Alexander Crummell: An Apostle of Negro Culture

ALEXANDER CRUMMELL AN APOSTLE OF NEGRO CULTURE

A noted English lawyer-author has declared that the twelfth chapter of Ecclesiastes is the final word of the world’s philosophy; that no ancient or modern thinker has uttered a profounder word. And in the seventh verse of that chapter it reads, “Then shall the dust return to the earth as it was; and the spirit shall return unto God who gave it.”

Metaphysicians tell us that through his five senses, man is in touch with and in relation to his physical environment and a physical world, and that through his reason, imagination, conscience, aesthetic and religious intuitions, man is in touch with and in relation to his spiritual environment and a spiritual world. They also tell us that at death, the soul and body merely part company and go their respective ways. The oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and other chemical elements in the body mingle with the material elements from which they came. And the soul of man, the ego, the center of self-consciousness, recognitive memory and reflective thought, which has maintained its identity amid the changes of the physical organism, will survive the destruction of that organism and live on and on in the spirit world, embodied in whatever form and clothed with whatever garments its Maker so decreed.

Scientists tell us that when you throw a pebble in a stream, it sets up a series of ever-widening circles until it reaches the shore. They tell us that when you utter an audible sound, you start in motion sound waves which travel on for miles and miles. So it is with the influence of a human personality. It does not end at the grave. It lives in the lives that have been inspired, in the example set and the thoughts thrown out.

Twenty years and three months have elapsed since the soul of Alexander Crummell bid its bodily partner farewell and took its flight to its spiritual home. But Alexander Crummell’s terrestial influence did not end thus. It still goes on and will go on for centuries. We will briefly review his life and career and then estimate the weight, worth and significance of the ideas which he advocated, for which he lived and which were incarnated in his personality.

The Rev. Dr. Alexander Crummell, the Negro apostle of culture, was a born autocrat, a man born to command. And men instinctively bowed before him. Some even trembled before his wrath.

Crummell was born in New York in 1819, nearly a century ago. He was the son of Boston Crummell, a prince of the warlike Temene tribe, who was stolen while a boy playing on the sands of the seashore. At first, Crummell, with George T. Downing attended a school in New York taught by the Reverend Peter Williams, then went to the school in Canaan, New Hampshire, which was hauled into the pond by those who were angry because the Negro was taught to read. Crummell with others took refuge in a barn. They were fired upon; but Henry Highland Garnet fired a return shot, at which they were allowed to depart in peace. Then Crummell attended the Oneida Institute, of which Beriah Green was the President. He became a priest in the Episcopal Church, was for twenty years a missionary on the west coast of Africa, during which period he visited seventy tribes. He returned to this country in the late sixties or the early seventies, was for a year or two rector of St. Philip’s Church, New York, and for twenty-three years rector of the St. Luke’s Church in Washington, D. C. The last years of his life were spent in issuing his race tracts and founding the American Negro Academy, the first body to bring Negro scholars from all over the world together. He died at Point Pleasant, N. J., in Dr. Matthew Anderson’s summer home in September, 1898, in his eightieth year.

He was not as famous a man as Douglass, because in the most eventful years of the Negro race’s history from 1850 to 1870 he was in Africa. When he died, men like Phillips Brooks and Dr. Fuller, of Rochester, who were old friends of his and who knew him intimately, the man and his work, had already crossed the mystic stream of death and passed over to the other shore. But he was a power in his own race to the last. Still in the late forties, he delivered three addresses that attracted considerable attention. In 1847 he addressed a colored convention at Troy, N. Y. And in 1848 he visited London and spoke at the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, with such fire, force, finish and polish that he made many friends, both for himself and his race.

