that this series of events and an exhibition at madlyn College is celebrating so Oxford University's first black African undergraduate Christian Coll first african-american Rhodes scholar and Midwife to the Harlem Renaissance Alain Locke and the great Irish wit and dandy Oscar Wilde all three were undergraduates at Oxford at Univ Hartford and Modlin College respectively and it's wonderful that these three colleges are also collaborating on honoring them but they also highlight the stories about them and the exhibition about them highlights the surprising shared histories and intersectional identities of Oxford's queer black and first-generation undergraduates so it's a fascinating story and an important story and it includes an exhibition which you are all warmly invited to attend it is at maudlin college in the library there and as well as a series of lectures so the exhibition and the whole series of events have has been a collaboration curated by Elizabeth Adams from univ college and elizabeth is here with us elizabeth is back there Michelle Mendelsohn from from Mansfield College Darryl Greene from maudlin college who is here and I want to thank all three of them for for their work on this and the whole idea of honoring these three trailblazers I want to give credit to Michelle Mendelsohn for for thinking about linking these three historic figures and I also want to commend to you her remarkable book making Oscar Wilde about about Oscar Wilde so this is the inaugural event there will be several more events in the making history series there's a lunchtime discussion about Alan Locke's legacy with Nicholas Gaskell hosted by Hartford College and that's going to be on the 30th of May there's a black Oxford walking tour making history black Oxford pioneers and trailblazers walking tour with Angela Morgan that's going to be on June 4th there's a lecture on Christian Cole with Pamela Roberts that will be on June 12th at Univ and finally making history and Oscar Wilde lecture with Merlin Holland that will be next year in McComas term on the 19th of October and the exhibition at madlyn will be up through that October date so if you'd like to participate in these events check out the exhibition please go to the maudlin College website and if you search for making history you'll find the the whole series of events as well as the information on how you can make an appointment to go see this the exhibition so we're very proud to claim Alain Locke as the first African American Rhodes scholar and and excited to learn more about him and his legacy and we are also very proud to welcome back to Rhodes house Donald field Browne he is a 2014 Rhodes Scholar from Vicksburg Mississippi who completed masters here in European and American history and he is now working he's now completing his PhD at Harvard working with Cornel West I believe and also with Henry Lewis gates I think are your two advisers specializing in post-civil rights movement writing by black Americans I believe is your your specialty field I've heard many wonderful stories about field and his contributions to the road Scholar community while he was here in residence and and we are excited about his brilliant academic career his evolving academic career and really excited to have him join us today and to talk to us about Alain Locke and his legacy so please join me in welcoming field Brown [Applause] thank you for the introduction I really appreciate it and I just want to give a couple of acknowledgments before I start so I want to thank Michelle Mendelsohn a lot she's sitting in the back she probably doesn't want to be acknowledged but she means a lot to me so when I came here as a junior well a rising junior I was studying abroad I was born and raised in Mississippi I never left the country before I came here on a study abroad with Mississippi State and I looked her up online because she studied American literature and races and so I was like if I come back I might want to work with her so let me just reach out she responded to my email and we got coffee in in Mansfield and she actually told me that day and this show us how things come full circle she said you remind me of a lady like you might have what it takes to get the roads and I remember that now because it's funny she's the one that invited me to come give this speech and so it means a lot that I can come back and talk it's Bob Wiley okay Bob Wiley is in the house okay Bob is the man so if you all walk past the entrance and don't get to know Bob you're doing yourself a disservice because he's a great person great friend helen is in the house she was in my class as well from Australia I appreciate you for coming out and yeah how many rows scholars are here by the way just by show of hands okay a lot of a lot of Rhodes Scholars how many how many African American rows guys in the house five okay cool cool are you all first year second years mostly first okay one second year okay cool cool I just wanted to get a little bit of context before I started so Elaine like is a fascinating figure to say the least so this talk will be about Elaine Locke's life but will also be about the ways in which Elaine likes life illuminates a lot of things about Oxford illuminates a lot of things about the Rose experience for african-americans and so I was thinking about giving this talking I did a lot of research read a lot of books trying to figure out Elaine likes life and I was thinking like anybody can read a book about Elaine Locke's life but I'm presenting I would hope that this presentation is more than just regurgitating things you could learn from a book so it may take me a while to get to Elaine lock but we will eventually get there and I hope you all are ready to embrace me on the journey as I take you there so first thing guys start off with I really appreciate you bringing up calling response because I like interaction I like getting a little bit of feedback my granddad was a preacher and I'm gonna actually start with a Bible verse it may seem I but how many people have read the New Testament before heard of it yeah okay good good so there's this passage there numerous passages where Jesus says some of the things such as this says it's hard for a rich man to get into heaven he says this at one point when he's talking to this rich man who says he's obeyed all the laws of the Old Testament he says it's not enough it's not enough it's hard to be a rich man to get into heaven can you give all you can to the poor God walks away Jesus tells his disciples hard for a rich man to get into heaven the reason I bring that up is at least from me somebody who came from Mississippi first person from my University when the scholarship there was a lot of expectations that came with winning the road scholarship a lot of expectations that I would do a lot of good for my state and do a lot of good for the folks in my community came from a very rural place in Mississippi the most illiterate part of America is the Delta in Mississippi and it meant a lot that I was somebody who had come from a public school system went to a state university and eventually got to Oxford and it was it was an expectation that Oxford would provide something that I could then give back and the reason I say that is because in some ways being it Oxford makes it tougher to be that person they want you to be and