Alexander Crummell, Episcopalian Priest, Cambridge University Graduate

Alexander Crummell was born in New York City on March 3, 1819 to Boston Crummell and Charity Hicks. His father was from a royal family of the Temne1  ethnic group in West Africa, where he lived until he was 13 years of age when he was then sold into slavery. While Alexander’s2 father became free in his adulthood, his mother was born free to a family of free Black residents in Long Island, New York. Though Boston Crummell could neither read nor write, he hired tutors and educated his children, who in turn read to him English classics, and he could by memory repeat authors like Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope3.  

At age 13, Alexander Crummell joined the African Free School4 of Mulberry Street where he completed his elementary education. In 1831, he was enrolled in the Canal Street High School founded by Reverend Peter Williams,5 with the help of Alexander’s father, Thomas Downing,6 and other Black leaders who hired a white instructor to teach Greek and Latin. Crummell attended Canal Street School until 1835, then moved to the city of Canaan, New Hampshire, on invitation, to enroll in the Noyes Academy, a school created by abolitionists for all races. Crummell swore to become a great intellectual after hearing a discussion among white lawyers. According to Booker (2000),7 one of the attorneys quoted the pro-slavery senator John C. Calhoun8 saying “if he could find a Negro, who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man” (p.52). As soon as he joined the school, Crummell showed his intellectual qualities. For instance, on July 4th, 1835, Crummell, along with other Black students, Henry Highland Garnet9 and Thomas S. Sidney10 delivered an excellent speech at an Independence Day gathering organized by abolitionists in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Angered by the speech, whites in the area convened a meeting that evening, and another on July 13. After notifying neighboring towns of their plan to get rid of these Black students—Crummell, Sidney and Garnet—on August 10, 1835, they destroyed the school, and Crummell subsequently returned to New York.

Recounting his ordeal at Noyes Academy in New Hampshire, Crummell wrote:

We met a most cordial reception at Canaan from two score white students, and began, with the highest hopes our studies. But our stay was the briefest. The Democracy of the State could not endure what they called a “Nigger School” on the soil of New Hampshire; and so the word went forth, especially from the politicians of Concord, that the school must be broken up. Fourteen black boys with books in their hands set the entire Granite State crazy! On the 4th of July, with wonderful taste and felicity, the farmers, from a wide region around, assembled at Canaan and resolved to remove the academy as a public nuisance! ....They were two days in accomplishing their miserable work. …. When we left Canaan the mob assembled on the outskirts of the village and fired a field piece, charged with powder, at our wagon. We returned home over the Green Mountains of Vermont, along the valley of the Connecticut, through Troy, down the Hudson to New York” (Crummell,1891, pp. 280-281).

 In 1836, Crummell joined the Oneida Institute at Whitesboro, founded in 1833 by the abolitionist Beriah Green.11 He graduated in November 1838 and again returned to New York City. The same year, he was appointed ward commander for the newly formed New York Association for the Political Improvement of Colored People. In 1839, he was a candidate for Holy Orders,12  under the direction of Reverend Peter Williams, Rector of St. Phillips Church, was received as a candidate in the Diocese of Massachusetts, and ordained a deacon in 1842. In 1839, he had also applied for admission into the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church, but he was denied entry. His former classmates at Oneida Institute  protested against his exclusion. He finally obtained private tutoring in Rhode Island with Reverend. Dr. A.H. Vinton,13 and was ordained a priest in 1844.  

International Travels

Crummell’s international travels were also rooted in the challenges he faced and was trying to address in the United States as well as England. Crummell began his priestly duties in Rhode Island, but was unhappy with the few number of Blacks in the congregation. Attempts to secure an appointment elsewhere failed multiple times because of his color. Tired, Crummell returned to New York City where he started a congregation of poor and Black people.

In 1847, at the invitation of friends, he visited England to raise funds for his church in New York. While in England, he enrolled in Cambridge University, Queens College in 1848, where he graduated with a bachelor degree in 1853. Crummell preached and lectured during his stay in England. Yet, the cold climate affected his health, and upon the advice of his physician to move to a warmer climate, he later left England for Liberia. 