He visited Liverpool. He so impressed the Bishop of the diocese, that he was invited to officiate as minister in the St. George’s Church at Everton, of which the Reverend Mr. Eubanks was rector. The audience had never heard a colored man preach before. And Crummell’s dignity and bearing in the pulpit, his polish and refinement, his lucid exposition of the text, his sublimity of thought, beauty of diction, and fire and force of utterance for nearly an hour held that cultured audience spellbound. Crummell made history for the race on that Sunday morning in 1848. And I suppose that Crummell’s eulogy on Clarkson, delivered in New York City in 1846, in its grandeur of thought, sublimity of sentiment and splendor of style, surpasses any oratorical effort of any colored man in the antebellum days. From that time until his death in 1898, Crummell swayed both colored and white audiences.

I remember in the fall of 1896, a Baptist preacher lectured in Newport, R. I. At the close of the lecture, a tall, slender, venerable looking man, with an aristocratic air, arose and stirred the audience with his heroic words. The Baptist preacher was so touched that he sought Crummell out. And then an influence entered his life that made him a new man, a stronger moral force in the Baptist denomination. I remember, too, when McKinley was inaugurated in 1897. Men and women, old and young, from all sections of the country, of varying degrees of culture, of divers religious creeds, came to Crummell’s house as a mecca. Some had been thrilled by his sermons and commencement addresses; others caught the inspiration of their lives from his works, “Africa and America,” “The Future of Africa,” and “The Greatness of Christ, and Other Sermons.” Today his memory is treasured in Washington, in cities of the north and south, and along the west coast of Africa. Such was the influence the imperial Crummell wielded.

There you have the historic Alexander Crummell, the finished scholar, the magnetic preacher, the brave, uncompromising idealist, who was dreaded by imposters and fakirs and time-servers and flunkies. He was one of those rugged, adamantine spirits, who could stand against the world for a principle, but he was gracious, courteous, tender and sympathetic withal. Tall, slender, symmetrical, erect in bearing, with a graceful and elastic walk, with a refined and aristocratic face that was lighted up by keen penetrating but kindly eyes, and surrounded by the gray hair and beard which gave him a venerable appearance, with a rich, ringing, resonant baritone voice, which had not lost its power even in old age, with an air of unmistakable good breeding and a conversation that flavored of books and literature and art, Dr. Crummell was a man that you could never forget, once you met him or heard him preach. He frequently said that what the race needed was an educated gentry, and he was himself one of the finest specimens of that rugged strength, tempered with Christian culture and a refined benevolence, which was his ideal, that the race has yet produced. Sprung from the fierce Timene Tribes, who on the west coast of Africa cut to pieces a British regiment near Sierre Leone several years ago, he possessed the tireless energy, the untamed spirit and the fearless daring that made his warrior ancestors dreaded. But like the apostle Paul, his native strength was mellowed by the Christian religion.

There was an ineffable charm in his conversation. He was a delightful companion, ever ready in wit and repartee, versatile and resourceful in debate, with the wide knowledge that is gained by travel and garnered from many fields of study. He reminded me of Wendell Phillips as an orator, with the impression of having an immense reserve power behind him; he could fill a large hall by speaking in his natural conversational voice. He possessed the same keen Damascus blade of sarcasm when aroused. Undoubtedly he was the Sir Philip Sidney of the Negro race.

In my chapter upon “The American Negro’s Contribution to literature,” I tell how beautifully DuBois in his “Souls of Black Folk” has drawn the figure of a man, whom I regard in some respects the grandest character of the Negro race. Read the chapter and read Crummell’s book upon “Africa and America,” and then you will recognize the greatness of Crummell. Some people say that great Negroes are jealous of each other. But read Crummell’s chapter upon Henry Highland Garnet and DuBois’s chapter upon Crummell, and you will see how kindred spirits appreciate each other’s worth and value.

Those who are interested in Tuskegee Institute will remember that in February, 1899, a memorable meeting was held in the Hollis Theatre in behalf of that celebrated school. The Hampton and Tuskegee Quartettes sang. Dunbar recited his dialect poems; Dr. Washington, as usual, spoke in an impressive and eloquent manner. But the event that interested many thoughtful minds was the paper of Dr. Wm. E. Burghardt DuBois upon the “Strivings of a Negro for the Higher Life.”

