Alexander Crummell, Cambridge’s first black graduate
Alexander Crummell is not a name that resonates in any list of black pioneers but his story as the son of a former slave who became almost certainly the first black student to graduate from Cambridge University will be told tonight at a lecture in the university’s Festival of Ideas.
The resurrection of the long-obscure 19th-century American student comes months after Cambridge and Oxford once again had to fend off accusations about low admission rates for students from ethnic minorities. In 2009, 15% of first-year undergraduates were from ethnic minorities, but none of the academic or laboratory staff at the university were black.
Although Crummell was perhaps not the first black student Cambridge had seen – a Jamaican man, Francis Williams, is thought to have studied there in the 1700s and a mixed-race violinist, George Augustus Bridgetower, had been awarded a music degree for a composition in 1812 – he is the first officially recorded in the university records as having studied and graduated.
His story will be told by Sarah Meer, a university lecturer and fellow of Selwyn College, at the English faculty. “He was immensely proud to have studied at Cambridge and said he had never felt free until he landed in Britain,” Meer said.
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