the annual Thanksgiving feast. His three years in Oxford were lonely. There is no evidence from that period or from later decades that any of his classmates ever befriended him. His name is absent from their correspondence and publications. In 1908 at Thanksgiving the guest speaker was to be a don from Balliol. Upon discovering that Locke was not invited, the don backed out and hosted a special dinner at his college to which he invited Locke and all the other Rhodes Scholars. Americans from the southern states boycotted that affair.37
Locke's frictions with his classmates probably also stemmed from his homosexuality, though he never “came out” in Oxford. Indeed, he was still grappling with his sexual orientation during that period of his life. Perhaps his classmates did not even realize he was gay. But obviously he was a dandy. After George Parkin first met Locke he commented that the young man had “the grace and politeness of manner of a Frenchman or an Italian.”38
Locke's foppish manners enabled him to mix well with many British students. From the late nineteenth century at least until the 1930s Oxford students were divided into three types. In the middle were the great mass who had no strong eccentricities or distinctive lifestyles. On the two extremes, numbering perhaps ten to twenty percent each, were the “hearties” and the “aesthetes.” The hearties were what we today call the jocks. They played in the rougher sports and belonged to clubs like the Bullingdon rather than to the debating societies. The aesthetes dressed well, had exaggerated mannerisms, and favored poetry, refined dining, and the gentler sports. In the last decades of the nineteenth century the most famous aesthetes were the Brasenose don Walter Pater and the Magdalen student Oscar Wilde. In later decades aestheticism was personified most famously by Harold Acton, a student in the 1920s, and by the character of Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited. The popular assumption was that all the hearties were lustily heterosexual and the aesthetes gay-though by no means was this always the case.
Locke also formed close associations with some black and colored students from Africa and India. Much of the inspiration for his later career as a spokesman for the “New Negro” came from these acquaintances. They taught him about the magnificent cultural accomplishments of non-whites.
In addition to the antipathy Locke faced from his fellow Americans, he experienced other problems. He started out reading Greats but soon realized that his command of Latin and Greek was insufficient. He then switched to philosophy. At the end of his third year he was not ready to take his exams. Instead of completing his work at Oxford, in 1910 he enrolled at the University of Berlin. There too, he failed to get a degree, but he did complete a long paper that he submitted in Oxford as a thesis for a B.Litt. Oxford, however, deemed the thesis inadequate, and Locke returned home in 1912 with no degree to show for his five years away. He appears, however, to have had cordial relations with Parkin and Wylie and with his tutors. In 1918 he obtained a Ph.D. from Harvard, though in the 1920s he considered returning to Oxford to obtain a degree there. Academically, therefore, Locke's experience in Oxford produced no concrete results but appears to have been beneficial and not altogether unpleasant.39
On the other hand, Locke did encounter social problems while living in Britain. He called Oxford the “Imperial Training School.” He disliked the British sense of superiority and paternalism, particularly as it applied to any foreigners whose skin color might indicate that they were from the colonies.40
On the whole, however, he found that few Britons exhibited the racial prejudices held by most Americans. This caused a different sort of problem for him. Within weeks of arriving in England, Locke published a magazine article entitled “Oxford: By a Negro Student.” For the most part the essay was a balanced, even favorable, description of Oxford society and traditions. However, near the end he addressed the question of race. He acknowledged that in Britain there were “no race distinctions” and “no race curiosity.” In short, his race was not an issue in most of his social dealings. This bothered him, because his blackness was important to him. He asserted that
One cannot be neutral toward a class or social body without the gravest danger of losing one's own humanity in denying to some one else the most human of all rights, the right to be considered either a friend or an enemy, either as helpful or harmful. So for the good of every one concerned, I infinitely prefer race prejudice to race indifference.41
He feared being engulfed in a homogeneous mass. Oxford thus helped to instill in him the germ of his ideas about black pride and creativity.
Should one condemn the white Rhodes Scholars for their racism? A handful of them opposed the exclusion of Locke from the American Club, but none appears to have gone out of his way to befriend him. Locke died in 1954, and the American Oxonian published an obituary. Generally such pieces were written by fellow classmates or by other Rhodes Scholars who had come to know the deceased well. In contrast, the person who wrote this one appears never to have known Locke personally. The obituary praises Locke for his professional accomplishments, but it has none of the intimate reminiscences typical of other obituaries printed in the magazine.42
Distasteful as their attitudes seem for us today, the Rhodes Scholars who shunned Locke were acting as most Americans would have done at that time. Blacks were excluded from many jobs, schools, clubs, and restaurants even in the northern states. Not long before Locke went to Oxford, President Theodore Roosevelt had brought a storm of criticism upon the White House by inviting Booker T. Washington to lunch. Thus Rhodes Scholars were no worse than most of their contemporaries, but neither were they in the vanguard of change.
In the aftermath of the controversy sparked by Locke's appointment, selection committees avoided doing anything to encourage blacks. No records were kept about the race of applicants, but few, if any, blacks applied for the scholarships over the next half century. There were relatively few blacks in American colleges, and most of them were in Negro colleges or state universities – hardly the kinds of institutions that produced most Rhodes Scholars. Not until 1963 would there be other black American Rhodes Scholars.
NOTES
1. Richard Harrity, “63 Years of Yanks at Oxford,” Look, 4 October 1966, 82.
2. Ibid.; TAO, 1 (1914): 43; 38 (1951): 84.
3. TAO, 49 (1962): 199.
4. TAO, 51 (1964): 240.
5. Elton, First Fifty Years, 88.
6. Stanley Royal Ashby, “An American Rhodes's Scholar at Oxford,” MacMillan's Magazine, n.s. 1 (1906): 182-83; Parkin, Rhodes Scholarships, 195.
7. Mackaye, “What Happens,” 11. Unfortunately, Mackaye does not provide the name of the Rhodes Scholar in question.
8. TAO, 45 (1958): 63.
9. TAO, 26 (1939): 18–19.
10. TAO, 56 (1969): 238.
11. TAO, 50 (1963): 70; Mackaye, “What Happens,” 11. Also see various issues of the Alumni Magazine and the early pages of A Register of Rhodes Scholars, 1903–1981 (Oxford, 1981).
12. Gale E. Christianson, Edwin Hubble: Mariner of the Nebulae (New York, 1995), 64, 76, 84, 87; TAO, 66 (1979): 122.
13. TAO, 52 (1965): 218.
14. Alumni Magazine, 3 (January 1910): 24.
15. TAO, 68 (1981): 159; 76 (1989): 158.
16. TAO, 2 (1915): 21; 25 (1938): 176.
17. Ashby, “American Rhodes' Scholar,” 183.
18.