It was for such a delicately drawn portrait, such a halo surrounded it, that Prof. William James and other Bostonians doubted that it was the likeness of a real man and believed that it was the picture of an ideal, an imaginary Negro. But Crummell was not a dream creation. He was a being who had actually been clothed in flesh and blood, who had actually trod on these terrestrial shores and walked on this earth.

He was indeed the Newman of the Negro pulpit. If any one desires to read the romance of his life, of his struggles to get an education, of his despair in encountering the hostility of the Anglo-Saxon and the ingratitude and lack of appreciation of his own race, and of his bravely surmounting his difficulties, I refer him to DuBois’ “Souls of Black Folk.”

After Alexander Crummell, the first Negro apostle of culture, had spent a few years as a student in Cambridge University, England, nearly a quarter of a century as a missionary upon the west coast of Africa, he returned about the year 1870 to the United States, the land of his birth, and for twenty-three years served as rector of the St. Luke’s Episcopal Church of Washington, D. C. Then he retired from the ministry.

He had passed the three score and ten mark. Never strong or robust physically, he had lived a very active life. It seemed as if his days of usefulness were over. But, no, this grand old man of the Negro race, nearly eighty years of age, endeavored to realize a dream that he had conceived when a student in Cambridge University, England. He proposed to found and establish the American Negro Academy, an organization composed of Negro scholars, whose membership should be limited to forty and whose purpose should be to foster scholarship and culture in the Negro race and encourage budding Negro genius. He communicated with colored scholars in America, England, Hayti and Africa. The result was that in March, 1897, when McKinley was inaugurated, the most celebrated scholars and writers in the Negro race for the first time assembled together in the Lincoln Memorial Church and formally organized into a brotherhood of scholars. Dunbar, the poet; DuBois, the sociologist; Scarborough, the Greek scholar; Kelly Miller, the mathematician; Dr. Frank J. Grimke, the theologian; Prof. John W. Cromwell, the historian; President R. R. Wright, Principal Grisham, Prof. Love and Prof. Walter B. Hayson, noted educators; Prof. C. C. Cook, the student of English literature, and Bishop J. Albert Johnson, the brilliant preacher, were among those present. Bishop Tanner, of the A. M. E. Church, and two or three other bishops were enrolled as members, and such distinguished foreign Negroes as Prof. Harper were added as members. The Academy seemed destined to do for the Negro race what the French Academy did for France.

But Crummell soon died; DuBois was elected president. The industrial fad swept over the country and men soon forgot the Academy. But Prof. John Wesley Cromwell, the secretary, Dr. Francis J. Grimke, the treasurer, Prof. Kelly Miller, Prof. C. C. Cook and Prof. John L. Love, of Washington, D. C., did not despair. In December, 1902, the Academy startled the country by a two days’ session in which a series of papers were read upon “The Religion of the Negro.” The papers of Prof. Harper, the Rev. Orishatukeh Faduma and Dr. Matthew Anderson attracted considerable attention at the time. Later the “Literary Digest” noticed my paper upon “A Historical and Psychological Account of the Genius and Development of the Negro’s Religion.” In December, 1903, Archibald H. Grimke was elected as President. The Academy took a new lease of life and in March, 1905, a brilliant series of papers were read upon “The Negro and the Elective Franchise.” They were afterwards published in an eighty-five page pamphlet and they remain today the best discussion upon Negro Suffrage and Southern Disfranchisement.

The session of the Academy in December, 1906, was held in Howard University, and at that session the audience that assembled in the small chapel of Howard University listened to an illuminating discussion upon the “Economic Condition of the Negro.” Kelly Miller’s paper upon “Labor Conditions in the North” attracted some attention in the “Washington Post.” I do hope the scholars of the race will perpetuate the organization, which was the dream of Crummell’s life. I well remember the Saturday in September, 1898, when I received a card from Walter B. Hayson, Crummell’s protege, announcing that Crummell was dying. I hurried to Point Pleasant, N. J., but Crummell had breathed his last and his body was carried to New York City. For two hours on Monday night I walked up and down the beach at Asbury Park. I looked up at the stars shining so silently in the immensity of space and heard the distant murmur of the ocean as it rolled and broke upon the shore. In the silent midnight hour, Nature’s calmness and repose seemed to touch my soul and then from the depth of my being came the cry, “Crummell is not dead, but he liveth; he is now with his God and Maker.”

