The American Negro Academy (ANA), founded in Washington, DC in 1897, was the first organization in the United States to support African-American academic scholarship.
The scholarly contributions aided the spirit of blacks in the South, who were being disenfranchised by white-dominated legislatures, who also imposed Jim Crow laws.
[10] The Academy generally held an annual meeting of one-two days at Lincoln Temple United Church of Christ in Washington, D.C.
The ANA was part of the early struggle for equal rights for blacks, seeking to support their academic efforts.
It was organized shortly after the United States Supreme Court had upheld the principle of "separate but equal" in the 1896 case, Plessy v. Ferguson.
As Crummel said, to aid the black intellectual's efforts to have influence on "his schools, academies and colleges; and then enters his pulpits; and so filters down into his families and his homes…to be a laborer with intelligence, enlightenment and manly ambitions".
It was unable to consistently organize; it struggled to recruit new members, and especially to raise scholarship funds for the education of more students.