100 Year Anniversary commemoration moves to Portland for the 2016 meeting of the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy (SAAP.)

This Alain Locke Society panel at SAAP will be held in honor of the 100 year anniversary of the lecture series delivered by Alain Locke in 1916 entitled “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations: Lectures on the Theory and Practice of Race” which he also delivered in the Spring of the previous year. The lecture was given under the joint auspices of the Howard Chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and the Social Science Club. The lectures were part of Locke’s efforts to include race theory in the social science and humanities curriculum of Howard University, an effort that had been opposed by the university’s president and board of trustees.

Over the course of the lectures Locke argues for various theses that are of historical and contemporary intellectual import. The topics covered range from theoretical and scientific conceptions of race, practical and political conceptions of race, the phenomena and laws of race contacts, to modern race creeds and their fallacies, and racial progress and race adjustment.

The series as a whole constitutes Locke’s most comprehensive and definitive study of race. The lecture series was never published in his life time. This may account for why Locke’s philosophy of race is one of the more understudied aspects of his overall philosophy. For most of his career and the four decades after his death his most systematic examination of race was not available in print.

Here are the details of the Alain Locke Society session to be held Friday, March 4, 2016, at 3:30pm:

Session V.A.
Alain Locke Society:
Honoring the Centennial
of Alain Locke’s Address
on “Race Contacts and Interracial Relations”

Greg Moses, Texas State University, “Toward an Integrated Preclusion of White Supremacy: Peirce’s Agapism, Dewey’s Democracy, James’ Will, Locke’s Parity, and King’s Triple Evils”

Dwayne Tunstall, Grand Valley State University, “Post-Black is the Newest New Negro: Alain Locke’s Ethnic Race and the Prospects for a Post-Black Identity”

Jacoby Adeshei Carter, CUNY: John Jay College, “Alain Locke’s Philosophy of Race: Substitutionism and Partial Eliminativism”