The American Negro Academy: Black excellence 100 years ago

American Visions, Feb-March, 1997 by Reginald Blaxton

The 1890s, a period of American history valorized by many writers as the Progressive Era, was not viewed as such by most Americans of African descent. In the South, where almost 90 percent of black Americans lived, the reversal of Reconstruction's hard-won civic rights gathered pace as the 19th century drew toward a close. The rise of Jim Crow segregation in education, transportation and public accommodations was legitimated by the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson decision. This social trend was complemented by the sharp curtailment of a black political sphere in the South. These events demoralized African-American communities, creating a crisis of belief.

Consider, for example, the lamenting witness in the mid-1880s of the 22-year-old, Mississippi-born "new" woman Ida Wells, who had yet to embark on her life's crusade as a militant journalist and human rights activist: "I have firmly believed all along that the law was on our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I feel shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and fly away with them. O God, is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us? Thou has always fought the battles of the weak and oppressed. Come to my aid ... for I am sorely disappointed. Show us the way."

Nor was the crisis less in the North, though it was somewhat different, for a seismic cultural shift was spreading from Urban America, placing upon black folk the disorienting demands of unprecedented social change associated with an economy oriented toward and powered by commercial values and industrial interests in the high noon of laissez faire capitalism.

Stepping into this breach of belief was the American Negro Academy, described in its constitution as "an organization of authors, scholars, artists, and those distinguished in other walks of life, men of African descent, for the promotion of Letters, Science, and Art." Though little known today, the academy, America's first major black learned society, was an extraordinary attempt by a tiny and vulnerable African-American leadership class -- in the words of the group's principal historian, Alfred A. Moss Jr. (The American Negro Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth) -- "lead and protect their people" and to serve "as a weapon to secure equality and destroy racism."

The American Negro Academy was founded in Washington, D.C., in 1897. Its driving force -- and the group's first president -- was the 78-year-old Rev. Alexander Crummell, an Episcopal clergyman, writer, educator and missionary and the preeminent black intellectual of the 19th century. Crummell had been reared and educated (about which more later) on New York's Lower East Side, in the era called Five Points, just down the street from "Mother Zion," the first church of the Methodist Episcopal Zion tradition, founded in 1800. Denied a theologic I education at the General Seminary of the Episcopal Church, he moved to England, where in 1853 he received a bachelor's degree from Queens College, Cambridge University. Crummell was in England and Liberia from the early 1850s to 1874, when he returned to the United States to be elected rector of St. Luke's Church, one of two still-active congregations he founded in Washington.

The other members of the academy were similarly accomplished -- most of them college and university teachers and administrators, members of the clergy, practitioners of law or medicine, or community activists with a high regard for scholarship and learning. A significant minority of the working academicians were classicists and historians with a remarkably broad range of scholarly interests, including Africana studies. If the academy is no longer well remembered, such is not the case with many of its leading members -- men such its W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Carter G. Woodson, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomburg and Archibald H. Grimke. (Despite the existence of Wells and other black women with similar interests, the academy remained an all-male organization, a group of educated men endowed with the serious, critical, questing spirit -- and values and biases -- that characterized respectable middle-class sensibility throughout the Victorian era.)

Academy members were, moreover, sensitized as educated black men to the caesura -- the gap between democratic, meritocratic ideals and the harsh social reality that they routinely experienced on the ground -- sensitized in bruising encounters with customary racial prejudice, in interracial contacts geared to deference, and by the everyday denial to a powerless, oppressed people of ordinary respect and "manhood" rights.

The academy was thus an effort by black intellectuals at institution building, a way of sustaining community hope in the critical importance and usefulness to the race of mental discipline (the word itself underscoring a Victorian sensibility). As Crummell argued: "We have got to meet the minds of this country. ... It is only ... scientific truth, in every department, that is going to do anything for us."