Alexander Crummell, an Episcopalian priest, missionary, scholar, and teacher. Crummell earned his degree from the University of Cambridge in 1853, becoming the first black student to graduate from the institution. He spent much of his life addressing the conditions of African Americans while urging an educated black elite to aspire to the highest intellectual attainments as a refutation of the theory of black inferiority.
Alexander Crummell was born in New York City on March 3, 1819, to Charity Hicks and Boston Crummell. Both his mother and father were free, with Boston having been taken from Timannee, West Africa, and forced into bondage in the North, but eventually refusing servitude. With his parents believing in education for their children, Alexander began his education at an integrated school in New Hampshire. He later transferred to an abolitionist institute in Whitesboro, New York where he learned both the classics and manual labor skills. However, after being denied admittance to the General Theological Seminary of the Episcopal Church because of his race, Crummell was forced to study privately. Crummell attended the Yale Theological Seminary for a time and at the age of 25, he became an Episcopalian minister.
He traveled overseas toward the late 1840s. From 1848 to 1853 Crummell lectured took on speaking engagements in England just to make ends meet and later attending the University of Cambridge's Queens' College, from which he graduated in 1853—thus becoming the first black student to graduate from Cambridge. Crummell left England to become an educator in Liberia, accepting a faculty position at Liberia College in Monrovia. From his new post, Crummell urged African Americans to emigrate to Liberia.
Internal politics, however, forced Crummell to leave Liberia in 1872, shattering his dream of the West African nation as the Christian Republic populated by both indigenous people and African American immigrants. Crummell returned to the United States and settled in Washington, D.C. where he founded St. Luke’s Episcopal Church. When some Episcopal bishops proposed a segregated missionary district for black parishes, Crummell organized a group now known as the Union of Black Episcopalians to fight the proposal. Crummell also lectured widely across the United States stressing the social responsibilities of educated middle-class African Americans as race leaders.
From 1895 to 1897 Crummell taught at Howard University in Washington, D.C. In 1897, the last year of his life, Crummell helped found the American Negro Academy and became its first president, with W.E.B. DuBois and William Saunders Scarborough as vice presidents.
Alexander Crummell, died on September 10, 1898, in Red Bank, New Jersey, at the age of 80
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