Exploring Black History at Trinity: Alexander Crummel

Alexander Crummell (1819-Sept. 12, 1898)

Alexander Crummell was an African American priest, missionary, and educator whose life exhibits both the amazing contributions of Black Episcopalians to the church, and the failure of the church to make space for the ministries of Black Americans. Throughout his life, Crummell struggled to find a place in the church in which to exercise his vocation. Having been born and raised in New York City, Crummell was denied admission to New York’s General Theological Seminary. He studied independently for ministry instead, during which time he lived briefly in New Haven, CT. Crummell was at one time in conversation to become the first rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church, which had recently formed after members of Trinity on the Green refused to allow Black people to sit in pews designated for the general congregation. Ultimately Crummell moved on instead to Providence, Rhode Island, where he began parish ministry. Crummell was ordained a deacon in 1842, and a priest in 1844.

Crummell’s next call was to a church in Philadelphia, though he resigned in protest for being excluded from diocesan convention, due to his race. Crummell moved to England, where he could finally pursue a formal theological education while serving as a curate. While in England, Crummell discovered a passion for missionary work. He moved from England to Liberia, where he served as a missionary from 1853 to 1873. Despite his passion for the work, Crummell struggled to find his place there as well, at times caught between his white Episcopal colleagues and the ruling elite class of mulatto Americo-Liberians. Crummell returned to the United States in 1873, where he founded and served as rector of St. Luke’s Church, Washington D.C. He also organized the Conference of Church Workers Among Colored People, a forerunner of what is today the Union of Black Episcopalians (UBE).

W.E.B Dubois, whose grandfather was one of the founding members of St. Luke’s New Haven, was profoundly moved by Crummell’s story and wrote about it in his book The Souls of Black Folk:

“He did his work, --he did it nobly and well; and yet I sorrow that here he worked alone, with so little human sympathy. His name to-day, in this broad land, means little, and comes to fifty million ears laden with no incense of memory or emulation. And herein lies the tragedy of the age: not that men are poor, --all me know something of poverty; not that men are wicked, --who is good? Not that men are ignorant, --what is Truth? Nay, but that men know so little of men.”

Sources:

Randall K. Burkett, “The Reverend Harry Croswell and Black Episcopalians in New Haven, 1820-1860” in The North Star: A Journal of African American Religious History (Fall 2003: Vol. 7, No. 1).

The Episcopal Church, “Crummell, Alexander” in An Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, https://www.episcopalchurch.org/glossary/crummell-alexander/.

W.E.B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk, originally published 1903 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2009).

Harold T. Lewis, Yet with a Steady Beat: the African American Struggle for Recognition in the Episcopal Church (Trinity Press international, 1996).