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19pp. Comprising:

• Civilization: The Primal Need of the Race
• The Attitude of the American Mind Toward the Negro Intellect

Original wrappers. First Edition.

The third “Occasional Paper” published by the Academy, founded the previous year, soon to become “the nation’s preeminent Black intellectual society” at the start of the 20th century. All the original 22 Academy scholarly papers published between 1897 and 1924 are now scarce. With signature on front wrapper of Duke University historian William K. Boyd, who has made some unobtrusive marginalia in the text.

Crummell was a leading African-American intellectual, the son of a slave and her white “owner" who became one of the first Black graduates of Harvard Law School, Boston attorney and  American diplomat  who, after living in Liberia for 20 years, formulated the concept of “Pan-Africanism”. 

The Academy was called “the voice of the talented tenth” – the term coined by W.E.B.DuBois, who wrote the Academy’s second Occasional Paper eschewed the Booker T. Washington philosophy that downplayed academic achievement and higher education.