Alexander Crummell was an American minister, Episcopalian priest, missionary, scholar, and teacher. He was ordained as an Episcopal priest in the United States. Alexander Crummell was born in New York City on March 3, 1819, to Charity Hicks, a free woman of color, and Boston Crummell, a formerly enslaved person. Alexander Crummell devoted most of his life to addressing the plight of African Americans, advocating an educated black elite to strive for the highest intellectual achievements in order to refute the thesis of black inferiority. Crummell, the son of an African prince and a free mother, attended an interracial school in Canaan, New Hampshire, and an institution in Whitesboro, New York, which was operated by abolitionists and mixed manual labor and the classical curriculum. Crummell then enrolled at the Oneida Institute in central New York, which was a hotspot of abolitionism at the time. He decided to become an Episcopal priest while he was there. His status as a young intellectual gained him a slot as keynote speaker at the anti-slavery New York State Convention of Negroes in Albany in 1840.
The greatness of peoples springs from their ability to grasp the grand conceptions
Alexander Crummell
of being. It is the absorption of a people, of a nation, of a rare, in large majestic
and abiding things which lifts them up to the skies.
Upon graduation, Crummell went to the General Theological Seminary, but he was denied admission because of his color. Despite this setback, he continued his theological studies in the Diocese of Massachusetts. The Bishop of Delaware ordained him in 1842 and to the priesthood two years later. In 1844, he founded a modest mission in Philadelphia and became involved in politics, particularly the fight for equal suffrage and the abolition of slavery. Crummel left the diocese and relocated to Englewood after
being rejected from the Pennsylvania diocesan conference. Crummell went to Liberia as a missionary and spent 20 years there as a parish rector, professor of intellectual and moral science at Liberia College, and public figure. Alexander Crummell became a citizen of the new republic and a strong advocate of Liberian nationalism.
If you are to be leaders, teachers, and guides among your people, you must have strength.
Alexander Crummell
No people can be fed, no people can be built up on flowers.
Crummell returned to the United States in 1873. He established and served as a pastor at St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. In 1883, he led the Conference of Church Workers Among Colored People as a spokesperson for blacks seeking greater respect in the church. After leaving the ministry in 1894, he taught at Howard University (1895-97) and formed the American Negro Academy, which encouraged the publication of scholarly work on African American culture and history. W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Laurence Dunbar were among the notable members. Crummell was an outspoken champion for the abolition of slavery and the lifting of legal restrictions on African Americans in his early years. He ad-vocated for the right to vote and the establishment of African-American schools. Late in his career, he published and lectured widely against the growing entrenched racism of post-Reconstruction America, appealing to educated blacks to provide leadership.
Oppression not only makes a wise man mad, it robs him also of his self-respect. And this is our loss, but having emerged from slavery, it is our duty to cast off its grave-clothes and resist its deadly influences.
Alexander Crummell
He openly criticized race-based discrimination and segregation, pushing for full involvement of African Americans within American society. His eloquent oration and written works inspired many individuals to fight for civil rights. His conviction regarding the global African diaspora interconnectedness made him one of the pioneers leading up to what would later become a widespread movement known as Pan-Africanism during the 20th century. Alexander Crummell’s story symbolizes African Americans’ unyielding courage and determination when confronted with hardship.