I'm sure that people here understand what that means especially folks that come from backgrounds they aren't similar to Oxford because in many ways you distance yourself from the people that you care about the most and so I say that because I think Elaine likes life and his story illuminates a lot about the greatness of the roads and what you can get from the roads but it also illuminates a lot about what is oftentimes lost the collateral damage that comes from winning the roads that comes from ended up going back to Harvey went to Harvard for undergrad then went to Oxford then got his PhD at Harvard then went to Howard and was a philosopher for a long time so I say that to say Alain Locke when he got to Oxford Alain Locke was more or less like an OJ Simpson even though OJ Simpson right I'm sure the American Legion or Jake Simpson so when OJ Simpson was this guy who pretty much distance himself from the black race and the more successful he got the more he did it the more he did it Alain Locke was the same way he went to an elite public school in Philadelphia I think it's called central high school they ended up going to going anybody Philadelphia here ok I saw you shake your head I was like ok I don't know it's Central High School but ok is it still elite like that now ok cool cool so things that haven't changed yeah so then he went to Harvard for undergrad was the excellent student whine the bow to an essay anybody here go to Harvard for undergrad there has to be somebody from Harvey here right no all right cool ok I see one hand yeah so it's a pretty prestigious essay prize to win he was an excellent student at Harvard it was on Tennyson and then he gets to Oxford when he gets to Oxford you know if you read his letters one thing that he consistently says is I am NOT going to England as a Negro I am NOT a race problem I did this on my own people are muddying my story with the issue of race and obviously Alain Locke being the well-read man that he was I think in some ways he was responding to Dubois is where Dubois saying the souls of black folks how does it feel to be a problem and he thinks that that is the binding force that's the effect of being a Negro in America Alain Locke says when I get here I'm distance myself from there and not to be honest at Harvard he argued that he did not experience much racism and so when he gets to England he assumes that things are going to be pretty much the same he was wrong and I think that for a lot of black people at least from the states and where you hear this narrative of England is where race is not as big of a deal America is where it is the race problem is most prominent I think that it probably relates that some people stories are here because I'm from I'm from Mississippi now so I mean Mississippi is is historically the most racist state in America right I mean the most lynchings happened in Mississippi black power was formed in Mississippi this is the state in which the racism which took his most violent form and when I would see it Oxford to be honest I I saw I saw no difference as far as as far as the race issue I saw no difference whatsoever and that's not to say it was worse it was basically the same and so I think that that still holds at least in 2015 when I left I don't know if it holds in 2019 but I wouldn't be surprised if if it did and so his time at Oxford actually leads him to embrace the race question even more he becomes the leader of the Harlem Renaissance becomes the leader of the anthology the new Negro which he it's but before I get to that I want to hone in more on the nature of universities the nature of the knowledge that we learn at these universities and the ways in which that knowledge has to be filtered through a belief system so let me just read let me read a quote see if I can get here really quickly ok so this is what Alain Locke says about the role of scholarship he says if he has served his time and purpose well he will be I take it a man whose sympathies are wider than his prejudices whose knowledge is larger than his beliefs his work and his hope greater than he himself that's the idea of a road scholarship now I repeat that if he has served his time and purpose well he will be I take it a man whose sympathies are wider than his prejudices whose knowledge is larger than his beliefs his work and his hope greater than he himself now that would be a great story to tell I don't think that always happens I don't mean to sound pessimistic I don't mean to be too critical but I just I just don't think that naturally happens I've been in universities from Mississippi State to in to Oxford and now to Harvard I've grown I've seen my friends who own the Rhodes Scholarship who started out of exposition still the exposition read the new Jim Crow read Tony he see codes read everything it's still the same person and that's why I said it's hard for a rich man to get into heaven there's a certain amount of comfort that comes with being in places like Oxford there's a certain amount of comfort that often times makes it very easy to not question assumptions about ourselves and that's and lay like did that to an extent but Alain Locke did not do that to an extent so we'll talk about both but that's that's I think a very important point to hit on and so let's go to the next core he says a man who simply I mean a man whose knowledge is larger than his beliefs I push if I'm reading that correctly I push back on that quote your beliefs have to be larger than your knowledge if your beliefs aren't grounded at first the knowledge means nothing what are you filtering the knowledge through that's why I said you can read all the books you can read the right books you can read James Baldwin you can read Audrey Lorde it doesn't matter if your beliefs are not in place and that's the kind of work that nobody can do for you that's the kind of work that you have to do by yourself that's the kind of work to borrow from Alain Locke Beneful ossifer what's the main thing of philosophy what to be a philosopher is to learn to die that's what Montaigne said that's what Plato said that's when Jesus said that's what a lot of folks have said that's what Cornel West said that's where I got it from but it's to learn to die is to learn to die that's the kind of work you can't do by reading a book I cannot tell you how many times and this this is a Side Story I didn't mean to get into this but I think it's important this exposes the contradiction when I was here Oxford this is one of the I had an issue with Christchurch I wrote a letter about in what you call it Times Higher Education right about porters didn't think I went to the University stuff was gone didn't go to the University okay I'm just wearing stuff for us for no reason that's cool so but here's the but but here's the thing so I talked to the one person in Christchurch it wasn't the Dinos the person under the name was the source was a social psychologist this person was a social psychologist studied implicit bias I say well don't you think they'd at least replace it by something I'm not calling these people out for being just blatant racist I'm just saying there may have been some implicit bias say I'm not sure implicit bias exists you study it you study it and that's why I say it's not about what you research it's I know people both black and white who study race