Part I. The education of Alain Locke. A death and a birth ; A black Victorian childhood ; Child god and black aesthete ; An errand of culture at Harvard College, 1904-1905 ; Locke's intellectual awakening, 1905-1907 ; Going for the Rhodes ; Oxford contrasts ; Black cosmopolitan ; Paying second-year dues at Oxford, 1908-1909 ; Italy and America, 1909-1910 ; Berlin stories ; Exile's returns ; Race cosmopolitan comes home, 1911-1912 ; Radical sociologist at Howard University, 1912-1916 ; Rapprochement and silence : Harvard, 1916-1917 ; Fitting in Washington, D.C., 1917-1922 -- Part II. Enter the New Negro. Rebirth ; Mother of a movement, mothered in return, 1922-1923 ; Europe before Egypt ; Egypt bound ; Renaissance self-fashioning in 1924 ; The dinner and the dean ; Battling the Barnes ; Looking for love and finding the New Negro ; Harlem issues ; The New Negro and Howard ; The New Negro and the blacks ; Beauty or propaganda? ; Black curator and white momma ; Langston's Indian summer ; The American scholar ; On maternalism -- Part III. Metamorphosis. The naked and the nude ; The saving grace of realism ; Bronze booklets, gold art ; Warn a brother ; The riot and the ride ; Transformation ; Two trains running ; The queer Toussaint ; The invisible Locke ; FBI, Haiti, and diasporic democracy ; Wisdom de profundis ; The New Negro lives.