If his personality is grand and sublime, he will live on in the moral world. But if his ideas are not progressive, he will not live long in the thought world. Dr. Alexander Crummell believed that the Negro belonged to the genus vir as well as to the genus homo, that he could be included in the class aner as well as anthropos, that he had a soul to be trained as well as a body to be clothed, sheltered and fed. In a word, he believed that the Negro was made out of the same clay as the rest of mankind, that he was worthy of the same education and training, and was entitled to the same treatment, consideration, rights and privileges as other men.

The question is, were the soaring ideals that inspired Dr. Crummell’s effort dreams of the imagination, or were they grounded in reality? Did his perspective belong to the class of mirages in the desert, or did his Weltauschanung belong to that class of visions, of which it was said in Proverbs, “Where there is no vision, the people perish?”

We can only answer those questions by studying the state of the American mind when the Academy was formed. In 1776, the high sounding and world resounding Declaration of Independence was signed, which said that all men were created free and equal and had an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And yet some of the signers of that Declaration held slaves. Why was it? The late Prof. William Graham Summer of Yale said that it was because they did not regard the Negro as a man.

And the whole slavery debate hinged on the question of the humanity of the Negro, hinged upon the question as to whether he possessed the intellectual, ethical, aesthetical and religious potentialities and possibilities which white men possessed, hinged upon the question as to whether the Negro did or did not possess a soul. The South said that the Negro was a beast and not a man, and was not capable of intellectual or moral improvement. In Georgia and other states, they took particular pains to see that the Negro had no chance or opportunity for mental improvement. In Georgia they would fine and imprison a white man and whip and imprison a colored man who was caught teaching a slave to read and write.

The great Calhoun said that “The Negro race was so inferior that it had never produced a single individual who could conjugate a Greek verb.” Dr. Crummell in his paper before the American Negro Academy upon “The Attitude of the American Mind Towards the Negro Intellect,” wittily said that Calhoun must have expected Greek verbs to grow in Negro brains by some process of spontaneous generation, as he never had tried the experiment of putting a Greek grammar in the hands of a Negro student.

But ere long arose Dr. Blyden, the linguist and Arabic scholar; Prof. Scarborough, who wrote a Greek text book and “The Bird of Aristophanes” and the “Thematic Vowel in the Greek Verb;” Dr. Grimke, the theologian; Prof. Kelly Miller, the mathematician, arose. Colored students of Harvard like Greener, Grimke, DuBois, Trotter, Stewart, Bruce, Hill and Locke, and Bouchet, McGuinn, Faduma, Baker, Crawford and Pickens of Yale arose, who demonstrated every kind of intellectual capacity. Then Trumbull of Brown, Forbes and Lewis of Amherst, Wright of the University of Pennsylvania, and Hoffman and Wilkinson of Ann Arbor University, also won honors. Dr. Daniel Williams distinguished himself as a surgeon, Dunbar as a poet, Chestnut as a novelist, Tanner as an artist, and Coleridge Taylor as a musician.

So in the days when the American Negro Academy came into existence, the Bourbons of the south and their northern sympathizers realized that the Negro had achieved distinction in intellectual fields, where they said he would be like fish out of water.

So then they changed their tack. They then said that the Negro could be educated, but education made him “a builder of air castles,” in the words of their colored spokesman, and made him useless to