Alexander Crummell

Works

• 1862The Future of Africa

  Sermons and addresses from his years in Liberia, among them “The English Language in Liberia” and “The Relations and Duties of Free Colored Men in America to Africa”: Black Americans are called to bring Christianity, learning and self-government to Africa, and the Liberian republic is their test.

• 1897Civilization the Primal Need of the Race

  Inaugural address to the American Negro Academy: what the race needs most is not property or industrial skill alone but civilisation – letters, science and moral culture – created and led by its own educated people.

Position

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.

Life & context

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.

Further main works

• 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)