Adria Locke Langley
Locke was born in Iowa, 1899, as the youngest of three children. When she was young her family moved to Stanton, Nebraska and that is where she grew up. Her father William Locke, was president of the Omaha livestock market and a Quaker. He had certain ideas of what a woman should be. Because of this Adria's grandfather, Thomas Glendenning, took over in teaching her what would later be a great social consciousness.
Alain LeRoy Locke
Locke sustained his religious relationship to Christianity in the public eye and rarely openly supported his affiliation to the Bahá'í movement. Locke was a member of the Bahá'í Faith and declared his belief in Bahá'u'lláh in 1918. Due to the lack of an official enrollment system for the Bahá'í movement, the date in which Locke converted to Bahá'í faith is unverified. However, the National Bahá'í Archives discovered a "Bahá'í Historical Record" card that Locke completed in 1935 at the inquiry of a Bahá'í census from the National Spiritual Assembly. He was one of seven African American individuals from the Washington D.C. Bahá'í movement to complete the card. On the card, Locke wrote the year 1918 as the year he was accepted into Bahá'í religion and wrote Washington D.C. as the place he was accepted. This date suggests that Locke's conversion from Orthodox Christianity to Bahá'í faith was during the early 1920s. It was common to write to 'Abdu'l-Bahá to declare one's new faith, and Locke received a letter, or "tablet", from 'Abdu'l-Bahá in return. When 'Abdu'l-Bahá died in 1921, Locke enjoyed a close relationship with Shoghi Effendi, then head of the Bahá'í Faith. Shoghi Effendi is reported to have said to Locke, "People as you, Mr. Gregory, Dr. Esslemont and some other dear souls are as rare as diamond."