Edward Wilmot Blyden

Edward Wilmot Blyden was born to free parents in Charlotte Amalie, on the Danish Caribbean island of Saint Thomas, on the third of August 1832. His family traced its descent to the Igbo people of what is now Nigeria, and from boyhood he showed a gift for languages and learning that would carry him across three continents. In May 1850 he sailed to the United States hoping to study for the ministry, only to be turned away from Rutgers Theological College — and two other seminaries — solely because of his race.

Rebuffed in America, Blyden emigrated to Liberia in early 1851, the young republic that had declared its independence in 1847. There he flourished: he studied and then taught at Alexander High School in Monrovia, was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1858, and in 1862 became professor of classics at the newly opened Liberia College, teaching Greek and Latin alongside Arabic, which he mastered.

His public service matched his scholarship. Blyden served as Liberia's Secretary of State in the 1860s, as an envoy to Britain and France, and as president of Liberia College from 1880 to 1884. In Sierra Leone he founded newspapers and, late in life, directed Muslim education. Through works such as Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), he argued for the dignity and civilizational worth of African peoples and gave voice to the idea of the "African personality."

From his thought descend the currents of Pan-Africanism, African nationalism, and négritude. He died in Freetown, Sierra Leone, on the seventh of February 1912. We honor Edward Wilmot Blyden as the nineteenth-century intellect who taught a scattered people to lift their heads toward the continent of their origin.