Alexander Crummell Timelines: Setting the Stage for Catto’s Life

Alexander Crummell, pioneering ordained Episcopal priest, academic and African nationalist, is born. He was educated at Cambridge University. Crummell’s pan-nationalist philosophy later inspires W.E.B. DuBois, Paul Lawrence Dunbar, and Marcus Garvey. Before founding his own church in Washington, D.C. on 1876, Crummell served as an interim minister at St. Thomas African Episcopal Church, when O.V. Catto was a member an vestryman. DuBois called Crummell the “greatest black intellectual of the 19th Century” and dedicated a chapter to him in Souls of Black Folks. With Benjamin Taller, Crummell founded the American Negro Academy in memory of Frederick Douglass.  His church, St. Luke’s Protestant Episcopal Church, is designated as a National Historic Site.