No man is bigger than the idea that dominates him, and that he embodies in his life. If his personality is grand and sublime, he will live on in the moral world. But if his ideas are not progressive, he will not live long in the thought world. Dr. Alexander Crummell believed that the Negro belonged to the genus vir as well as to the genus homo, that he could be included in the class aner as well as anthropos, that he had a soul to be trained as well as a body to be clothed, sheltered and fed. In a word, he believed that the Negro was made out of the same clay as the rest of mankind, that he was worthy of the same education and training, and was entitled to the same treatment, consideration, rights and privileges as other men.

The question is, were the soaring ideals that inspired Dr. Crummell’s effort dreams of the imagination, or were they grounded in reality? Did his perspective belong to the class of mirages in the desert, or did his Weltauschanung belong to that class of visions, of which it was said in Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish?”

We can only answer those questions by studying the state of the American mind when the Academy was formed. In 1776, the high sounding and world resounding Declaration of Independence was signed, which said that all men were created free and equal and had an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet some of the signers of that Declaration held slaves. Why was it? The late Prof. William Graham Summer of Yale said that it was because they did not regard the Negro as a man.

And the whole slavery debate hinged on the question of the humanity of the Negro, hinged upon the question as to whether he possessed the intellectual, ethical, aesthetical and religious potentialities and possibilities which white men possessed, hinged upon the question as to whether the Negro did or did not possess a soul. The South said that the Negro was a beast and not a man, and was not capable of intellectual or moral improvement. In Georgia and other states, they took particular pains to see that the Negro had no chance or opportunity for mental improvement. In Georgia they would fine and imprison a white man and whip and imprison a colored man who was caught teaching a slave to read and write.

The great Calhoun said that “The Negro race was so inferior that it had never produced a single individual who could conjugate a Greek verb.” Dr. Crummell in his paper before the American Negro Academy upon “The Attitude of the American Mind Towards the Negro Intellect,” wittily said that Calhoun must have expected Greek verbs to grow in Negro brains by some process of spontaneous generation, as he never had tried the experiment of putting a Greek grammar in the hands of a Negro student.

But ere long arose Dr. Blyden, the linguist and Arabic scholar; Prof. Scarborough, who wrote a Greek text book and “The Bird of Aristophanes” and the “Thematic Vowel in the Greek Verb;” Dr. Grimke, the theologian; Prof. Kelly Miller, the mathematician, arose. Colored students of Harvard like Greener, Grimke, DuBois, Trotter, Stewart, Bruce, Hill and Locke, and Bouchet, McGuinn, Faduma, Baker, Crawford and Pickens of Yale arose, who demonstrated every kind of intellectual capacity. Then Trumbull of Brown, Forbes and Lewis of Amherst, Wright of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hoffman and Wilkinson of Ann Arbor University, also won honors. Dr. Daniel Williams distinguished himself as a surgeon, Dunbar as a poet, Chestnut as a novelist, Tanner as an artist, and Coleridge Taylor as a musician.

So in the days when the American Negro Academy came into existence, the Bourbons of the south and their northern sympathizers realized that the Negro had achieved distinction in intellectual fields, where they said he would be like fish out of water.

So then they changed their tack. They then said that the Negro could be educated, but education made him “a builder of air castles,” in the words of their colored spokesman, and made him useless to his own people. They barred the educated Negro from employment in keeping with his natural tastes and aptitudes and previous training and inclination, and then said that he couldn’t make a living. They said the Negro was mentally inferior to the Anglo-Saxons and then reduced the curriculum in the state colleges and high schools to keep him mentally inferior.