who are still racist it happens it happens to the best of it happens to me nobody's beyond this stuff and that's why I think a lot of times at least for me and I'm sure the same thing for Elaine luck things are thrust upon us for from a very young age to win a roll scholarship you got to be under 24 in the States I don't know what other countries are like you have to be under 24 it's really hard to build a real moral compass before you're 24 years old I mean I'm just 27 now but I still know that I know that to be true I know how innocent how naive I was at that age and to think that I could just read books and become a better person that's a very naive way of thinking it's very naive you have your beliefs have to be greater than your knowledge again people can disagree we had a Q&A letter I love people to disagree with me but but I think that for you all in the crowd and for Elaine like we see these kind of issues taking place so we can talk about Elaine lock and the nature of his time at Oxford but let me go back to when he won the Rhodes someone he won the Rhodes many universities in the South said we are not going to let our students apply for the Rhodes Scholarship anymore I'm just not gonna do it we don't want that kind of contamination among our leaders of America and the warden Francis Wiley the warden actually said he argued he tried to look at a lame Locke's life to find anything he possibly could to renege the scholarship from him not only that while while doing that he also wrote letters saying I support you being here I'm looking forward to meeting you playing both sides of the field you can't have your cake and eat it too and so that's that's what I mean so it was a very kind of tense time and there were things going on he didn't even know about so him as this innocent black boy who went to a nice public school and really never dealt with the race issue and I find that really strange to leave you went to Harvard and didn't go to Harvard people did with race at Harvard life but he didn't deal with he says until they got to Oxford and so these are kind of things that are happening there were all the folks in the South in particularly Mississippi it doesn't surprise me in South Carolina you know they refused to have any dealings with him when he was here they refused to go to the Thanksgiving dinner when he was here they they asked him to not he did not get an invitation he did not get an invitation to Thanksgiving dinner they ended up organizing a separate Thanksgiving dinner two really nice one of them Horace Calvin I forget the other one's name organize a separate dinner for him this crushed him this crushed him he doesn't really talk about it a lot but it crushed him I'm gonna read a quote from Horace Calhoun that kind of that kind of hits at the ways in which these experiences devastated devastating him to to to a great degree so this is what Horse Callan says about Elaine luck some people have been mean-spirited enough to draw the color line for the benefit of Englishman this boy earned his scholarship an open competition he has said nothing to me himself others have deprecated his being there but he is here one of America's scholars and a Harvard man he finds himself suddenly shut out of things unhappy and lonely and doesn't know why that's Horace Callen he never said that he was writing letters to his mom saying everything is good everything and and I'm sure people get that because when you're Oxford nobody understands what's going on in Oxford nobody on this day it's like Vegas what happens in Oxford stays in Oxford is that's just the way things go but and especially for somebody like Elaine like even though he did come from a middle-class family for black people in the states Oxford we don't know anything about at least my father they didn't know anything about Oxford it's saying purely in terms of success if you're telling them that's you're struggling they're thinking what are you talking about your Oxford you see so he lied to his mom because you know out of a sense of probably respect to his mom and wanted to make sure everything was good but it was really it was really tough on the lane lock and so there was a couple of other experiences where he was not accepted by Oxford there was nothing where there was an event at the American Embassy in London and where the warden said we don't want you to come please don't come to the event it just would be better for everybody so he ends up coming anyway sitting all by himself and then the the American ambassador finally does go over there and make sure to keep him company make sure to keep him company and and and things like this happen often but those are the two biggest ones so I guess the question is how did he get along here did he did he make other friends and the question is yes he made a lot of other friends he was actually quite social during his time here he ran up a lot of debts partying a lot trying to be the Oxford man that he thought he could be never quite became me because sometimes sometimes different bodies not everybody can be that Oxford man you could try to be an Oxford man but people did not see him that way but the English undergrad did get along quite well with him he does look back and say he thinks that they fetishize him he says his nickname was the ugly duckling so I would probably think they did fetish shots even if that was his nickname but but he got along quite well with with with undergrads drinking and so forth and then more importantly he got along well with the Cosmopolitan Club so these were a group of people from in Egypt India South Africa primarily who really taught Alain Locke how to think through race because Alain Locke did not want to think through race and talk they taught him that what he's experiencing over here in England is part of more of an international context of white supremacy as it relates to this to this global scene and he did start to think through race and he started to actually take up the mantle of being a race leader I'll be it with caveats I'll be aware could teks that I'll get to that's a big part of that story is that he Oxford forced him to think about race it forced him to realize that I am a Negro no matter where I go and if I'm gonna do any good I've got to face this issue head-on so when he when he gets back to well first off when he does not complete his degree here Oxford he never tells anybody the truth people don't find out till later they never completed his degree at all Oxford it crushed him in a lot of ways because he was the first black rice rose scholar he talked to big game didn't fulfill it he said race wasn't going to be an issue it was an issue and it was probably part of the reason why he didn't complete the degree he ends up going to Berlin after his first year studies the philosophy of value he first he started he was studying Greek and Latin was not doing well in Greek and Latin switched switch topics moved to Germany studied their turns in his thesis and said nope not good enough I haven't read the thesis I don't know if he should have been good enough I don't know but it was not accepted he comes back to the states applies to job and gets the ghost I get the PhD philosophy at Harvard then he goes to Howard never tells anybody the truth about not getting the degree and years later he writes a letter to the