In Liberia, where he spent two decades as a missionary, he took the position of professor of English and moral philosophy at Liberia College. In 1872, multiple challenges forced him to return to the United States. Settling in Washington, D. C. he founded St. Luke' s Church, and served as its rector for almost twenty-two years. He helped establish the Conference of Church Workers among Colored People within the Episcopal Church in 1883. In 1895, at 76 years of age, Crummell resigned from St. Luke' s Church, then taught at Howard University from 1895 to 1897. On March 5, 1897, Crummell established the American Negro Academy, which  assembled Black scholars of science and literature such as John W. Cromwell, Kelly Miller, W.E.B Dubois, Henry P. Slaughter, and Arthur A. Schomburg, its last president.

Fight for Civil Rights, Identity, and Racial Equality

Throughout his life, Crummell identified with the struggle for civil rights and racial equality. His writings, sermons, speeches, and other literary works were avenues he employed to reclaim Black identity, and oppose narratives about the inferiority of the Black race.

In Defense of the Black race

Crummell often used his sermons to oppose arguments about the inferiority of Black people. For instance, in a sermon on the book of Isaiah 67, verse, 7, titled “The destined superiority of the Negro,"14 he said the following:

The Negro race, nowhere on the globe, is a doomed race! … Just the reverse with the Negro! … The discussion of this morning teaches us that the Negro race, of which we are a part, and which, as yet, in great simplicity and with vast difficulties, is struggling for place and position in this land discovers, most exactly, in its history, the principle I have stated. And we have in this fact the assurance that the Almighty is interested in all the great problems of civilization and of grace carrying on among us. All this is God’s work. He has brought this race through a wilderness of disasters; and at last put them in the large, open place of liberty; but not, you may be assured, for eventual decline and final ruin. You need not entertain the shadow of a doubt that the work which God has begun and is now carrying on, is for the elevation and success of the Negro… Nothing, believe me, on earth; nothing brought from perdition, can keep back this destined advancement of the Negro race. No conspiracies of men nor of devils! The slave trade could not crush them out. Slavery, dread, direful, and malignant, could only stay it for a time. But now it is coming, coming, I grant, through dark and trying events, but surely coming…

Crummell’s theological training allowed him to anchor his defense of the Black race on the Bible, thus refuting other religious leaders who used the same book to justify slavery and the inferiority of Black people. Hence, as a preacher, he could conclude that:

Everywhere on earth has been given him, by the Almighty, assurance, self-assertion, and influence… With all  these providential indications in our favor, let us bless God and take courage. Casting aside everything trifling  and frivolous, let us lay hold of every element of power, in the brain; in literature; art and science; in industrial pursuits; in the soil; in cooperative association; in mechanical ingenuity; and above all, in the religion of our God; and so march on in the pathway of progress to that superiority and eminence which is our rightful heritage, and  which is evidently the promise of our God!  (Crummell, 1882, p.352).

In Defense of the Black Woman

As much as he defended the Black race, Crummell also addressed the challenges faced by Black women. He was, in his own rights, an early advocate of Black women's rights. In an address before the Freedman’s Aid Society15 at the Methodist Episcopalian Church, titled “The Black woman of the South: Her neglects and her needs,"16 he said the following: 

She [the Black woman] was picker of cotton. She labored at the sugar-mill and in tobacco factory. When through weariness or sickness, she has fallen behind her allotted task, there came, as punishment, the fearful stripes upon her shrinking, lacerated flesh. … But some of you will ask: “why bring up these sad memories of the past? Why distress us with these dead and departed cruelties?” Alas, my friends, these are not dead things. Remember that: “The evil that men do lives after them”. The evil of gross and monstrous abominations, the evil of great organic institutions crop out long after the departure of the institutions themselves. (p.161).

For Crummell, the Black woman of the South "is one of the queens of womanhood. If there is any other woman on this earth who in native aboriginal qualities is her superior, I know not where she is to be found … the Negro woman is unsurpassed by any other woman on this earth…. The testimony to this effect is almost universal—our enemies themselves being witnesses'' (Crummell, 1883, p. 167). As seen in the following excerpt, Crummell felt compelled to defend the Black woman:

But for the mothers, sisters, and daughters of my race I have a right to speak.  And when I think of their sad  condition down South; think, too, that since the day of emancipation hardly anyone has lifted up a voice in  their behalf, I felt it a duty and a privilege to set forth their praises and to extol their excellencies. …But I must  remember that I am to speak not only of the neglects of the black woman, but also of her needs. And the  consideration of her needs suggests the remedy which should be used for uplifting of this woman from a state of brutality and degradation….But a true civilization can only then be attained when the life of woman is reached,  her whole being permeated by noble ideas, her fine taste enriched by culture, her tendencies to the beautiful  gratified and developed, her singular and delicate nature lifted up to its full capacity; and then, when all these  qualities are fully matured, cultivated and sanctified, all their sacred influences shall circle around then thousand firesides, and the cabins of the humblest freedmen shall become.

