American Pluralists, Friends at Oxford

This chapter explores Horace Kallen and Alain Locke's budding friendship and how it led to the formation of their shared pluralistic outlook. Much of the scholarship surrounding Locke and Kallen at Oxford has focused on the Oxford American Club's Thanksgiving dinner of November 1907, when white Rhodes scholars declined to invite Locke, and Kallen refused to attend in protest. Kallen's Jewishness proved an important marker of difference. Locke's Blackness proved more significant and created a power imbalance between the two men, complicating their friendship. That friendship featured prejudice and admiration, bigotry and respect. Over time, admiration and respect won out. The burgeoning friendship between Kallen and Locke exemplified cultural pluralism as lived experience.