American Negro Academy

American Negro Academy, scholarly and artistic organization founded in 1897 in Washington, D.C., that was dedicated to the education and empowerment of African Americans. The American Negro Academy was founded by Alexander Crummell, who was the son of a West African chief and was an important American literary figure. Its members included some of the most highly educated and socially prominent African Americans and other people of African descent living abroad.

At the inception of the American Negro Academy, its founding members laid out five major objectives: “the promotion of literature, science, and art; the culture of intellectual taste; the fostering of higher education; the publication of scholarly work; the defense of the Negro against vicious assaults.” The organization brought together black artists and scholars from all over the world.

The American Negro Academy was most notable for the scholarly works it produced. At the time, most mainstream universities and other scholarly institutions paid very little attention to African American or African studies, but the American Negro Academy published many works that examined the role of blacks in the United States.

One of the notable works published, in 1898, under the auspices of the academy consisted of a pair of Crummell’s addresses to the academy: “Civilization: The Primal Need of the Race” and “The Attitude of the American Mind Toward Negro Intellect.” The academy would go on to produce many noted literary and scholarly works, including Charles Cook’s A Comparative Study of the Negro Problem (1899) and T.G. Steward’s How the Black St. Domingo Legion Saved the Patriot Army in the Siege of Savannah, 1799 (1899).

Crummell died in 1908, and civil rights leader W.E.B. Du Bois was elected president of the organization, whose mission fit well with Du Bois’s idea of the Talented Tenth. By 1924, however, the American Negro Academy had disbanded, giving way to other African American arts and cultural organizations.