Alain LeRoy Locke (1885-1954) was an intellectual, professor and author who espoused that African Americans, specifically artists, to capture the personality, lives, and essence of their people in "The New Negro". He explained “The Negro physiognomy must be freshly and objectively conceived on its own patterns if it is ever to be seriously and importantly interpreted. Art must discover and reveal the beauty which prejudice and caricature have overlaid.” What Locke is expressing here is not only the call for black artists to overcome racial prejudices via positive artistic representations of blacks, but that the actual African American individual like Thrash portrayed the lives of fellow blacks, and had the power to propagate this idea of the New Negro, as Locke explains, “There is the possibility that the sensitive artistic mind of the American Negro, stimulated by a cultural pride and interest, will receive…a profound and galvanizing influence.”