 National culture captures a complex idea for Crummell. On the one hand, he argues that each generation has a duty to the future—specifically, a duty to make the future better than the past—an obligation he often described in terms of “civilization.” Civilization thus accumulates all of the greatest symbolic achievements of the past: literature, philosophy, the arts, and so on. But that does not happen without cultivating the population whose symbolic achievements are thus collected. What we would today call culture, with little or none of his idea of progress and improvement, Crummell and his contemporaries thought of as that which is so cultivated, and hence is prepared to add to civilization. But while civilization is for everyone—it is universal, Crummell would say—culture is particular to this or that group, this or that nation. National culture is thus that set of symbolic achievements made by a particular (national) group for the good of universal (world) civilization. The Negro, in the idiom of Crummell's day, has no less obligation than any other “nation” to make a cultural contribution to civilization. 