But Crummell soon died; DuBois was elected president. The industrial fad swept over the country and men soon forgot the Academy. But Prof. John Wesley Cromwell, the secretary, Dr. Francis J. Grimke, the treasurer, Prof. Kelly Miller, Prof. C. C. Cook and Prof. John L. Love, of Washington, D. C., did not despair. In December, 1902, the Academy startled the country by a two days’ session in which a series of papers were read upon “The Religion of the Negro.” The papers of Prof. Harper, the Rev. Orishatukeh Faduma and Dr. Matthew Anderson attracted considerable attention at the time. Later the “Literary Digest” noticed my paper upon “A Historical and Psychological Account of the Genius and Development of the Negro’s Religion.” In December, 1903, Archibald H. Grimke was elected as President. The Academy took a new lease of life and in March, 1905, a brilliant series of papers were read upon “The Negro and the Elective Franchise.” They were afterwards published in an eighty-five page pamphlet and they remain today the best discussion upon Negro Suffrage and Southern Disfranchisement.
The session of the Academy in December, 1906, was held in Howard University, and at that session the audience that assembled in the small chapel of Howard University listened to an illuminating discussion upon the “Economic Condition of the Negro.” Kelly Miller’s paper upon “Labor Conditions in the North” attracted some attention in the “Washington Post.” I do hope the scholars of the race will perpetuate the organization, which was the dream of Crummell’s life. I well remember the Saturday in September, 1898, when I received a card from Walter B. Hayson, Crummell’s protege, announcing that Crummell was dying. I hurried to Point Pleasant, N. J., but Crummell had breathed his last and his body was carried to New York City. For two hours on Monday night I walked up and down the beach at Asbury Park. I looked up at the stars shining so silently in the immensity of space and heard the distant murmur of the ocean as it rolled and broke upon the shore. In the silent midnight hour, Nature’s calmness and repose seemed to touch my soul and then from the depth of my being came the cry, “Crummell is not dead, but he liveth; he is now with his God and Maker.”
No man is bigger than the idea that dominates him, and that he embodies in his life. If his personality is grand and sublime, he will live on in the moral world. But if his ideas are not progressive, he will not live long in the thought world. Dr. Alexander Crummell believed that the Negro belonged to the genus vir as well as to the genus homo, that he could be included in the class aner as well as anthropos, that he had a soul to be trained as well as a body to be clothed, sheltered and fed. In a word, he believed that the Negro was made out of the same clay as the rest of mankind, that he was worthy of the same education and training, and was entitled to the same treatment, consideration, rights and privileges as other men.
The question is, were the soaring ideals that inspired Dr. Crummell’s effort dreams of the imagination, or were they grounded in reality? Did his perspective belong to the class of mirages in the desert, or did his Weltauschanung belong to that class of visions, of which it was said in Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish?”
We can only answer those questions by studying the state of the American mind when the Academy was formed. In 1776, the high sounding and world resounding Declaration of Independence was signed, which said that all men were created free and equal and had an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet some of the signers of that Declaration held slaves. Why was it? The late Prof. William Graham Summer of Yale said that it was because they did not regard the Negro as a man.
And the whole slavery debate hinged on the question of the humanity of the Negro, hinged upon the question as to whether he possessed the intellectual, ethical, aesthetical and religious potentialities and possibilities which white men possessed, hinged upon the question as to whether the Negro did or did not possess a soul. The South said that the Negro was a beast and not a man, and was not capable of intellectual or moral improvement. In Georgia and other states, they took particular pains to see that the Negro had no chance or opportunity for mental improvement. In Georgia they would fine and imprison a white man and whip and imprison a colored man who was caught teaching a slave to read and write.
The great Calhoun said that “The Negro race was so inferior that it had never produced a single individual who could conjugate a Greek verb.” Dr. Crummell in his paper before the American Negro Academy upon “The Attitude of the American Mind Towards the Negro Intellect,” wittily said that Calhoun must have expected Greek verbs to grow in Negro brains by some process of spontaneous generation, as he never had tried the experiment of putting a Greek grammar in the hands of a Negro student.
But ere long arose Dr. Blyden, the linguist and Arabic scholar; Prof. Scarborough, who wrote a Greek text book and “The Bird of Aristophanes” and the “Thematic Vowel in the Greek Verb;” Dr. Grimke, the theologian; Prof. Kelly Miller, the mathematician, arose. Colored students of Harvard like Greener, Grimke, DuBois, Trotter, Stewart, Bruce, Hill and Locke, and Bouchet, McGuinn, Faduma, Baker, Crawford and Pickens of Yale arose, who demonstrated every kind of intellectual capacity. Then Trumbull of Brown, Forbes and Lewis of Amherst, Wright of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hoffman and Wilkinson of Ann Arbor University, also won honors. Dr. Daniel Williams distinguished himself as a surgeon, Dunbar as a poet, Chestnut as a novelist, Tanner as an artist, and Coleridge Taylor as a musician.