Based on much new information, this biography examines the life and times of one of the most prominent African-American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Crummell, educated at Queen's College, Cambridge, lived for almost twenty years in the Republic of Liberia as an Episcopal missionary, then accepted a pastorate in Washington, D.C., and founded the American Negro Academy, influencing W.E.B. Du Bois and future progenitors of the Garvey movement. A pivotal nineteenth-century thinker, Crummell is essential to any understanding of twentieth-century black nationalism.

The eighteen texts that J. R. Oldfield has assembled cover the last twenty-three years of Crummell's life, when he was at the height of his influence as both an Episcopal minister and president of the ANA. All of the pieces, directly or indirectly, are concerned with the fate of Southern blacks in the areas of politics, education, religion, gender, and race relations.

Crummell, pastor of St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C., from 1879 to 1898, spoke out for Black liberation, and founded the Negro Academy. He addresses freed Black Americans from Liberia. He does not favor a "return to Africa" movement, popular as it may be, but rather says African Americans should take up the challenges of Africa -- trade, commerce, and evangelization -- for which they are well-suited because of their African heritage and ties. He cites Liberia as an example of such an endeavor.

This remarkable biography, based on much new information, examines the life and times of one of the most prominent African-American intellectuals of the nineteenth century. Born in New York in 1819, Alexander Crummell was educated at Queen's College, Cambridge, after being denied admission to Yale University and the Episcopal Seminary on purely racial grounds. In 1853, steeped in the classical tradition and modern political theory, he went to the Republic of Liberia as an Episcopal missionary, but was forced to flee to Sierra Leone in 1872, having barely survived republican Africa's first coup. He accepted a pastorate in Washington, D.C., and in 1897 founded the American Negro Academy, where the influence of his ideology was felt by W.E.B. Du Bois and future progenitors of the Garvey Movement. A pivotal nineteenth-century thinker, Crummell is essential to any understanding of twentieth-century black nationalism.

Building upon his previous work and using Richard Hofstadter's The American Political Tradition as a model, Professor Moses has revised and brought together in this book essays that focus on the complexity of, and contradictions in, the thought of five major African-American intellectuals: Frederick Douglass, Alexander Crummell, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. DuBois and Marcus M. Garvey. In doing so, he challenges both popular and scholarly conceptions of them as villains or heroes. In analyzing the intellectual struggles and contradictions of these five dominant personalities with regard to individual morality and collective reform, Professor Moses shows how they contributed to strategies for black improvement and puts them within the context of other currents of American thought, including Jeffersonian and Jacksonian democracy, Social Darwinism, and progressivism.