Description

Meet Alexander Crummell (1819-1898), Episcopalian priest, civil rights campaigner, intellectual and early pan-Africanist, who defied American pro-slavery politicians to become an expert in ancient Greek. The alleged inability of people of African descent to learn the ancient languages of Greece and Rome was sometimes actually used to demonstrate that they were not humans worthy of liberty.

In 1833 or 1834, American pro-slavery thinkers were very much on the defensive. It was then that  the Senator for South Carolina, John C. Calhoun, notoriously declared at a Washington dinner party that only when he could ‘find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax’ could he be brought to ‘believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man’.

The young black errand boy who overheard a discussion between two lawyers about the conversation, Alexander Crummell, later said that it was this insult which motivated him to head for Cambridge University in England, where he indeed learned Greek as part of his studies in theology at Queens’ College (1851–3). His university education was financed by Abolitionist campaigners.

Crummell was born to a free woman of colour and a former slave in New York; his paternal grandfather was abducted into slavery from Sierra Leone at the age of 13. Crummell spent twenty years in Liberia as a missionary, and in 1876 founded the first independent Episcopalian Church in Washington, D.C., St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, which is now a National Historic Landmark.