Alexander Crummell

(1819 - 1898)

Born to a free woman and an escaped slave in New York City, Alexander Crummell studied at an integrated abolitionist school in New Hampshire until a lynch mob forced him and other black students out of town. He graduated from Cambridge University in 1853, and then spent nearly two decades as an Episcopalian missionary in Liberia before returning to the United States. The year before his death, he founded the American Negro Academy.