अलेक्ज़ेंडर क्रमेल

कृतियाँ

• 1862अफ़्रीका का भविष्य

  लाइबेरिया के वर्षों के उपदेश और भाषण, जिनमें “द इंग्लिश लैंग्वेज इन लाइबेरिया” और “द रिलेशंस एंड ड्यूटीज़ ऑफ़ फ़्री कलर्ड मेन इन अमेरिका टु अफ़्रीका” शामिल हैं: अश्वेत अमेरिकियों का आह्वान है कि वे अफ़्रीका में ईसाइयत, विद्या और स्वशासन लाएँ, और लाइबेरिया गणराज्य उनकी कसौटी है।

• 1897सभ्यता: नस्ल की प्राथमिक आवश्यकता

  अमेरिकन नीग्रो अकादमी में उद्घाटन भाषण: नस्ल को सबसे अधिक संपत्ति या केवल औद्योगिक कौशल की नहीं, बल्कि सभ्यता की – साहित्य, विज्ञान और नैतिक संस्कृति की – आवश्यकता है, जिसे उसके अपने शिक्षित लोग रचें और नेतृत्व दें।

मत

Crummell is on the map as a founder of Pan-African thought and as the leading nineteenth-century advocate of higher learning as the foundation of Black emancipation. In Liberia he argued in “The Future of Africa” (1862) that Black people of the diaspora had a providential duty to bring Christianity, the English language and self-government to Africa, and he saw the Liberian republic as the test of their capacity for civilisation. Back in the United States he opposed both those who denied Black people’s capacity for culture and those who, like Booker T. Washington, made industrial training the main goal: in “Civilization the Primal Need of the Race” (1897) he held that the race needed above all a trained, morally serious elite that would create letters, science and moral culture. He thought of race as a moral and spiritual community with its own destiny – a view that Kwame Anthony Appiah examined critically at the opening of In My Father’s House (1992), arguing that Crummell’s Pan-Africanism rested on a racial conception of Africa and on a low view of African cultures. Anna Julia Cooper took up his address “The Black Woman of the South: Her Neglects and Her Needs” (1883) in A Voice from the South (1892) and challenged some of its claims, insisting on Black women’s own voice in the work of the race. W. E. B. Du Bois, who first met him in the 1890s and joined his Academy, devoted a chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903) to him, a portrait of a life of struggle against prejudice and doubt; Du Bois’s idea of a “talented tenth” has often been read as continuing Crummell’s programme.

जीवन और संदर्भ

Alexander Crummell was born free in New York on 3 March 1819, the son of Boston Crummell, who had been brought from West Africa as an enslaved boy, and of a free mother. He attended the African Free School, the Noyes Academy in New Hampshire, which a mob destroyed in 1835, and the Oneida Institute. Refused admission to the General Theological Seminary because he was Black, he studied privately and was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1844. From 1848 he studied at Queens’ College, Cambridge, graduating in 1853, and then went to Liberia, where for some twenty years he worked as a missionary, teacher and professor at Liberia College. Political conflict in Liberia led him to return to the United States in 1872; in Washington he founded St Luke’s Episcopal Church, which he led until 1894, taught at Howard University and in 1897 founded the American Negro Academy, with W. E. B. Du Bois among its first members. He died in Red Bank, New Jersey, in September 1898.

अन्य प्रमुख कृतियाँ

• The Future of Africa: Being Addresses, Sermons, etc., Delivered in the Republic of Liberia (1862)
• The Greatness of Christ and Other Sermons (1882)
• The Black Woman of the South: Her Neglects and Her Needs (1883)
• Africa and America: Addresses and Discourses (1891)
• Civilization the Primal Need of the Race (1897)