Anglican Commemoration
Priest, Missionary, & Scholar
September 10 · d. 1898
also known as Alexander Crummell Jr.
Black American Episcopal priest, Cambridge-educated theologian, missionary, and intellectual. Crummell spent twenty years as a missionary in Liberia, founded St. Luke's Church in Washington DC, and became a foundational figure in Black intellectual Anglicanism. W.E.B. Du Bois devoted an entire chapter of Souls of Black Folk (1903) to Crummell, recognizing him as a precursor to African American intellectual leadership. His extensive published sermons and essays articulate a vision of Christian civilization, African redemption, and intellectual excellence.
Alexander Crummell is honored in Black Anglican tradition as a foundational intellectual and pastoral figure. Through Du Bois's essay, he became known to the broader educated African American community as a model of intellectually rigorous, theologically grounded, racially conscious Christian ministry. In contemporary discussions of Black liberation theology, postcolonial theology, and African diasporic Christianity, Crummell frequently appears as a precursor and source. His insistence on combining classical education with Christian formation, and his articulation of how African and Christian identities need not be opposed, continue to shape Black Anglican self-understanding. In ACNA and other Anglican contexts, Crummell represents the possibility of authentically Black Anglican intellectualism grounded in patristic theology and classical learning.
Alexander Crummell was born in 1819 in New York City to a free Black family with West Indian ancestry. Despite the profound racial constraints of antebellum America, Crummell received an excellent education, including classical training at the African Free School in New York and later theological education leading to ordination in the Episcopal Church (1844). His intellectual formation was shaped by exposure to both African diaspora identity and Anglican theological and liturgical tradition.
Crummell's priesthood in the American church was constrained by racial prejudice: even as an ordained priest, he faced discrimination from white clergy and exclusion from many parishes. Seeking a larger field for his ministry and a context where his intellectual and pastoral gifts could be fully exercised, Crummell accepted a missionary call to Liberia in 1853. He spent the next twenty years (1853–1873) in West Africa, where he worked as a missionary, educator, and intellectual voice articulating a vision of Christian civilization and African redemption.
Crummell's most important work during his Liberian years was theological and educational: he taught at Alexander High School (later Liberia College), wrote extensively on the relationship between Christianity and African civilization, and developed his characteristic intellectual approach combining patristic theology, classical education, and African diaspora consciousness. His essays and sermons from this period (collected in works like The Future of Africa) articulate a sophisticated vision of how Christian faith, civilizational development, and African identity might be reconciled and integrated.
Returning to America in 1873, Crummell settled in Washington DC, where he founded St. Luke's Church (1879) and continued his prolific writing and speaking on religion, race, civilization, and intellectual life. He became a powerful voice articulating what W.E.B. Du Bois would later recognize as a distinctly African American intellectual tradition grounded in Christian faith and classical learning. His sermons and essays addressed the moral formation of educated Black Americans, the relationship between religious faith and intellectual excellence, and the theological meaning of African American existence in a predominantly white nation.
Crummell died on September 10, 1898 (though commemorated December 2), leaving behind an extraordinary corpus of published work that would profoundly influence Du Bois and subsequent generations of Black intellectuals. Du Bois's essay on Crummell in Souls of Black Folk presents him as a prophetic figure: isolated, brilliant, partly unappreciated by the generation he addressed, yet foundational to the development of African American intellectual Christianity.
Almighty and everlasting God, you called your servant Alexander Crummell to preach the Gospel to the people of Liberia: Raise up in this and every land evangelists and heralds of your kingdom, that your Church may proclaim the unsearchable riches of our Savior Jesus Christ; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever. Amen.