Commontide
Anglican Commemoration
Priest, Missionary, & Scholar
September 10 · d. 1898
also known as Alexander Crummell Jr.
The first nationally celebrated Black intellectual in the Episcopal Church: a Cambridge-trained priest who gave twenty years to mission in Liberia and founded St. Luke's Church in Washington. W. E. B. Du Bois devoted an entire chapter of The Souls of Black Folk to him, calling him a seer and confessing, "I instinctively bowed before this man, as one bows before the prophets of the world." Turned away from American altars because of his color, Crummell built, taught, and wrote his way into the foundations of Black Anglican thought.
Alexander Crummell was born free in New York City in 1819, at a time when most people who looked like him were owned. His mother came from a free New York family; his father, he believed, had been carried from West Africa. The boy was sent first to the African Free School, then to the Noyes Academy in Canaan, New Hampshire, a school that dared to teach Black and white children together. A mob of townspeople hitched the building to ninety yoke of oxen and dragged it off its foundation into a swamp. Crummell, a teenager, walked home and kept studying.
When he sought to train for the priesthood, the General Theological Seminary in New York refused to admit him because he was Black. He read theology privately instead, and in 1844 he was ordained a priest. His own diocese would not seat him as a full member of its convention. So Crummell carried his learning across the Atlantic: he entered Queens' College, Cambridge, and took his degree in 1853, among the first men of African descent to graduate from the university.
Then he did the thing that defined him. Rather than nurse his grievances in America, he sailed to Liberia and spent twenty years there as missionary, teacher, and prophet of what he called the redemption of Africa. He preached, he taught at the college, and he wrote essays arguing that to be African and to be Christian were not opposites but a single inheritance.
Failing health and Liberian politics finally drove him home. In 1879 he founded St. Luke's Church in Washington, the first independent Black Episcopal congregation in the capital, and pastored it for two decades. Near the end of his life, in 1897, he gathered the ablest Black minds in America into the American Negro Academy, devoted to scholarship as a defense against contempt.
A young Harvard man named W. E. B. Du Bois met him in those years and never forgot it. "I instinctively bowed before this man," Du Bois wrote, "as one bows before the prophets of the world." In The Souls of Black Folk he gave Crummell a whole chapter, telling how the old priest had walked through three temptations, the temptation of Hate, the temptation of Despair, and the temptation of Doubt, and had come out the far side still believing. Crummell died in 1898, and the boy who had watched his school dragged into a swamp was buried a patriarch.
Crummell is among the best documented Black churchmen of the nineteenth century, chiefly because he documented himself. He published three substantial volumes of sermons and essays, The Future of Africa (1862), The Greatness of Christ (1882), and Africa and America (1891), which lay out his thought in his own words. The institutional record is equally plain: the General Theological Seminary's refusal to admit him, his ordination in 1844, his Cambridge degree of 1853, and the founding of St. Luke's, Washington, in 1879 all survive in church and university archives.
His enduring fame came from another pen. W. E. B. Du Bois, who had met him near the end of his life, made Crummell the subject of chapter twelve of The Souls of Black Folk (1903), one of the founding texts of African American letters. Du Bois cast him as a seer who had refused the easy roads of bitterness and despair, and that portrait, more than any of Crummell's own books, carried his name into the twentieth century. Modern scholarship, above all Wilson J. Moses's Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (1989), has recovered the complicated man behind the icon: a Black nationalist and a high churchman at once.
Crummell is commemorated on September 10 in the calendars of the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church in North America. He is honored as a founder of Black Anglican intellectual life, a priest who insisted that classical learning, patristic theology, and African identity belonged together, and who would not let the church's prejudice define the church's faith.
His American Negro Academy, founded in 1897, was the first major learned society for Black scholars in the United States, and its members shaped a century of thought; the young Du Bois read his inaugural paper there. St. Luke's Church still stands in Washington. In an age that argues over whether Christianity was only a master's religion pressed on the enslaved, Crummell is remembered as a man who took the faith as his own, tested it against the worst his country could do, and handed it on undefeated.
The Future of Africa: Addresses, Sermons, and Other Papers(English, 1862)
Crummell's early sermons and essays on African redemption and Christian civilization, in his own words.
Public domain: Internet Archive, first edition
Africa and America: Addresses and Discourses(English, 1891)
His mature thought, including the addresses of his Washington years.
Public domain: Internet Archive, first edition
The Souls of Black Folk (chapter XII, "Of Alexander Crummell")(English, 1903)
Du Bois's chapter-length portrait, the source of Crummell's modern fame.
Public domain: Project Gutenberg
Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent(English, 1989)
The standard modern biography, recovering the man behind the Du Bois icon.
Further reading. Crummell's own voice is the place to begin: The Future of Africa (1862) and Africa and America (1891) show the sweep of his mind. W. E. B. Du Bois's chapter "Of Alexander Crummell" in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) is the indispensable portrait. For modern scholarship, Wilson J. Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (Oxford University Press, 1989), is the standard biography.
Online resources. The Souls of Black Folk is free at Project Gutenberg; several of Crummell's own works are scanned at the Internet Archive.
Readings for a Missionary
Isaiah 49:1–7Psalm 98Romans 10:11–18Luke 5:1–11
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.