While he never labelled himself a Pan-Africanist, Senghor had a vision of Negritude which often coincided with the earlier but still vibrant and powerful ideology of Pan-Africanism, which was founded in the late nineteenth century by Liberian educator and diplomat Edward Blyden. For both men believed (as did the American physician and journalist Martin Delany and clergyman Alexander Crummell) that Africa was the true homeland for all black Africans and peoples of African descent, united by a common ancestral culture and languages that were at least equal to, if not superior to, those of white Western civilization. Interestingly, this concept of a shared cultural homeland was first attributed to the white German anthropologist Johann Herder, but unlike Herder, one-time Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois elaborated on it with a dynamic anti-colonialist and/or anti-imperialist agenda taken up in the PanAfrican Congresses of 1919, 1921, 1923 and 1945 (and then carried on, after his death, in the 1974 and 1994 gatherings) seeking to provide black African nations with political and economic independence.