you will recognize the greatness of Crummell. Some
people say that great Negroes are jealous of each other. But read
Crummell's chapter upon Henry Highland Garnet and DuBois's chapter upon
Crummell, and you will see how kindred spirits appreciate each other's
worth and value.

Those who are interested in Tuskegee Institute will remember that in
February, 1899, a memorable meeting was held in the Hollis Theatre in
behalf of that celebrated school. The Hampton and Tuskegee Quartettes
sang. Dunbar recited his dialect poems; Dr. Washington, as usual, spoke in
an impressive and eloquent manner. But the event that interested many
thoughtful minds was the paper of Dr. Wm. E. Burghardt DuBois upon the
"Strivings of a Negro for the Higher Life."

I. "The Negro Apostle of Culture."

It was for such a delicately drawn portrait, such a halo surrounded it,
that Prof. William James and other Bostonians doubted that it was the
likeness of a real man and believed that it was the picture of an ideal,
an imaginary Negro. But Crummell was not a dream creation. He was a being
who had actually been clothed in flesh and blood, who had actually trod on
these terrestrial shores and walked on this earth.

He was indeed the Newman of the Negro pulpit. If any one desires to read
the romance of his life, of his struggles to get an education, of his
despair in encountering the hostility of the Anglo-Saxon and the
ingratitude and lack of appreciation of his own race, and of his bravely
surmounting his difficulties, I refer him to DuBois' "Souls of Black
Folk."

After Alexander Crummell, the first Negro apostle of culture, had spent a
few years as a student in Cambridge University, England, nearly a quarter
of a century as a missionary upon the west coast of Africa, he returned
about the year 1870 to the United States, the land of his birth, and for
twenty-three years served as rector of the St. Luke's Episcopal Church of
Washington, D. C. Then he retired from the ministry.

II. History of the American Negro Academy.

He had passed the three score and ten mark. Never strong or robust
physically, he had lived a very active life. It seemed as if his days of
usefulness were over. But, no, this grand old man of the Negro race,
nearly eighty years of age, endeavored to realize a dream that he had
conceived when a student in Cambridge University, England. He proposed to
found and establish the American Negro Academy, an organization composed
of