Alexander Crummell

Alexander Crummell was born free in New York City on the third of March 1819, the son of Boston Crummell — a man taken from the Temne kingdom of West Africa and brought to America as an enslaved child, who later achieved his own freedom. He was educated at the Mulberry Street School in Manhattan and at the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire — until white residents of Canaan dragged the school's building off its foundations with eighty yokes of oxen in 1835 to end the integrated education of Black students.

He completed his theological education at the University of Cambridge in England (B.A. 1853), becoming one of the first African American clergymen to receive a Cambridge degree. He was ordained an Episcopal priest in England in 1844.

He moved to Liberia in 1853 and served as a missionary, teacher, and professor of moral philosophy at Liberia College for twenty years. His sustained intellectual contribution during the Liberian period — including the books The Future of Africa (1862) and Africa and America (1891) — anticipated by two generations the Pan-African civilizational arguments of Edward Wilmot Blyden, Marcus Garvey, and W. E. B. Du Bois (Du Bois explicitly identified Crummell as a personal intellectual ancestor in The Souls of Black Folk).

He returned to the United States in 1873, founded St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., and in 1897 — at seventy-eight — founded the American Negro Academy, the first major Black scholarly organization in the United States. The Academy's roster included Du Bois, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and James Weldon Johnson — all placed in this archive.

He died in Red Bank, New Jersey, on the tenth of September 1898, age seventy-nine.

He is honored here as the founder of the American Negro Academy and the philosopher Du Bois named his ancestor.