warden says I still want to go back and get the degree I just got to wait to the exchange rate so better I gotta figure some things out with my life but off my stick I'm gonna still get the degree he never gets a degree never goes back but that must have been really tough that must have been a big weight on him and another thing is his friend said that his friend Fawcett who he stayed with said that the only time he ever mentioned racism being like very visible very like a acute sense of awareness was when he was at Oxford and so again Lane like was a man of many secrets he was also a closeted gay as well so he had a lot of things he was holding in while he was at Oxford they ended up carrying over and so when he got back to the state's interesting fact so I told you about before he got to Oxford he didn't think through race much he was very much hesitating through race I'm sure people knows or Neale Hurston she ended up going to how Howard she was his mentor she was studying anthropology he told her don't open up to White's too soon don't trust him with your material that's a different man that's a totally different man in the person who said I'm going to Oxford he actually thought when he went to Oxford he was not gonna return to England I mean return to the United States he thought he's gonna stay in England be a diplomat and totally escape and by the end of his time he's mentoring black students telling them to not trust white folks that's a big change one more thing about Elaine like we talk about a thing he's known for the most how many people have read the new Negro or didn't know anything about yeah of course so so Elaine luck was a big part of the Harlem Renaissance sure people who heard the phrase the Harlem Renaissance some of the most important movements in African American literature he was a big part of it he was the one to kind of connect folks to people in Africa he edited this big anthology called the new Negro in which he got a lot of famous writers like Langston Hughes Countee Cullen WB Dubois all these folks to write in one book very short stories poems artists all these types of things and when he argued is there's a new type of black person in town now we're going to speak for ourselves now we're not gonna let white folks say what they want about us we're gonna do it ourselves and I will argue that this book is as much of an accomplishment as it is a lot there's a lot of blind spots as well and this is what I mean Elaine like I told you she grew up middle class and I'm going to Oxford going back to Harvard he never really figured out that class thing he never did and that's why I said it's hard for a rich man than getting to heaven it's hard to die to attach the assumptions you're born with he didn't change on the race issue to a degree but the new Negro in some ways as much of it is an accomplishment it leaves you wanting more because Elaine like relied on black culture he loved black culture he loved excavating from the spirituals excavating from the blues to say something about black folks he never really had that deep respect for working-class people he'd never got it and that gets back to the nature of these universities it's hard to get it at places like this when you're not around people that come from those backgrounds it's very hard to do that if you don't come from it you can read millions of books you can meet millions of people the same blind spots he died with those blind spots he died a great man but he died with blind spots we all died with blind spots that's the nature of life but he argued that the new Negro was separate from the southern rural migrant well what does that say about the southern rural migrant I mean how many people y'all that african-americans your grandparents probably was sharecroppers his parents were free black folks he never got that part he never got it and so that's what I mean by when as you all go through this journey as you all learn degrees your knowledge is not greater than your beliefs you should want your beliefs to be greater than your knowledge work on your internal system first you got a long time to read books but while you're young while you have access to this work on this first this is time off I mean not necessarily time off I'm not sure the warden wants me to say that it was time off for me in some ways but but yeah I could say I could say a lot more about a lane like a lot more about Oxford but it might be helpful if I now opened it to questions if that's okay but thank you so much for this [Applause] thank you very much for what you've just said and I'm not a student here at Oxford but Sam I was having a conversation out in the garden about Oxford and saying how in for me coming into Oxford always see it as a place that is very much under a closed she knows sort of very much verified and very nice and it's one of those places that somewhere subconsciously as well as consciously and through life as it were that for certain people Oxford isn't necessarily the obvious place to go to and it's that trying to see Oxford as an opportunity to be one of these Oxford students they're going to go out and be better but equally as you rightly say losing a little bit of yourself as well because when you go back to your community you're a changed person and it's trying to build those links to use what you've benefited from here in terms of your education but it is not necessarily an education that will allow you to fit back in and give a little bit more of yourself as still keep what was originally who you were so it's one of the things because when I grew up when I was at College Oxford and Cambridge were not for us we were going to Technical College's we were going to polytechnics that's where we were seen and it was through and one of our prime ministers that it was opened up but there's still this elitism that still somehow means that certain people don't feel a natural bent to come to Oxford so I don't know if that was something that you are trying to also convey back in what you've been saying to us now a lot of what you say resonates with me a lot and I think part of the overarching thesis I always think in terms of thesis cuz I'm always writing essays and thinking how do I present I have to have a thesis and it was their form of Education as a to a double-edged sword and it always is it's always in and if people don't if you come to Oxford without understanding that then you're gonna lose a lot you're gonna you're gonna you inevitably I my thesis is you lose a lot especially if you come from a marginalized community and if you don't and you plan to use that form of education to in some way shape or form our communities then you've missed out on a lot cuz formal education maybe just one-fourth of it the majors be it's definitely not I don't think it's even half be discipline read the books you've got to happen elsewhere it's got to it's something internal I'm not I'm not a preacher so I couldn't tell you where it happens but it has it has it happened by yourself at night alone thinking to yourself trying to do other things I thank you so much I'm a first year scholar okay so my question is about the the ways in which the structure of a university could even plausibly facilitate the growth of a Liberatore politic that's a great question is there's not one that I will be able to answer that's