Alexander Crummell was born in New York City, the child of "free Africans," who insisted they were of "unadulterated stock." The family of his mother Charity (Hicks) Crummell had been Long Islanders, for several generations, and "associated" with the Hicks family of Quakers. She became affiliated with "the Afro-American group of the Protestant Episcopal Church," however, as did her husband Boston Crummell. For a short time, Alexander studied informally at Yale University, while ministering to a congregation in New Haven, Connecticut, where the grandfather of W.E.B. Du Bois was among his vestrymen. During the early years of his marriage to Sarah Crummell, he served small congregations in Providence, Philadelphia, and New York. Although his candidacy for admission to the General Theological Seminary was denied on racial grounds, he was ordained an Episcopal priest, after a course of private studies. He then conceived the idea of studying abroad, and during five years that he spent in England, lecturing as an abolitionist, and raising funds for his church in New York, he earned the bachelor's degree from Queens' College Cambridge in 1853. He then undertook a missionary career in Liberia until 1870, when a coup led by the reactionary mulatto aristocracy forced him to flee the country. Crummell returned to the United States for good in 1872, and after some initial uncertainties, settled in Washington, D.C., where he established St. Luke's Episcopal Church in 1879, serving as its pastor until 1894 and holding a professorship at Howard University. He spent his final years writing and lecturing widely, and in 1897, he founded the American Negro Academy, as a challenge to the Machiavellian schemes and pragmatic materialism of Booker T. Washington. In 1897, he organized the American Negro Academy, where he encouraged the young W. E. B. Du Bois to expound his ideas on "The Conservation of Races." Two of his protégés, John E. Bruce and the Yale graduate William H. Ferris, became senior officials in the black power movement led by Marcus Garvey in the 1920s. He was the author of three books, and numerous orations including "The Destined Superiority of the Negro" and "The Black Woman of the South: Her Neglects and her Needs."

He argued vehemently that African Americans' black Christianity and culture must be purged of the vulgar materialism and emotionalism of slave religion, which he considered antinomian. A strict Episcopalian, exceedingly hostile to enthusiastic conversions, he wrote: "Sentiment, feeling, emotion...come from an inferior side of our nature. They are more allied to the physical than they are to the rational or spiritual of our being.... Easily excited, they as easily depart. And, at the best the feelings come and go, ofttimes independant of the will; dependant, not seldom upon health, or some peculiar physical condition; and hence evidently they are not the soil in which the Holy Spirit plants the seed of Gods wonderful grace."

For a full biography, see Alexander Crummell, A Study of Civilization & Discontent, by Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Oxford University Press, 1989.

His parents names were Boston and Charity.
His four children were Sidney G., Alexander, Frances A. and Sophia H.

Bio by Van Carter # 48111436