Crummell on Africa

Alexander Crummel believed that Africa was the motherland of the Black race, in an abject state and in dire need of help. In a letter titled “ Free colored men in America to Africa"17 he wrote:

I remark that the abject state of Africa is a most real and touching appeal to any heart for sympathy and aid… Africa lies low and is wretched. She is the maimed and crippled arm of humanity. Her great powers are wasted. Dislocation and anguish have reached every joint. Her condition in every point calls for succor -moral, social, domestic, political, commercial, and intellectual (Crummell, 1862,, p.219).

Africa, for Crummell needed the aid of Blacks in America because  Africa “needs skill, enterprise, energy, worldly talent, to raise her; and these applied here to her needs and circumstances, will prove the hand maid of religion, and will serve the great purposes of civilization and enlightenment through all her borders” (Crummell, 1862, p. 221).

Crummelll clearly believed that Africa could only be helped by Blacks beyond her shores, whose ancestors were forced to leave the continent. Africa for her regeneration needed her “civilized emigrants”. In his speech “The progress and prospects of the Republic of Liberia18” delivered to the American Colonization Society of New York in 1861, he stated:

...training, habits, customs, education, and political experience, [of Blacks in the United States] have made us—it is not, it is true, a dignified mode of expression, but I have used it in private, and may be pardoned its use here—they have made us “Black Yankees;” and I feel assured that in Liberia, we shall find a more congenial field, better appliances, a government more suitable to our antecedents, better fitted to a youthful nation and an aspiring emigrant population; to achieve that which seems to me the master aim of all our colonization to Africa, and the noblest duty of  the Republic of Liberia—I  mean the evangelization and enlightenment of heathen Africa!

This imperialistic view, woven in evangelization and enlightenment erased Africans, projected Africans as inferiors, and aligned with European colonizers’ mindset, with the difference that Crummell this time was calling for Black Americans' colonization of Africa. Therefore, it is not surprising that Crummell’s perception of Africa was met with criticism from other scholars (Appiah, 1990; West, 2004). Furthermore, Black Americans who believed their duty was to the United States, their home, and nation did oppose Crummell’s Africa colonization project.  Yet, there is no doubt that Alexander Crummell's contributions to Black liberation in America was immense. Crummell laid the ground for civil rights thinkers and activists centuries after his death on September 10, 1898. The American Negro Academy he founded, which disappeared in 1920 with the rise of the Harlem Renaissance, inspired and mentored famous Black intellectual such as W.E. B. Dubois.

Notes and References

1 The Temne people are found in West Africa, specifically in Sierra Leone, Guinea, and The Gambia.

2 The circumstances of his emancipation are not clear, but it is said that he simply refused to serve his New York owners any longer after reaching adulthood.

3 In The Colonial church chronicle and missionary journal (1847-1862). London F. and J. Rivington.  As for the name “Crummell” the authors of this journal explained that it was a transformation of Kerumah, probably in the Temne language.

4. The African Free School was founded in 1787 by the New-York Manumission Society whose members composed the first Board of Trustees of the school. These members included: Melancton Smith, James Cogswell, Thomas Burling, John Lawrence, John Bleecker, Lawrence Embree, Willet Seaman, Jacob Seaman, Nathaniel Lawrence, White Matlock, Matthew Clarkson, and John Murray, Jun. In Andrews, C. C. (1830). The history of the New-York African free-schools, from their establishment in 1787, to the present, Manuscript Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

5. Reverend Peter Williams, Jr. (1780-1840), was an abolitionist, the son of the founder in 1796 of what would become the AME Zion Church in New York City. The young Williams helped establish in 1819 the first Black Episcopalian church in New York, St. Philips African Episcopal Church of which he was the pastor. Recollections of seventy years collection, Manuscript Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 

6 Brief speech denouncing the African Civilization Project. The speaker believed this was similar to the American Colonization Society project and just one more way of making money using African American labor.

