Ordained as an Episcopal priest in the United States, Crummell went to England in the late 1840s to raise money for his church by lecturing about American slavery.

Abolitionists supported his three years of study at Cambridge University, where Crummell developed concepts of pan-Africanism and was the school's first recorded Black student and graduate.

In 1853, Crummell moved to Liberia, where he worked to convert Africans to Christianity and educate them, as well as to persuade African-American colonists of his ideas.

Crummell lived and worked for 20 years in Liberia and appealed to American Blacks to join him, but did not gather wide support for his ideas.

According to Crummell's account, his paternal grandfather was an ethnic Temne, born in what is now Sierra Leone; he was captured and sold into slavery when he was around 13 years old.

His parents' influence and these early experiences within the abolitionist movement shaped Crummell's values, beliefs, and actions throughout the rest of his life.

Other African-American men who became active in the abolitionist movement, such as James McCune Smith (a pioneering doctor) and Henry Highland Garnet, also graduated from this school.

His prominence as a young intellectual earned him a spot as keynote speaker at the anti-slavery New York State Convention of Negroes when it met in Albany in 1840.

[2] Denied admission to the General Theological Seminary in New York City because of his race,[3]: 58  Crummell went on to study at Yale from 1840 to 1841.

From 1849 to 1853, Crummell studied at Queens' College, Cambridge, sponsored by Benjamin Brodie, William Wilberforce, Arthur Penrhyn Stanley, James Anthony Froude, and Thomas Babington Macaulay.

Crummell arrived in Liberia in 1853, at the point in that country's history when Americo-Liberians had begun to govern the former colony for free American Blacks.

[12]: 261 Crummell began to preach that "enlightened," or Christianized, ethnic Africans in the United States and the West Indies had a duty to go to Africa.

They raised funds to construct a new church on upper 15th Street, N.W., in the Columbia Heights area, beginning in 1876, and celebrated Thanksgiving in 1879 in it.

He spent the last years of his life founding the American Negro Academy, the first organization to support African-American scholars, which opened in 1897 in Washington, DC.

Crummell's legacy can be seen not only in his personal achievements, but also in the influence he exerted on other Black nationalists and Pan-Africanists, such as Marcus Garvey, Paul Laurence Dunbar, and W. E. B.

[16] Crummell's private papers are held by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, of the New York Public Library in Harlem.