for sure but I mean obviously I think that a lot of that happens with the people that you know I think if we relate it back to Alain Locke Liberatore politics probably happened in conversations with the folks in the Cosmopolitan Club I mean he was reading for the philosophy of value he was reading for more abstract things so I'm not thinking that may not have been what he was interested in but I do think that and to be honest I think is about talking to people back at home about these things I think yeah I think only part of it happens here and that's why I say Alain Locke for a grade of a man is he was I'm not sure how much of that he did with working-class folks as he began to think through the nature of culture and the nature of the civil rights and I'm not sure how much he did at that and it's hard to because even Howard is HBCU but Howard is elite and leaders Ali no matter if it's black or white and so I do think that it necessarily has to take place outside the classroom you had your hand up - yeah thank you I was I'm really interested in how you were describing the roads experience having changed him because I mean if you think of some of the this alumni of the scholarship part tend to be known for their technocratic or incrementalist worldviews but it seems like it could have been a radicalizing experience for him to be here where did where do you have you think ultimately it played out in his writing and contributions later in life like do you think it expanded his politic to be more radical or Liberatore or not right no it definitely expanded in terms of so I mean even him ant out anthologized in the new Negro I mean so as I said before he said he's coming to England not as a Negro he wanted to avoid the race problem Oxford forced him to think through the race problem in very particular ways he started in among the international context in the new Negro is a text in which he connects the Negro experience back to Africa he becomes someone who connects Negroes from across the country into this big anthology to prove that hey we're here we do have a literature we do have a culture something else that he did while he was here he was a big friend in Horace Collins who was a Jew from America who he knew at Harvard and they started to work through this idea of cultural pluralism pluralism which is essentially how can you be both a minority and American and how can you work through your identity and he so he dealt with that as well and so he it definitely was an experience in which he grew on a philosophical level and he began to think through his ideas in terms of race so Oxford meant a lot I mean he would not have become the man he was today the man that he died as in 1954 so it meant a lot to him for sure um so I'm a second-year scholar my name's Christian I lived in Florida and Georgia I'm so southern you being a selectman is uh it's very happy experience for you to be here for me because not many of us out here but on that note what would you say your time in elite universities has taught you about you know the uniqueness of you being a southern black man versus had you been from the north the west or somebody whose family emigrated over more recently than our ancestors did yeah that's a good question well first off Helen tell him was I ever shy about telling the miles from Mississippi loud and proud always loud and proud what's the first thing that comes out of my mouth so uh yeah I mean that's a big question I mean I I do think that and where'd you go to undergrad West Point okay and West Point is where hmm I mean I know it's a naval school right that the naval base of the army base army okay I'm sorry I'm sorry a military school so yeah I mean I mean for me being from Mississippi and being in Mississippi my whole life before I got there up to Oxford I think that my relationship my notions of what it meant to be black were so different and were radically changed because there's not a lot of recent immigrants that come to this especially not to Mississippi there's not a lot of so when I saw such a such a true rainbow of colors it's black and white everybody is black and white that's it like I mean that's just the way because essentially everybody's descendants of slaves or white folks would be here for a very long time so coming here meeting folks from India meaning folks from Africa I not met many of those people at all and so it was interesting for me to read people thought about identity in a lot of different ways than I did had to understand that not try to put people in my categories are you white or black white or black you know I'm me you know and so I think that was something that took me a while to understand and I mean definitely the sense of hospitality here is totally different and people are not as friendly I remember this one guy that was an English guy who said he thought I was one of his best friends we met five times when I was here in two years five times with best friends I thought you barely knew who I was but but but but English folks a lot of times have a different sense of friendships then then I did it but somebody's my friend yeah we we hang it every weekend at least and sometimes throughout the week so so yeah thank you for your talk you talked about this sort of contrast or opposition between Locke's aesthetic approach to liberation and a more sort of class politic but from your training and also from which you were able in from his work do you think that opposition is always fairly set up in terms of it being two dueling or competing forces in terms of the aesthetic approach and a more class politic approach like Colleen mentioned his sort of black internationalism that went into the anthology as you mentioned do you think that was a form of sort of class politic in and of itself or the limits of his black internationalism yeah okay can you repeat because I want to be fair to the question can you repeat the distinction you're trying to make between the class politics and the black internationalism just a little bit more so there's traditionally there's sort of duality that set up and you sort of indicated where his is looked at a more sort of aesthetic approach where it's focused on a cultural for all right to make advances where others are folks on a sort of very real material yeah yeah I mean it does it definitely does not have to be that way it ended up being that way in his life I mean there's examples of writers like a quote Floyd Brown William Gardner Smith these are black writers who definitely saw those there's one in the same indeed both and it wasn't an either/or I don't think he got there but I think he I think it is possible yeah it's been done before so yeah thank you so much this is really rich and I love the way in which you've connected your experience and and lox I guess the the question I'm mulling around in my mind is his leadership you know I mean he he was this I guess this incredible kind of magnetic force um you know once he got back once he wrote the new Negro and edited the new Negro and was sort of a mentor and champion to African American writers and cultural figures and you wouldn't necessarily have predicted that from the very kind of individualistic achievement that you know of his time at Harvard and even you know coming as a Rhodes Scholar so I guess I'd love to hear maybe this is a little