Crummell was born in New York in 1819, nearly a century ago. He was the son of Boston Crummell, a prince of the warlike Temene tribe, who was stolen while a boy playing on the sands of the seashore. At first, Crummell, with George T. Downing attended a school in New York taught by the Reverend Peter Williams, then went to the school in Canaan, New Hampshire, which was hauled into the pond by those who were angry because the Negro was taught to read. Crummell with others took refuge in a barn. They were fired upon; but Henry Highland Garnet fired a return shot, at which they were allowed to depart in peace. Then Crummell attended the Oneida Institute, of which Beriah Green was the President. He became a priest in the Episcopal Church, was for twenty years a missionary on the west coast of Africa, during which period he visited seventy tribes. He returned to this country in the late sixties or the early seventies, was for a year or two rector of St. Philip's Church, New York, and for twenty-three years rector of the St. Luke's Church in Washington, D. C. The last years of his life were spent in issuing his race tracts and founding the American Negro Academy, the first body to bring Negro scholars from all over the world together. He died at Point Pleasant, N. J., in Dr. Matthew Anderson's summer home in September, 1898, in his eightieth year. He was not as famous a man as Douglass, because in the most eventful years of the Negro race's history from 1850 to 1870 he was in Africa. When he died, men like Phillips Brooks and Dr. Fuller, of Rochester, who were old friends of his and who knew him intimately, the man and his work, had already crossed the mystic stream of death and passed over to the other shore. But he was a power in his own race to the last. Still in the late forties, he delivered three addresses that attracted considerable attention. In 1847 he addressed a colored convention at Troy, N. Y. And in 1848 he visited London and spoke at the annual meeting of the Anti-Slavery Society, with such fire, force, finish and polish that he made many friends, both for himself and his race.