Emma Hamilton Dancing

Alexander Crummell was born in New York City in 1819 to Boston Crummell and Charity Hicks. Both of Crummell’s parents were free, though his father had been born into West African royalty, enslaved, and subsequently freed in adulthood. Crummell’s early education was at a Quaker school, and he later attended the Canal Street High School where he was able to learn Greek and Latin. He also briefly attended the Noyes Academy, a racially integrated school in New Hampshire founded by abolitionists, before the school was destroyed in an act of racist violence. Crummell then relocated to another abolitionist school, the Oneida Institute in Whitesboro, New York. From 1840-41 Crummell attended the Yale Divinity School, although he was barred from formal enrollment or participation in class. He was also denied entry to the General Theological Seminary in New York, but managed to study on his own to be ordained an Episcopal deacon in 1842 and later a priest in 1844. His first positions as deacon and priest were in Providence, Rhode Island and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. While in Philadelphia, he became actively involved in the abolitionist and Black suffrage movements.

In 1848 Crummell moved to the UK, where he obtained his bachelor's, becoming the first Black graduate of Cambridge. In 1853 he moved to Liberia and worked there as an Episcopal missionary for the next twenty years. While there he was also a professor at the College of Liberia. Crummell believed strongly in the back-to-Africa movement, and endorsed a vision of African-American colonization in Liberia to enlighten and civilize Africans and create a republic based on Christian morals. He published The Future of Africa: Being Addresses, Sermons, etc. Delivered in the Republic of Liberia on this topic while living in Liberia.

In 1873 Crummell moved to Washington, DC, where he founded St. Luke’s church and served as its rector for roughly twenty years. In 1883 he also founded the Conference of Church Workers Among Colored People in response to institutional endorsement of segregation. Following his retirement from St. Luke’s, he taught briefly at Howard University before founding the American Negro Academy, an elite institution for Black education, in 1897.

Crummell died in Point Pleasant, New Jersey in 1898. In 2023 he was awarded, along with James W. C. Pennington, an MA privatim degree from Yale.