Alain Locke Harlem/big apple quote--1988 New Amsterdam article

[Cohen, Gerald Leonard]

In a major development on the Harlem/big apple quote, Kathleen Bethel (African American Studies Librarian, Northwestern University Library), sent me a pdf of a New York Amsterdam News article (Aug 20, 1988) p.23, col.1, "Getting to the core of "Big Apple," by Ali Stanton.  This article quotes Geraldine Daniels two years before her 1990 letter to the NY Times, thereby providing ample time for Daniels' statement to make its way into Dorothy Winbush Riley's book of African American quotes (first published 1990).
    I don't know if pdf's can be forwarded to ads-l, so I'll quote from the relevant part:   '...C'mon, Governor [Cuomo], that was informative but can't you be more specific?  Listen to what one of your colleagues said, she gave credit where credit is due. [heading: Apple source]                                                                                                                                                                                  Says Assemblywoman Geraldine Daniels: "...as the representative of central Harlem in the New York State Assembly, it is my understanding that the outstanding savant, the late Dr. Alain Locke, Professor of Philosophy at Howard University if Washington, D.C. was the originator of the term during the Harlem Renaissance.       "Dr. Locke, a graduate of Harvard Univesity, and the first Black RhodesScholar to attend Oxford University in England, first used the term to depict Harlem as the precious fruit in the Garden of Eden, and [!
 said] that oppressed Black American intellectuals could find it as an oasis for their talents in the Fine Arts, such as literature, music, and paintings. ...."'

Unless an earlier mention of Locke's quote arises, Stanton's 1988 article looks like the trigger for the quote's spread.  That's early enough to make it into Riley's book of African-American quotations. It's there for sure in the 1993 HarperCollins edition of Riley's book. On the back of the title page we read that the book had been privately published in 1991 (no mention of 1990).  And in WorldCat we see that she published it privately already in 1990, but that's still two years after the 1988 Stanton article.

It's still not clear how "c. 1919" was arrived at in Riley's book, and I'll await word from her about her source for the Locke quote (I wrote to her today requesting that information).  But barring any surprises (always possible, of course), the pieces of the puzzle seem to have fallen nicely into place: Daniels heard from the griots (oral historians) about how Locke felt about Harlem, presented her thoughts to Stanton for his 1988 New Amsterdam article and then in her 1990 NY Times letter to the editor, a collector of African-American quotations (most likely, thus far: Riley) mistakenly assumed that Locke expressed his thoughts as a direct quote, and the book of quotations presented them as such. And then this quote acquired a life of its own.

At  least that's how things presently look.  In any case, my thanks go to Kathleen Bethel for providing what looks like a very important piece of the puzzle.

Gerald Cohen

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