There you have the historic Alexander Crummell, the finished scholar, the magnetic preacher, the brave, uncompromising idealist, who was dreaded by imposters and fakirs and time-servers and flunkies. He was one of those rugged, adamantine spirits, who could stand against the world for a principle, but he was gracious, courteous, tender and sympathetic withal. Tall, slender, symmetrical, erect in bearing, with a graceful and elastic walk, with a refined and aristocratic face that was lighted up by keen penetrating but kindly eyes, and surrounded by the gray hair and beard which gave him a venerable appearance, with a rich, ringing, resonant baritone voice, which had not lost its power even in old age, with an air of unmistakable good breeding and a conversation that flavored of books and literature and art, Dr. Crummell was a man that you could never forget, once you met him or heard him preach. He frequently said that what the race needed was an educated gentry, and he was himself one of the finest specimens of that rugged strength, tempered with Christian culture and a refined benevolence, which was his ideal, that the race has yet produced. Sprung from the fierce Timene Tribes, who on the west coast of Africa cut to pieces a British regiment near Sierre Leone several years ago, he possessed the tireless energy, the untamed spirit and the fearless daring that made his warrior ancestors dreaded. But like the apostle Paul, his native strength was mellowed by the Christian religion.
There was an ineffable charm in his conversation. He was a delightful companion, ever ready in wit and repartee, versatile and resourceful in debate, with the wide knowledge that is gained by travel and garnered from many fields of study. He reminded me of Wendell Phillips as an orator, with the impression of having an immense reserve power behind him; he could fill a large hall by speaking in his natural conversational voice. He possessed the same keen Damascus blade of sarcasm when aroused. Undoubtedly he was the Sir Philip Sidney of the Negro race.
In my chapter upon “The American Negro’s Contribution to literature,” I tell how beautifully DuBois in his “Souls of Black Folk” has drawn the figure of a man, whom I regard in some respects the grandest character of the Negro race. Read the chapter and read Crummell’s book upon “Africa and America,” and then you will recognize the greatness of Crummell. Some people say that great Negroes are jealous of each other. But read Crummell’s chapter upon Henry Highland Garnet and DuBois’s chapter upon Crummell, and you will see how kindred spirits appreciate each other’s worth and value.
Those who are interested in Tuskegee Institute will remember that in February, 1899, a memorable meeting was held in the Hollis Theatre in behalf of that celebrated school. The Hampton and Tuskegee Quartettes sang. Dunbar recited his dialect poems; Dr. Washington, as usual, spoke in an impressive and eloquent manner. But the event that interested many thoughtful minds was the paper of Dr. Wm. E. Burghardt DuBois upon the “Strivings of a Negro for the Higher Life.”
I. “The Negro Apostle of Culture.”
It was for such a delicately drawn portrait, such a halo surrounded it, that Prof. William James and other Bostonians doubted that it was the likeness of a real man and believed that it was the picture of an ideal, an imaginary Negro. But Crummell was not a dream creation. He was a being who had actually been clothed in flesh and blood, who had actually trod on these terrestrial shores and walked on this earth.
He was indeed the Newman of the Negro pulpit. If any one desires to read the romance of his life, of his struggles to get an education, of his despair in encountering the hostility of the Anglo-Saxon and the ingratitude and lack of appreciation of his own race, and of his bravely surmounting his difficulties, I refer him to DuBois’ “Souls of Black Folk.”
After Alexander Crummell, the first Negro apostle of culture, had spent a few years as a student in Cambridge University, England, nearly a quarter of a century as a missionary upon the west coast of Africa, he returned about the year 1870 to the United States, the land of his birth, and for twenty-three years served as rector of the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church of Washington, D. C. Then he retired from the ministry.
II. History of the American Negro Academy
He had passed the three score and ten mark. Never strong or robust physically, he had lived a very active life. It seemed as if his days of usefulness were over. But, no, this grand old man of the Negro race, nearly eighty years of age, endeavored to realize a dream that he had conceived when a student in Cambridge University, England. He proposed to found and establish the American Negro Academy, an organization composed of Negro scholars, whose membership should be limited to forty and whose purpose should be to foster scholarship and culture in the Negro race and encourage budding Negro genius. He communicated with colored scholars in America, England, Hayti and Africa. The result was that in March, 1897, when McKinley was inaugurated, the most celebrated scholars and writers in the Negro race for the first time assembled together in the Lincoln Memorial Church and formally organized into a brotherhood of scholars. Dunbar, the poet; DuBois, the sociologist; Scarborough, the Greek scholar; Kelly Miller, the mathematician; Dr. Frank J. Grimke, the theologian; Prof. John W. Cromwell, the historian; President R. R. Wright, Principal Grisham, Prof. Love and Prof. Walter B. Hayson, noted educators; Prof. C. C. Cook, the student of English literature, and Bishop J. Albert Johnson, the brilliant preacher, were among those present. Bishop Tanner, of the A. M. E. Church, and two or three other bishops were enrolled as members, and such distinguished foreign Negroes as Prof. Harper were added as members. The Academy seemed destined to do for the Negro race what the French Academy did for France.
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