bit connected to kaleem's question as well as is you know as you think about the arc of his journey where did where did you know you've talked about how he started to really identify himself as a race leader as somebody who was trying to say something new and different about black identity you know in America in the world but he was also like mobilizing people and I guess supporting them and mentoring them and you know what's your sense of where that came from in in him that's a great question if I had to guess I would think you've probably had a lot to do with understanding racism is not just something that affects you on this material sense but it also affects me it's an isolating experience and I think for him the ability to bring folks together probably meant a lot but I wouldn't want to speak on that too much to that I couldn't identify but I do think that his isolation had Oxford in the ways in which he found that community in the Cosmopolitan Club probably translated into him wanted to form some of the communities in the States I would assume hey field it's good to see you again of course yes I'm thanks so much for this talk and this fantastic occasion so um I'm gonna challenge you a little bit on the idea that your beliefs have to come before knowledge and I love this just because some people's beliefs are very disturbing so yeah it's good if your beliefs come first if their humanitarian humane beliefs but what if they're not you know at the work you know a very obvious point but at the other end of the spectrum if you have objectionable discriminatory beliefs so surely the whole idea of the power of diversifying the curriculum which is an ongoing struggle in Oxford in English faculty for example I genuinely believe that you can change people's minds and beliefs or at least get them to think broadly through books because otherwise why bother diversifying the curriculum so I think it's is complicate more complicated than you know have your beliefs first because you might have beliefs that are really unhelpful I agree and I didn't want to it is a complicated thing because I do think that books ideally do facilitate a change in beliefs but I also think that if there is not internal work done outside of the books the books don't do much good and that's what I mean I mean I am i study african-american literature so I want more folks to read books about black folks but I also I've been in rooms where I've taught I just taught the intro to African American Studies class and a lot of the students I had read the books I and I'm not sure how much ditch did change because it's not I just don't think it's just reading and I think we're fooling ourselves if we think it's just reading I think that there has to be something else that comes with it but obviously it's better they read the not if somebody doesn't have the bleeds but I just think that it has to do with the certain it has to be do with certain kind of filter because I can read something somebody else can read something but if we come from different filtering systems the output is gonna be totally different so but yes diversified curriculum we must we must the first Factory yes for sure just on that issue of thank you very much for the talk the issue of taking people so you mentioned for example having people arriving at Oxford with belief X and then leaving with belief X and then at the same time this idea we need to have a Liberty Liberatore kind of politic being developed outside of classrooms so that means we need some sort of space for people to engage in a place where they can have the beliefs challenged not only books but you know where they engage in some sort of dialogue but increasingly you spoke about filtering as well we live in a world where so many of people are just living in filter bubbles where they just exposed to confirming sort of information so yeah in your mind how would you conceptualize a space where people can safely go from you know X which might even be you know an offensive belief and how can we take people in through dialogue or whatever method and change their beliefs so that they can filter through that information in a much more constructive way you have any ideas or suggestions and how that can be achieved I wish I really do wish so I mean I want to stress the fact that I don't think it's going to be formalized I just don't know how you could formalize a system to do that I think life is messy I think downs there swings people go through different moments maybe there is a formula I wouldn't assume that there is a formula for something like that and again it takes a lot of courage takes a lot of and that's why I say you have to learn to die you have to you have to come from the assumption that you're not right at first that you have something to grow you have to grow in some way shape or form and and so I don't know the formula to learn to die but I think we should all do it so but thanks for the question I see one in the in back there yeah all right thanks for thanks for coming down I'm really kind of fascinated by sort of the tension that you drew between yourself and Elaine about sort of the difference between knowledge and belief and it reminded me of my university South Carolina's motto which is learning humanizes character does not permit it to be cruel do you yes oh my my University's modern South Carolina was learning humanizes character and does not permit it to be cruel and it is sort of getting to that as well I'm wondering for Elaine where do you think when he said that that comes from is it from his sort of studies or is it from his experiences and his journey or maybe something else if you sort of had a gauge on where that was coming from yeah try not to overstep my bounds when I don't know the answer to a question so I'm gonna say that it would not be safe for me to judge where a lane like where that question came from cuz I just I really just don't know but but I do appreciate the question but I just wouldn't want to overstep yeah I see your question hand back here and then here yeah I want to try and tie together Tessa's question with your great question about spaces and I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about being on that bus with the other with Tim and with Josh those Rhodes Scholars and James Baldwin yeah and what that was and what that meant to you and what that made possible both in terms of the books that James Baldwin wrote but also maybe something towards belief and something more soulful that you seem to be pointing to in your in your lecture so if you could maybe share that experience with yeah no thanks so much for reminding me that so when I was here me and and Josh akin and Tim McGuinness we were in the back of the bus from Heathrow to Oxford on the first time riding so josh is another African enroll scholar and Tim's the white guy from South Carolina North Carolina North Carolina and we said we like James Baldwin so oh cool we should just read James Baldwin together and talk about it and we started doing it every week we started balling reading club where we read James Baldwin when we brought a lot of people in Michelle was in tests came sometimes and it was a good it was a part of the race and resistance Network for a while I'm not sure what's going on with the race and resistance network now but I'm sure it's still going