‘Spreading to Leaven’: Alexander Crummell, W.E.B. Du Bois and the American Negro Academy

“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 which is the nearest ally of religion.”-Alexander Crummell, “Civilization: The Primal Need of the Race” (1898)

In the above excerpt, Rev. Alexander Crummell-Yale-trained seminarian before the end of the Civil War-argued at the opening of the founding of the American Negro Academy that educated and literate African American preachers and scholars must lead moral, ethical, intellectual and social reform efforts amidst their uneducated African American community members by supplementing-perhaps even supplanting-traditional African American religious practices; this was what all advanced civilizations required, he believed.

The corollary to Crummell’s argument, then, meant that regular communication to uneducated African American community members was imperative. Crummell’s (as well as Du Bois’s) concern about this communication was so earnest that it straightway led him to form the American Negro Academy’s Occasional Papers in the afternoon session during the inaugural meeting where this talk was presented at the founding of the American Negro Academy.

Because educated and scholarly African Americans and literate clergymen were without a suitable print medium of expression designed for this ongoing commitment in either their community or the white one, Crummell’s American Negro Academy tried to fashion an alternative print mode-minus the bulky scholastic documentation-that would convincingly adhere to their respective academic backgrounds while simultaneously facilitating a forum for moral, ethical, intellectual, and social leadership in the African American community. To be certain, educated African American leaders of this ilk were also concerned with protecting African Americans from unceasing racist attacks. Yet the persistent strain of uplift and reform writing that this unique cadre was also preoccupied with is often overlooked.