Ellison Joins Black Scholars In Alain L. Locke Symposium

One cannot have an American experience without also having a Black experience, Ralph Ellison told a standing-room-only audience at Boylston Auditorium Saturday.

Ellison, who won the 1953 National Book Award for fiction for his novel, "Invisible Man," spoke along with three other prominent black American scholars in a three-and-a-half-hour symposium held in tribute to Alain L. Locke '08, one of the University's first black graduates.

Locke Symposium

The other lecturers participating in the symposium were Harold Cruse, a professor of history at the University of Michigan, Nathan I. Huggins, a professor of history at Columbia University, and Albert L. Murray, author of the soon-to-be-published novel "Train Whistle Guitar."

Ellison, last of the four speakers, said America is a conglomeration of cultures and the art created here reflects an ethnic mixture. Using jazz as an example, he cited Louis Armstrong's jazz-blues style as having a mixture of French Creole and military roots.

"It is difficult to find a pure situation in America," Ellison said, and when someone says that something is culturally pure, "we are usually dealing with historical and cultural ignorance."

"People who have defined the essence of the American experience have transcended racism and bias...and defined the world in turbulent transition," Ellison said, referring to modern American writers.

The three other lectures ranged from Afro-American art and politics to an analysis of Locke's doctoral thesis on aesthetics.

The program, sponsored by the Harvard Advocate, was the first symposium ever held here in honor of one of the University's first black graduates.

"I feel that it was a tremendous success," Lewis P. Jones, the program's organizer, said yesterday. "It has filled a gap that has existed at Harvard for some time by having top-notch Afro-American intellectuals on this campus," he said.

Jones said he hopes to see the Alain L. Locke Symposium continued on a bi-annual basis.