He had passed the three score and ten mark. Never strong or robust physically, he had lived a very active life. It seemed as if his days of usefulness were over. But, no, this grand old man of the Negro race, nearly eighty years of age, endeavored to realize a dream that he had conceived when a student in Cambridge University, England. He proposed to found and establish the American Negro Academy, an organization composed of Negro scholars, whose membership should be limited to forty and whose purpose should be to foster scholarship and culture in the Negro race and encourage budding Negro genius. He communicated with colored scholars in America, England, Hayti and Africa. The result was that in March, 1897, when McKinley was inaugurated, the most celebrated scholars and writers in the Negro race for the first time assembled together in the Lincoln Memorial Church and formally organized into a brotherhood of scholars. Dunbar, the poet; DuBois, the sociologist; Scarborough, the Greek scholar; Kelly Miller, the mathematician; Dr. Frank J. Grimke, the theologian; Prof. John W. Cromwell, the historian; President R. R. Wright, Principal Grisham, Prof. Love and Prof. Walter B. Hayson, noted educators; Prof. C. C. Cook, the student of English literature, and Bishop J. Albert Johnson, the brilliant preacher, were among those present. Bishop Tanner, of the A. M. E. Church, and two or three other bishops were enrolled as members, and such distinguished foreign Negroes as Prof. Harper were added as members. The Academy seemed destined to do for the Negro race what the French Academy did for France. But Crummell soon died; DuBois was elected president. The industrial fad swept over the country and men soon forgot the Academy. But Prof. John Wesley Cromwell, the secretary, Dr. Francis J. Grimke, the treasurer, Prof. Kelly Miller, Prof. C. C. Cook and Prof. John L. Love, of Washington, D. C., did not despair. In December, 1902, the Academy startled the country by a two days' session in which a series of papers were read upon "The Religion of the Negro." The papers of Prof. Harper, the Rev. Orishatukeh Faduma and Dr. Matthew Anderson attracted considerable attention at the time. Later the "Literary Digest" noticed my paper upon "A Historical and Psychological Account of the Genius and Development of the Negro's Religion." In December, 1903, Archibald H. Grimke was elected as President. The Academy took a new lease of life and in March, 1905, a brilliant series of papers were read upon "The Negro and the Elective Franchise." They were afterwards published in an eighty-five page pamphlet and they remain today the best discussion upon Negro Suffrage and Southern Disfranchisement.