ABSTRACT
Alexander Crummell, a pioneering nineteenth-century Pan-Africanist, statesman, and missionary who spent the bulk of his creative years as an Anglican minister in Liberia, was also a pioneering intellectual and philosopher of language, founding the American Negro Academy in 1897 and serving as the intellectual godfather of W. E. B. Du Bois.1 In
his first annual address as President of the Academy, delivered on December 28, 1898, Crummell selected as his topic "The Attitude of the American Mind Toward the Negro Intellect."2 Given the occasion of the first annual meeting of the great intellectuals of the race, he could not have chosen a more timely or appropriate topic.