strong okay good yeah and so uh it meant a lot to us to have that Spencer we could use literature to work through stuff we were dealing through you know dealing with in our everyday life and so and so it definitely was probably one of the best hours of my week every every week I was here at Oxford and so that was a space but again it like I said it kind of happened organically if I said y'all need to start a bottle reading Club I mean I'm not sure that would work you know it has to come from you know the bottom up as they say so so yeah hey I'm uh Noah from Pontotoc Mississippi so I'm only a couple hundred pages into the book about at the point where he just won the scholarship and all the newspapers are writing all the articles and anything and everything in the community the black community is kind of coming around saying writing all these articles about him and he was kind of pushing back against that right I was curious what your own experience was in Mississippi because I remember when you won your face was on everything for months afterwards at Mississippi State right WTVA news and everything yeah it's a personal question we're just wondering you know how you deal with that and also like expectations for your community you coming back especially piece on what you said about when you come here you you lose touch with those things that you care the most about yeah no I think I appreciate you asking the person who questioned I also think it ties back to him and in terms of it gets back to youth I mean for me I was thrust in a situation where I had billboards in two cities I had the commercials on TV all the time I max people stopping me take pictures in Walmart and I'm giving speeches every week it was a lot and I say all that to say that if I had that in 2014 in 1907 it's the first I can't even imagine what he had it but he was so young and so you're thrust in the situation where people think you have something to offer them and and to be honest at least in my life I didn't yeah I was I was I just love books I love be reading books by black people but I was seen as a leader and so what happens and again so part of the process for me at least was to die I am NOT a leader yet I'm a young kid that's made really good grace knows a lot about black literature well I'm not quite sure I have much to provide to my state yeah and then some and in that real sense that people expected me to and I believed that life for a while I mean I finally realized it wasn't the case and in some ways the lane like had similar things similar you know issues with his own life I think that's something more general for role scars I mean he's really young I just have really recently realized how young it is to be 21 and when a scholarship like that that's really young and I'm sure for everybody in this room no matter how smart you are we've all got a lot of growing to do and so and so yeah but not now so now that I see your face did you go to Millsaps yeah Kenneth Townsend he told me about you okay now I remember your face so yeah it's nice to meet you now man yeah hopefully exactly exactly man most definitely yeah I see yeah so when you are talking about in the beginning how this experience pulls you further away from you know your community back home in Mississippi and and your family that you know a lot of people were shaking ahead yes because it resonates with them and you know I was one of them so you know after Oxford or just going through this time when you're making calls back home or you know or when you actually got back home and having those conversations with family I'll tell you what happens to me and how I try to think about it cuz I'm kind of scared for you know going down dinner's pretty soon and I'm gonna be back in the States you know how conversations that you know families just talking about whatever stuff that that family talks about and you know a few times it's like Christian I'm just trying to have a normal conversation like stop I'm not trying to have a sit like when I didn't want a seminar from you you know because once you get to Oxford you hear people debate at the Union you know you give your one to three reasons why and therefore your conclusion is better than everybody else's yeah at least that's the way that people think in that's the way that we argue but with that being said I think okay well that's obviously gonna be some somewhat off-putting to people but then to be reflexive about it it's somewhat condescending to think okay how do I need to talk to different people at various levels of educational attainment or intellect and I just want to ask you know how you've thought about it or navigated that sort of dynamic that we all inevitably sort of have to figure out right that's a good question the return so when I was here I study african-american writers that went to Paris and I also but I say the retirement cause ever Macy's there was somebody I studied for Martinique and he talked about return to the native land and and I think that return is kind of what you're getting at but I would say I mean one sense is it's okay to mean we're gonna make mistakes and that's fine but I also think that to realize that at least personally I think I offer resources more than anything I'm not sure I offer knowledge to people and I mean I know a lot I know a lot about books but I just mean that's why I always said formal education because I don't think I'm more educating my granddaddy never went to high school leader the civil rights movement in his little city you know that you know and so I don't think I have much to I think I have a lot to offer as far as connections resources I mean I'm sure I have to offer the folks who you know down in South who still don't get gender who still don't I mean I have that to offer but I think in a lot of ways I don't have a lot to offer in ways that I may think I don't know more about racing my granddaddy mean his church got bombed so I don't I don't have anything to teach him I don't have anything teaching my parents we went to segregated schools their whole life I don't have at least I personally don't think I have anything to teach them about race and so I think learning what we can teach people what we and what we can is actually not always easy to distinguish think it's important to understand what we can teach them what we can't teach them to be and to be content with that I can teach a lot of people at Harvard about race probably but I don't but do you know so I mean so I do think it's we just gotta think through that kind of stuff Thanks I just had one more question you described him as a closeted gay man I was wondering if you could talk about that did he write about it was or is it something that that came out later posthumously in research and like how did that shape his politics and and work yeah so it's I really do not know a lot about his experience as a gay man I mean ins and outs of details and letters I do know it's something that they ate at him a lot I do know it's something that he kept to himself I also know it's something this gets the point I was talking about with you can be of a certain identity and still be discriminatory I know he was also very misogynist as a gay person and it also kind of sent towards women and so I guess what I'm saying is you can't believe something and I mean so I'm not exactly