Locke was cremated, and his remains given to Dr. Arthur Fauset, Locke's close friend and executor of his estate. He was an anthropologist who was a major figure in the Harlem Renaissance. After Fauset died in 1983, and the remains were given to his friend, Reverend Sadie Mitchell, who ministered at African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia. Mitchell retained the ashes until the mid-1990s, when she asked Dr. J. Weldon Norris, a professor of music at Howard University, to take the ashes to the university.