The American Negro Academy: Black excellence 100 years ago

The 1890 a period of American history valorized by means of many writers as the Progressive Era, was not viewed as similar by most Americans of African coming down In the South, where almost 90 percent of black Americans lived, the reversal of Reconstruction's hard-won civic rights gathered pace as the 19th hundred drew toward a close. The rise of Jim swagger segregation in education, transportation and public accommodations was legitimated by means of the Supreme Court's 1896 Plessy v Ferguson decision. This social turn was complemented by the sharp curtailment of a black political sphere in the southern These events demoralized African-American communities, creating a crisis of belief.

Consider, for example, the lamenting witness in the mid-1880s of the 22-year-old, Mississippi-born "new" woman Ida Wells, who had nevertheless to embark on her life's crusade as a militant journalist and human rights activist: "I have firmly believed all along that the law was upon our side and would, when we appealed to it, give us justice. I have feeling shorn of that belief and utterly discouraged, and just now, if it were possible, would gather my race in my arms and soar away with them. O the infinite is there no redress, no peace, no justice in this land for us? Thou has always fought the battles of the weak and bear hard uponed Come to my aid for I am sorely disappointed. present to view us the way."

Nor was the crisis les in the North, although it was somewhat different, for a seismic cultural shift was spreading from Urban America, placing on black folk the disorienting demands of unprecedent social change associated with an economy oriented toward and powered by means of commercial values and industrial interests in the high noon of laissez faire capitalism.

Stepping into this breach of belief was the American african Academy, described in its constitution as "an organization of authors, scholars, artists, and those distinguished in other walks of life, men of African fall for the promotion of alphabetic characters Science, and Art." Though little known today, the academy, America's first major black learned society, was an extraordinary attempt by dint of a tiny and vulnerable African-American leadership class -- in the words of the group's principal historian, Alfred A. Mos Jr (The American african Academy: Voice of the Talented Tenth) -- "lead and secure their people" and to subserve "as a weapon to certain equality and destroy racism."

The American african Academy was founded in Washington, DC in 1897 Its driving force -- and the group's first president -- was the 78-year-old Rev Alexander Crummell an Episcopal clergyman, writer, educator and missionary and the preeminent black intellectual of the 19th hundred Crummell had been reared and educated (about which more later) upon New York's Lower East Side, in the era called Five Points, just down the public way from "Mother Zion," the first house of worship of the Methodist Episcopal Zion tradition, rested in 1800. Denied a theologic I education at the General Seminary of the Episcopal house of worship he moved to England, where in 1853 he received a bachelor's stage from Queens College, Cambridge University. Crummell was in England and Liberia from the early 1850 to 1874 when he go [i]or[/i] come backed to the United States to be pick outed rector of St. Luke's temple one of two still-active congregations he fixed in Washington.

The other members of the academy were similarly accomplished -- greatest in quantity of them college and university teachers and administrators, members of the body of ecclesiastics practitioners of law or medicine, or community activists with a high regard for scholarship and learning. A significant minority of the working academicians were classicists and historians with a remarkably broad range of scholarly interests, including Africana studies. If the academy is no longer well remembered, like is not the case with many of its leading members -- men like its W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T Washington, Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson Carter G Woodson Alain Locke Arthur Schomburg and Archibald H Grimke. (Despite the existence of Wells and other black women with similar interests, the academy remained an all-male organization, a collection of educated men endowed with the serious, critical, questing spirit -- and values and biases -- that characterized respectable middle-class sensibility over the Victorian era.)

Academy members were, moreover, sensitized as educated black men to the caesura -- the gap between democratic, meritocratic ideals and the harsh social reality that they routinely experienced upon the ground -- sensitized in bruising meetings with customary racial prejudice, in interracial contacts geared to regard and by the everyday denial to a powerless, burdened people of ordinary respect and "manhood" rights.

The academy was thus an effort by means of black intellectuals at institution building, a way of sustaining community faith in the critical importance and usefulness to the race of mental discipline (the word itself underscoring a Victorian sensibility). As Crummell argued: "We have got to suited the minds of this geographical division ... It is only scientific truth, in every department, that is going to do anything for us."