Back More
Salem Press

Table of Contents

Encyclopedia of African-American Writing: Five Centuries of Contribution

American Negro Academy

1897–1924

Scholarly organization

On March 5, 1770, Crispus Attucks, a sailor of African-American and probably Native-American ancestry, was the first American killed in the Boston Massacre that initiated the American Revolution against British rule. Exactly 127 years later, a group of scholars commemorated the event by meeting in the U.S. federal district’s Lincoln Memorial Church to formally inaugurate the all-male American Negro Academy. Two days earlier, one of its founding members, Alexander Crummell, had just celebrated his 78th birthday. The 18 founding members also included John Wesley Cromwell, W. E. B. Du Bois, Francis J. Grimké, and William Sanders Scarborough. Crummell was the Academy’s first president. After Crummell’s death (in 1908), Du Bois presided over the Academy, followed by Francis’s brother Archibald H. Grimke.

After the inaugural meeting, the Academy members continued to meet annually, usually in December, as it was never intended as a writers’ workshop or a social organization. The members meant for the Academy to serve as a think-tank or institute. As its constitution noted, it was intended “to raise the standard of intellectual endeavor among American Negroes,” “to promote the publication of scholarly work,” and “to gather into its archives . . . data and the work of Negro authors.” Toward this aim, the Academy members paid an initial membership fee of $5 per member, with annual renewals of $2 per member. With its resources, the Academy funded half of the publication costs for each of the occasional papers, and the authors funded the other half.

Over the decades of its existence, the American Negro Academy produced 21 volumes of occasional papers, starting with Kelly Miller’s “A Review of Hoffman’s Race Traits and Tendencies of the American Negro,” as American Negro Academy Occasional Paper No. 1 (1897). Others followed, including Archibald H. Grimke’s “The Sex Question and Race Segregation,” William Pickens’s “The Status of the Free Negro from 1860-1870,” Arthur Schomburg’s “Economic Contribution by the Negro to America,” and Theophilus Gould Steward’s “The Message of San Domingo of the African Race” and “How the Black San Domingo Legion Saved the Patriotic Army in the Siege of Savannah 1799.” Washington-based attorney and historian John Wesley Cromwell edited the papers.

In addition to these occasional papers, the Academy published just one book-length monograph, Cromwell’s The Negro in American History (1914). Unlike the authors’ partial funding for the occasional papers, Cromwell funded his book’s publication expenses entirely himself, intending for the book to be used as a textbook for secondary-school and college students. Other members of the Academy included poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, poet and editor James Weldon Johnson, scholar Alain Locke, educator Booker T. Washington, and the scholar known as “the father of Black History,” Carter G. Woodson. The Academy’s pursuit of excellence in scholarship often led to elitism, and it constantly struggled to maintain its goal of including 50 members at any given time—a goal made more challenging because it failed to consider the female half of the African-American population. Perpetually underfunded, the Academy closed its virtual doors in 1924.

References:

1 

Blaxton, Reginald, (Feb-March, 1997), The American Negro Academy: Black Excellence 100 Years Ago," American Visions,//findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1546/is_n1_v12/ai_19257620/. Jackson, Errin, “American Negro Academy,” in //www.blackpast.org/?q=aah/american-negro-academy-1897-1924. Joyce, Donald F. 1991. Black Book Publishers in the United States: A Historical Dictionary of the Presses, 1817-1990. Westport, CT: Greenwood Publishing Group. //www.tbaal.org/history.html.

Citation Types

Type
Format
MLA 9th
"American Negro Academy." Encyclopedia of African-American Writing: Five Centuries of Contribution, edited by Bryan Conn & Tara Bynum, Salem Press, 2018. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AAW3E_0016.
APA 7th
American Negro Academy. Encyclopedia of African-American Writing: Five Centuries of Contribution, In B. Conn & T. Bynum (Eds.), Salem Press, 2018. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AAW3E_0016.
CMOS 17th
"American Negro Academy." Encyclopedia of African-American Writing: Five Centuries of Contribution, Edited by Bryan Conn & Tara Bynum. Salem Press, 2018. Salem Online, online.salempress.com/articleDetails.do?articleName=AAW3E_0016.