78. Freedom Through Art: Alain Locke

I think probably both of those are right. Bear in mind this is part of a wider value theory and for Locke values are intrinsically, well, valuable. So I believe he would say that cultivating one's aesthetic sense is worth doing simply because of the internal value of aesthetic experience - if you can have a wider, deeper, more subtle etc sense of beauty then why would you not want to do that? This does not rule out though that there could also be socio-political benefits, like reaching across group boundaries to achieve unity between peoples for example. But unlike Du Bois he would resist the idea that aesthetic experience is somehow rendered pointless if it lacks that political payoff. To put it another way he does not think that improving one's aesthetic sense has to be justified in terms of some non-aesthetic criterion. And the same would go for other values like morality or religious feeling.

For his academic philosophical work on aesthetics I would go with "Values and Imperatives" which is included in Molesworth, The Works of Alain Locke, at 452-64. For his debate with Du Bois check out L. Harris, “The Great Debate: W.E.B. Du Bois vs. Alain Locke on the Aesthetic,” Philosophia Africana 7 (2004), 15-39.

For cosmopolitanism you could look at the studies of Prof Harris: L. Harris, “Alain Locke’s Atavism,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 24 (1988), 65-83; L. Harris, “Alain Locke and Community,” Journal of Ethics 1 (1997), 239-47.