It was for such a delicately drawn portrait, such a halo surrounded it,
that Prof. William James and other Bostonians doubted that it was the
likeness of a real man and believed that it was the picture of an ideal,
an imaginary Negro. But Crummell was not a dream creation. He was a being
who had actually been clothed in flesh and blood, who had actually trod on
these terrestrial shores and walked on this earth.
He was indeed the Newman of the Negro pulpit. If any one desires to read
the romance of his life, of his struggles to get an education, of his
despair in encountering the hostility of the Anglo-Saxon and the
ingratitude and lack of appreciation of his own race, and of his bravely
surmounting his difficulties, I refer him to DuBois' "Souls of Black
Folk."
After Alexander Crummell, the first Negro apostle of culture, had spent a
few years as a student in Cambridge University, England, nearly a quarter
of a century as a missionary upon the west coast of Africa, he returned
about the year 1870 to the United States, the land of his birth, and for
twenty-three years served as rector of the St. Luke's Episcopal Church of
Washington, D. C. Then he retired from the ministry.