7 Booker, C. B. (2000). “I will wear no chain”: A social history of African American males. Westport, Connecticut: Praeger.

8 John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) served as a congressman, senator, secretary of war, secretary of state, and vice president of the United States.  He also served in both the House and Senate representing South Carolina. Calhoun is known for his defense of the institution of slavery, and advocated states’ rights as a means of preserving slavery in the South. John C. Calhoun papers 1818-1844, 1887, Manuscripts and Archives Division, Stephen A. Schwarzman Building, New York Public Library.

9 Henry Highland Garnet, friend of Crummell and Sidney. He attended the African Free School in New York City and Canaan New Hampshire. He graduated from Oneida Institute in 1840. He settled in Troy where he taught the colored district school. Licensed to preach in 1842, he became the first pastor of the Liberty Street Presbyterian Church, a Black congregation in Troy. Writers' Program, New York City: Negroes of New York collection 1936-1941, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

10  Thomas S. Sidney, escaped the Noyes Academy outrage along with his friends and classmates Crummell and Garnet. He enrolled at Oneida Institute. Upon graduation, he served as a ward commander and as corresponding secretary of the newly formed Association for the Political Improvement of People of Color in New York City. He also taught at the New York Select Academy, and held classes in the basement of Broadway Tabernacle. He died in 1841, at 23 years old. Sernett, M. C. (2004). Abolition's axe: Beriah Green, Oneida Institute, and the Black freedom struggle. Syracuse University Press. Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

11 Presbyterian minister, abolitionist, president of the Philadelphia convention of December 4, 1833, during which the American Anti-Slavery Society was formed. The American Anti-Slavery Society (1838). The constitution of the American antislavery society: with the Declaration of the National anti-slavery convention at Philadelphia, December, 1833, and the Address to the public, issued by the executive committee of the Society, in September, 1835.  Manuscripts & Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

12  Refers to the holy orders of bishop, priest, and deacon in the Episcopalian Church. This represents a hierarchical order, meaning that to be a candidate for priesthood, one should first be ordained as a deacon before ordination as a priest. Armentrout, D. S.& Slocum, R. B. (2000). An Episcopal dictionary of the Church: A user friendly reference for Episcopalians.  New York: Church Publishing.

13  Reverend A. H. Vinton was a zealous leader of the Episcopalian Church, committed to evangelization and learning. He was the president of the first Church Congress in 1874.

14 “Sermon XX, The destined superiority of the Negro. A Thanksgiving Discourse, 1877, Isiah 67, 7” Crummell, A. (1882). The Greatness of Christ and Other Sermons. (pp. 344-352). New York:  T. Whitaker.  Jean Blackwell Hutson Research and Reference Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

15 Founded by the American Missionary Association, Methodist Episcopal Church in the 1860s to increase education opportunities for freed blacks in the South, including men women and children by establishing schools and colleges for southern Blacks.

16  The speech was given in New Jersey. Alexander Crummell papers 1837-1898 Collection, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture

17  Crummell, A. (1862). The future of Africa: being addresses, sermons, etc., etc., delivered in the Republic of Liberia. Alexander Crummell papers 1837-1898 Collection, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture.

18  Crummell, "The Progress and Prospects of the Republic of Liberia, speech delivered at the Annual Meeting of the New York State Colonization Society, New York, on May 9th, 1861. Alexander Crummell papers 1837-1898 Collection, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 

Appiah, A. (1990). Alexander Crummell and the invention of Africa. The Massachusetts Review, 31(3), 385-406.

Brown, C. (1968). Christocentric Liberalism in the Episcopal Church. Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church, 37(1), 5-38. Retrieved from www.jstor.org/stable/42973199

Crummell, A. (1882). The Greatness of Christ and Other Sermons. New York:  T. Whitaker

Crummell, A. (1882). The Greatness of Christ, and Other Sermons. [With an Introduction by Thomas M. Clark, Bishop of Rhode Island, and with a Portrait.]. Thomas Whittaker.

Crummell, A. (1891). Africa and America: Addresses and discourses. New York: Negro Universities Press.

West, E.J. (2004). Of Providence and rhetoric: The failure of Alexander Crummell's Anglo-African Nationalism. Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History 5(3), doi:10.1353/cch.2004.0092.