American Negro Academy

"The American Negro Academy believes that upon those of the race who have had the advantage of higher education and culture, rests the responsibility of taking concerted steps for the employment of these agencies to uplift the race to higher planes of thought and action"

"During the last two decades of the nineteenth century black Americans experienced a relentless attack on their social, political, and economic rights. This resulted in a decline the their status throughout the United States and especially in the South, where slightly less than 90 percent of them lived. Beginning in 1890, measures designed to disfranchise blacks began to be written into the constitutions of southern states; and, by 1910, most blacks had been eliminated as voters. It was in this same period that racial segregation, or Jim Crow ideas, began to be translated into law and steadily extended to all areas of life in the South."

"By the mid-1880s blacks of all classes, in the North as well as the South, were coming to feel that the intense and implacable hostility of whites left them no alternative but to accept a separate existence apart from the larger American community. Many continued to protest and agitate for all their rights as citizens, but the impossibility of halting their exclusion had to be acknowledged. Confronted with this situation black Americans began to pour their energies into the creation of cultural, welfare, religious, educational, economic, and social institutions that would be counterparts to the ones from which whites barred them."