John W. Cromwell

John Wesley Cromwell was born free in Portsmouth, Virginia, on the fifth of September 1846. His family moved north to Philadelphia in 1851 to escape Virginia's increasingly punitive laws against free Black residents. He took his secondary education at the Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia under Charlotte Forten and her circle.

He completed his undergraduate education in 1864, taught Black freedmen in Virginia during Reconstruction, and was admitted to the District of Columbia bar in 1874 — among the earliest African Americans admitted to practice law in the District. He served as a U.S. Treasury Department clerk through the late nineteenth century.

He founded the People's Advocate newspaper in Washington in 1876 and edited it for ten years. The Advocate was one of the principal Black newspapers of the post-Reconstruction era and the leading platform for Black political response to the collapse of Reconstruction across the Southern states.

He co-founded the American Negro Academy with Alexander Crummell (also placed in this archive) in 1897 and served as its corresponding secretary throughout its operating decades. He edited the Academy's published proceedings and was the principal organizer of its working schedule.

His historical writing — most significantly The Negro in American History: Men and Women Eminent in the Evolution of the American of African Descent (1914) — built on the work of George Washington Williams and James W. C. Pennington (also placed in this archive) to produce one of the foundational survey histories of African Americans by an African American writer.

He died in Washington on the fourteenth of April 1927, age eighty.

He is honored here as the editor and historian who co-built the American Negro Academy.