until it reaches the shore. They tell us
that when you utter an audible sound, you start in motion sound waves
which travel on for miles and miles. So it is with the influence of a
human personality. It does not end at the grave. It lives in the lives
that have been inspired, in the example set and the thoughts thrown out.

Twenty years and three months have elapsed since the soul of Alexander
Crummell bid its bodily partner farewell and took its flight to its
spiritual home. But Alexander Crummell's terrestial influence did not end
thus. It still goes on and will go on for centuries. We will briefly
review his life and career and then estimate the weight, worth and
significance of the ideas which he advocated, for which he lived and which
were incarnated in his personality.

The Rev. Dr. Alexander Crummell, the Negro apostle of culture, was a born
autocrat, a man born to command. And men instinctively bowed before him.
Some even trembled before his wrath.

Crummell was born in New York in 1819, nearly a century ago. He was the
son of Boston Crummell, a prince of the warlike Temene tribe, who was
stolen while a boy playing on the sands of the seashore. At first,
Crummell, with George T. Downing attended a school in New York taught by
the Reverend Peter Williams, then went to the school in Canaan, New
Hampshire, which was hauled into the pond by those who were angry because
the Negro was taught to read. Crummell with others took refuge in a barn.
They were fired upon; but Henry Highland Garnet fired a return shot, at
which they were allowed to depart in peace. Then Crummell attended the
Oneida Institute, of which Beriah Green was the President. He became a
priest in the Episcopal Church, was for twenty years a missionary on the
west coast of Africa, during which period he visited seventy tribes. He
returned to this country in the late sixties or the early seventies, was
for a year or two rector of St. Philip's Church, New York, and for
twenty-three years rector of the St. Luke's Church in Washington, D. C.
The last years of his life were spent in issuing his race tracts and
founding the American Negro Academy, the first body to bring Negro
scholars from all over the world together. He died at Point Pleasant,
N. J., in Dr. Matthew Anderson's summer home in September, 1898, in his
eightieth year.

He was not as famous a man as Douglass, because in the most eventful years
of the Negro race's history from 1850 to 1870 he