James Aggrey

James Emman Kwegyir Aggrey (October 18, 1875 – July 30, 1927) was an intellectual, missionary, and teacher. He was a native of the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) who later emigrated to the United States, but returned to Africa for several years.

He was born in Anomabo, the son of the Kwadwo Kwegyir, a friend of the then master chieftain Amonu IV. In the June 1883, he was baptized in a municipality in the Gold Coast and accepted his Christian first name James. He attended a Methodist school in Cape Coast, where the teachers noted that he was precocious, already studying Greek and Latin, and he subsequently rose to become the school's headmaster.

In 1898, at the age of 23, he was selected due to his education to be trained in the United States as a missionary. On July 10, 1898, Aggrey agreed and left the Gold Coast for the United States, where he settled in Salisbury, North Carolina, and attended the Livingstone College. He studied a variety of subjects at the university, including chemistry, physics, logic, economics and politics. In May 1902 he graduated from the university with three academic degrees. Aggrey was very talented in language and was said to have spoken (beside English) French, German, Ancient and Modern Greek, and Latin.

In November 1903 he was appointed a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church in Salisbury. In 1905 he married Rose Douglas, a native of Virginia, with whom he had four children. In the same year he began to teach at Livingstone College. In 1912 he earned his doctorate in theology, and in 1914 followed a doctorate in osteopathy. In the same year he transferred employment to a small municipality to North Carolina. Between 1915 and 1917 Aggrey took up further studies at what is now known as Columbia University, where he studied sociology, psychology and the Japanese language.

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