Alain Locke Quotes

that man is richest who, having perfected the functions of his own life to the utmost, has also the widest helpful influence, both personal, and by means of his possessions, over the lives of others … Many of the persons commonly considered wealthy are, in reality, no more wealthy than the locks of their own strong boxes, they being inherently and eternally incapable of wealth.

Some of the other students were out on the grass in front of Alain Locke Hall, in pink and green, chanting, singing, stomping, clapping, stepping.

There’s a murderer on the loose in Sugarcomb Lake,” Clarissa reminded her.  “I’m positive the wrong person has been arrested.  So be on high alert until the real killer is caught, okay?  Lock your door tonight and don’t open it for anyone.” Liana

Changing your mindset, acknowledging that shootings happen, and that one could happen to you, are also important. The loud noise may be a car backfiring or a balloon popping. But what if it is a gunshot? If you assume wrong, you could be dead. If you jumped up and shut your already locked door and prepared to deny access, escape or fight and it turns out that it was a balloon popping, what is the harm? A little embarrassment? You can live with that. The key word being live. If you are in a public place and hear something that might be gunshots, don’t rationalize them away as something else. I’d rather you be embarrassed because you immediately exited the building in the opposite direction from the sounds, than become a victim. Better to be embarrassed than dead.

The rosy enthusiasms and hopes of 1925," Alain Locke said ten years later, "were. . . cruelly deceptive mirages." The ghetto was revealed in the thirties as "a nasty, sordid corner into which black folk are herded—a Harlem that the social worker knew all along but had not been able to dramatize. . . There is no cure or saving magic in poetry and art for. . . precarious marginal employment, high mortality rates, civic neglect," Locke concluded. It was this Harlem, the neighborhood not visible "from the raucous interior of a smokefilled, jazzdrunken cabaret," the Harlem hidden by the "bright surface. . . of. . . night clubs, cabaret tours and. . . arty magazines," that was devastated by the Depression.