This chapter identifies an alternative trajectory for tracing Alain Locke’s role in shaping the New Negro movement of the 1920s. As argued, Locke’s development as a theorist and architect of the New Negro movement can be traced back to the first decade of the twentieth century when Locke “swerved” away from the notion of the individual artist as “genius.” Locke found inspiration in Paul Laurence Dunbar, who himself had moved away from the notion of artist as genius to that of artist as “representative poet.” In particular, through this engagement with Dunbar, Locke formulated a notion of a race tradition rooted in intellectual influence and in the cultural and literary material that constitute an archive, which could stand in for an absent independent physical nation. This innovative notion laid the groundwork for the definition of the modern artist of the twentieth century, launching, in effect, a new theory of literature and the work that it does in the world.

In an America that prided itself on its exceptionalism, it was the Negro who was the most important exception to American citizenship. Unlike other Americans, with the exception of the Native Americans, African Americans had to wait until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1867, two hundred years after first arriving in North America, to become citizens, and wait another hundred years before they could exercise the rights of citizens everywhere in the nation. Because America has prided itself on its self-proclaimed pluralism, its justly lauded achievement of blending together so many diverse peoples into a common culture, some questions remained. What about the Negro? How could the Negro enter into an American notion of citizenship that was predicated on immigrants becoming “white” by defining themselves as “not black?” How could black people become citizens if black exclusion was the very ground of citizenship for others? Frederick Douglass perhaps put it best. Douglass asserted that Lincoln was a great man and the father of the new white nation that came into being with the Civil War. But the Negro was only Lincoln's stepchild, a fatherless child who had to find his or her own way into a citizenship alone. What was simply a passing anomaly to the rest of Americans marching to the drumbeat of celebratory democracy became, for the black citizen, what Henry James called a complex fate – for to forge a Negro into an American citizen would require that both America and the Negro be changed.