answering your question I understand and I apologize but I also think that it's um you can be gay and still be homophobic you can be gay and still not get gender you can be black and not get grace and I think that his life in some ways was an example of that I realized it he knew he learned that Oscar Wilde was outed at Oxford and that was a big turning point in his life where he realized that Oxford was a heap of Legends and a pile of stones that's what he said and he and he learned and so that probably influenced him to realize that it was something that he might want to keep keep to himself he was very private about the people that he let into his house he was always worried that people were watching him partly that was because he was gay so yeah I mean and so he was a man of a lot of Bury secrets I know he he well he would have loved the law of all the Langston Hughes Langston who didn't return it so I know some things but I don't I don't know that's about the extent of it so I'm kind of interested in this idea of spiritual emancipation that Locke talks about and how you think that connects to kind of what Hazim was talking about in this binary between I guess you said aesthetic liberation or his aesthetic freedom / having a class nuance which I don't see them as bifurcated but I guess if you are intellectualizing what he means by spiritual emancipation it seems that that could only be achieved through both a revolution within the aesthetic and more I guess on the ground stuff which sounds more like a comment than a question but I guess and what ways do you think his idea of spiritual emancipation connected to yeah that's a good question but before I answer did I say that like had an idea of spiritual emancipation oh okay I just want to make sure because okay okay because I I don't think that if I said that I didn't mean to say that but but is that what you're getting out did I hear you wrong mm-hmm right okay that's what you mean by spiritual okay I see right right okay now we're gonna I'm sorry I can't keep track of a lot of things so now I have what you mean by that can you come back to the comments you just said I'm sorry oh right right the other asked good questions but since I appreciate it though for sure I don't again I don't I don't want to overstep my bounds with the answer I do think that he and also an including Jean Toomer if you read Jo Jean Toomer was including the new negro he's just one person I think about in terms of this he's somebody who went down to Georgia and kind of heard the the role you know nature of the black folks down there and really embodied that voice in the text and he allowed for a part of you know came to be in the new Negro and I mean so I do think that there's a lot of potential within the culture to lead you to the on to the on-the-ground material I think its inherent within in the culture but I don't I don't have any tidy tidy answer to it to be honest but it's a good question I hope you keep thinking about it I think about that kind of stuff all the time so one more question hi thanks for your talk I'm Angela I'm a second-year Canadian scholar I think some of this has been touched upon and I also came late so I'm sorry if this is I'm getting you to just repeat yourself but I think a lot of marginalized students coming from marginalized backgrounds here scholars like we find ourselves doing symbolic work for the institution whether or not we want to sometimes you do that actively but also you're doing it whether that's something you actively decided to do or not and I even think about like this lecture we're doing any sort of history about an individual figure you are kind of like you're having to navigate that simple ilysm as well what they're doing as a symbol of history and especially like where I think we often forget that we aren't always the first one even when we're upheld that way and so I'm thinking like especially for you engaging in this project what has that been like I guess to deal like see I think those points of familiarity but also the strangeness like grappling with the fact that like clearly this is our land Locke is not a perfect figure like there are always moments where symbolic figures fail like failed to live up to their symbolism so how you're grappling with that but also like as you do history you are also kind of like shoring up the possibility of the symbolism as well and what I guess particularly engaging with his work engaging with his life has how that has explicitly in any sort of way shaped how now you're like how you view your experience and your time here versus before you were before you started this project yeah no I thought about the symbolic a lot and I really appreciate that question so that's that's why I intentionally tried to bring out the blind spots in the lane like because I think that and that's why I brought up the ways in which places like this oftentimes if we're not very careful reproduce blind spots if one is not very very keen on like questioning oneself and so I think it's important to not see him just as a symbol like I think that being the first at something like when the Rose scholarship that's not inherently a good or bad thing I don't think I don't think Barack Obama being the first black president is inherently a good thing if you don't you know I mean if you don't think he's a good president right why does it matter if he's black why does it matter if there's a room of black folks who are doing the same thing the white folks did right so I mean so I don't think that assemble in and of itself it gives it provides folks with hope but hope only goes so far when you have material reality to deal with so so but I do think he is someone to celebrate so and I do think that in many ways but that's why I was very keen to try to bring up the blind spots as well because I think that it's always sketchy territory when you just start praising folks you know and you don't have anything else to say about so thanks a lot for that question and thanks for everybody for coming it means a lot thank you so much field for it was such a thought-provoking and deep and nuanced conversation and presentation and I really appreciate your sharing from the heart as well as from your your you know critical understanding of of Alain Locke and I think given all of us a lot to think about about the the nature of a race of institutions like Oxford and how we how we continue that work and I think you know what I in particular really take from your talk is that incredibly important inner work and you know how do we as a community here at Rhodes house at Oxford find ways you know not only in the formal curriculum but beyond the formal curriculum that work so thank you so much I want to thank all of you for for coming Michelle and Darryl and Elizabeth for bringing this this whole program together and I want to invite all of you to join us for drinks right through those doors in the Atlantic room we have a drinks reception so please do join us for drinks and further conversation but last but not least please join me in thanking field Brown you [Applause]

Channel: Rhodes Trust

Views: 1,361

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Rhodes House, Rhodes Scholarship, Rhodes Lecture, Rhodes Trust, Rhodes Scholar

Id: yMbsClZ5vAI

Length: 69min 2sec (4142 seconds)

Published: Thu May 23 2019