  His Memory versus Recall Argument reveals the limitations of such vanguards. He recounts in his 1891 book Africa and America a sharp public exchange he has with Douglass over the effect of actively recalling how slavery degraded black life. Douglass, ever the activist, thought such recall was inspirational, motivating moral progress, while the relentlessly analytical Crummell thought it dispiriting and morally regressive. He decried what he saw as the “irresistible tendency in the Negro mind in this land to dwell morbidly and absorbingly upon the servile past” to the detriment of the needs of the future. Active recall of slavery, he argued, jeopardized black moral progress (“The Need of New Ideas and New Aims for a New Era” [AA], 18–19). Of course it “is not the memory of slavery” to be guarded against “but the constant recollection of it, as the commanding thought of a new people, who should be marching on to the broadest freedom of thought in a new and glorious present, and a still more magnificent future.” Memory is passive, as “the necessary and unavoidable entrance, storage and recurrence of facts and ideas to the understanding and the consciousness.” But recollection is a mental action, “the actual seeking of the facts, …the painstaking endeavor of the mind to bring them back again to consciousness.” By the “law of association,” then, it tends to “degradation.”