Alexander Crummell (1819–1898), a leading figure advocating black self-sufficiency and civil rights in the mid-19th century.

It is a masonry structure built mainly out of Chesapeake bluestone with an ashlar finish and laid in random courses.

The interior is finished in dark oak and has a barrel-vaulted ceiling with posts of iron and wood supporting the roof trusses.

[3] In 1875, some members of St. Mary's Chapel for Colored People in Foggy Bottom and their rector, the Rev.

Alexander Crummell of New York City and Liberia (where he worked for 20 years), left St. Mary's to found St. Luke's as the first independent black Episcopal church in Washington.