At the same time, they encouraged the Negro churches and looked with favor upon laboring men and washerwomen using their hard earned savings to erect costly churches. Why did they look cross-eyed at and frown at the higher education of the Negro, which they said made him impractical, while they smiled and looked with satisfaction at his religion, which they didn’t take seriously, but regarded as a dope? Why did they emphasize education and minimize religion for white men, and on the other hand minimize education and emphasize religion for black men? Why did they set up Yale and Harvard Universities as the white’s ideal of education and Hampton and Tuskegee as the colored man’s ideal?

These Bourbons of the south and their northern sympathizers had a definite propaganda and programme regarding the Negro. Their plan was to reduce the colored race to a race of hewers of wood and drawers of water, to disfranchise the Negro, run him out of Congress and lucrative political jobs in the south, to jim-crow him and segregate him. They knew that religion would act as a narcotic and opiate and that it would keep his eyes and mind centered upon the golden streets, jeweled pavements, sapphire walls and white-robed angels of the New Jerusalem, while they were robbing him of the civil and political rights which were won on the battlefields of the Civil War and guaranteed by the Constitution of the United States.

They knew that to educate him would be to open his eyes, to cause him to think and to prevent his being camouflaged. They knew that to educate him would be to make him dissatisfied with his lot at the bottom of the ladder. They knew that to educate him would introduce the leaven of divine discontent into his being. They knew that to educate him would cause him to aspire to something higher than hard labor or menial service. They knew that to educate him would cause him to know that robbing him of the ballot was reducing him to a pariah in American life and society and making him a political outcast. They knew that to educate the Negro would cause him to know that when he was being jim-crowed and segregated, a caste system based on the color of the skin was being established in America. In a word, those Americans who desired to rob the Negro of the fruits of the Civil War and to reduce him as far as possible to his previous status as a slave, knew that to educate the Negro was to open his eyes to the fact that the restrictions which they were trying to impose upon him were giving him a social, civil, political and economic status which was lower than that of the illiterate emigrant from Europe, lower than that of the Japanese, Chinese, Hindoo, Indian and Filipino. In a word, they knew that to educate the Negro would open his eyes to the fact that the color of his skin was a mark of shame and a badge of dishonor and that a caste prejudice based upon color, was contrary to the spirit of Christianity and to the democratic principles underlying this government. In a word, they knew that it would be more difficult for them to carry out their programme with the Negro educated. And these are the reasons why twenty years ago, it was regarded as unwise and dangerous to give the Negro any higher education above the three R’s and a training in the trades. And most of the leaders of the Negro race were asleep at the switch twenty years ago. They eagerly swallowed the sugar-coated and chocolate-coated pills. They took the medicine which their Anglo-Saxon friends offered because it was honeyed and sugared with a few fat jobs and contributions to churches and schools. And while they slept, as Samson slept on the lap of Delilah, they were shorn of their political and civil locks, and awoke one bright morning to find that their strength was gone.

It was a rude awakening that they experienced in the summer of 1917, when the edict went forth that all American citizens, black as well as white men, were subject to the selective draft. It was a rude awakening that they experienced, when they discovered that their sons must cross the ocean and give their lives to bring a freedom to war-ridden Europe, which was denied their race in this country. It was a rude awakening that they experienced when they realized that they who only experienced partial citizenship in this country were called upon to make the same sacrifice in blood and treasure as their fairer-skinned brothers, who had experienced the full blessings of citizenship.

A Baptist preacher whom I met in St. Louis a year ago voiced the thought of the entire colored race when he said, “Ferris, what a mighty big price we have to pay for a little freedom.”

It was a rude awakening, when Hog Island was calling for riveters and the Remington Company at Eddystone for machinists, and yet would turn down colored men who were capable. It was a rude awakening, when colored men and women who passed the Civil Service in Washington, D. C., during war times and were certified, were turned down because of their color. It was a rude awakening, when colored soldiers could fight and die side by side with white soldiers in France, and yet couldn’t visit the same service camps in America. And it was a still ruder awakening, when the Y. M. C. A. carried color prejudice to France where it had never existed before and attempted to jim-crow and segregate the very colored soldiers who were fighting to save France and to make the world safe for democracy.