THE PREACHER, THE SCHOLAR AND THE AMERICAN NEGRO ACADEMY (1897)

“ Just here arises the need of the trained and scholarly men of a race to employ their knowledge and culture and teaching and to guide both the opinions and habits of the crude masses […] we can spread abroad and widely disseminate that culture and enlightenment which shall permeate and leaven the entire social and domestic life of our people and so give that civilization. “”Civilization, The Primal Need of the Race,”

One important organization and person in Du Bois’s life that he largely omitted when documenting the story of his intellectual life was that of the American Negro Academy and Alexander Crummell.

Du Bois secured his first academic appointment at Wilberforce University, a religious institution under the auspices of the A.M.E church. While there, Du Bois would try to maintain a careful, uneasy balance between the religious expectations that the university would require of him and the research, educational, and intellectual expectations that he would require of the university. And it was at Wilberforce University where Du Bois first met Alexander Crummell, a Yale-educated African American preacher and scholar.

Crummell’s willingness to take his fellow African American clergymen to task for their derisory education, illiteracy, immorality, and a host of other areas proved attractive to Du Bois’s bourgeoning agnosticism. And though Crummell, Du Bois, and other African American Academy members attempted to craft quasi-religious reform rhetoric to implement the reform aims that Du Bois’s “The Conservation of Races” promoted, it was clear that the question of how to infuse scholarly knowledge into quasi-religious reform rhetoric was never entirely resolved, as this oil-and-water union between Du Bois’s credentials and agnosticism, and the religious dogma associated with Crummell’s rigid adherence to Episcopalian doctrine, would result in Du Bois’s relative silence about this period in his life.

Although no satisfactory explanation has been offered thus far for Du Bois’s failure to describe his time within the American Negro Academy and his relationship with Alexander Crummell, perhaps Du Bois’s silence about this period might be explained in terms of this experience’s frightening similarity with the zeal he exhibited at both Fisk and Harvard (albeit brief). This period probably reminded Du Bois of how closely and organically linked he had become with a fundamentalist para-African American religious organization and preacher, which, in the end, was radically at odds with his lasting agnostic legacy.