African American journalist, physician, the first African American field officer in the U S Army, abolitionist and the first proponent of American black nationalism was born a free black man in Charles Town, West Virginia (then part of Virginia) to Pati and Samuel Delany on May 6, 1812.
Early Life:
Martin Delany's maternal grandfather was a West African prince. His mother, Pati, was a free seamstress whose parents were African and of royal heritage. His father Samuel though was an enslaved carpenter.
When attempts were made to enslave him and a sibling, when they were very young, Pati, their mother, carried them 20 miles to the Winchester courthouse to preserve their freedom.
Whilst growing up, Delany and his siblings learned to read and write using The New York Primer and Spelling Book, a peddler had given them . The knowledge thus gained he used to write passes to enslaved blacks though it was breaking a Virginia law against teaching enslaved blacks to attain literacy.
Upon their use of the book being discovered in September 1822, fearing reprisals, Pati took her children to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania for a better climate to ensure their continued freedom. Their father having managed to buy his freedom a year later rejoined them.
In Chambersburg, the young Delany continued learning but occasionally left school to work when his family could not continue supporting his education. From 1823 to 1831 he lived in the tightly knit black community of Kernstown, outside Chambersburg, going to school and worshipping at the black Methodist Episcopal Church.
On 29th July 1831, at the age of 19, he set out on foot traveling 160 miles west to the growing city of Pittsburg. There to earn his living he became a barber and a laborer. By September he had earned enough to give himself an up-lift in life. He therefore enrolled as a student of Rev. Lewis Woodson in the cellar of Bethel African Methodist Church on Wylie Street attended by African Americans. In 1832 Delany studied classics, Latin and Greek at Jefferson College.
During an outbreak of cholera in 1833 he got apprenticed to Dr. Andrew N. McDowell. There he learnt fire cupping and leeching which in 1836 he became fully established in when he set up his own practice in Pittsburgh. He however continued studying medicine under various abolitionist doctors.
He then formed the Young Men's Literary and Moral Reform Society of Pittsburgh, as the Temperance Movement was taking hold particularly against widespread whiskey consumption. During this period he became the secretary to the executive committee of the Philanthropic Society, a "cover" organization rescuing, protecting and transporting fugitive slaves through Pittsburgh.
When in 1838 a State Supreme Court Chief Justice C. J. Gibson ruled that blacks cannot vote in Pennsylvania, in a suit brought by William Fogg, Delany's disillusionment with white dominated American culture and law began. So in 1839 he traveled with "free papers" down the Mississippi River to various states such as New Orleans the still independent Texas, the Choctaw Indian Nation near Fort Towson in Arkansas, as well as Mississippi.
On the 15th of March 1843 Delany met and married Catherine A. Richards, the black Irish daughter of an affluent meat merchant, and began their large family of eleven births, from which seven survived to adulthood.
Newspaper Work:
On September 1843 Delany founded and began publishing one of the earliest African American newspapers The Mystery, in Pittsburgh. He began writing on public issues. Though the paper was devoted particularly to the abolition of slavery, it was advocating for unrestricted equality for African Americans. His writings were often reprinted elsewhere such as in abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator. He got into controversy in 1846. He was sued for libel by a black man he had accused in The Mystery of being a slave catcher. Delany was convicted and fined an astronomical $650 paid by his white supporters in the newspaper business.
While the leading African American abolitionist Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were in Pittsburgh on the 14th 1847 on a regional anti-slavery tour, they met with Martin Delany and together they conceived the newspaper that became the North Star for which Douglass made him coeditor. Delany traveled to lecture, report, and obtain subscriptions throughout America. He was frequently confronted by mobs opposing his views.
His coverage in July 28 1848 in the North Star of U.S District Court Justice John McLean's instructing the jury in the Crosswait trial to consider it as a punishable offense for a citizen to prevent white persons from trying to "repossess" any alleged runaway slave in Ohio influenced abolitionist Salmon Chase to lead a drive that removed McLean as a candidate of the Free Soil Party for the Presidency a move in which Delany saw the seeds of the Fugitive Slave Law passed two years later.
Political Activism:
Delany also became more actively involved in politics. In 1835 he attended his first Negro Convention. He participated in several more conventions one of which was to protest slavery. On the 6th September 1848 whilst attending the Colored Convention in Cleveland he attacked the menial occupations available to free black women.
In August 1854 Delany led 145 participants in the 4 day National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio which approved a resolution that was demanding every political right, privilege and position open to whites for blacks. This body, which included a significant number of women 29 voting for the resolution, was considered as the foundation stone for black nationalism in American history.
Medical and Community Services:
From June 1849-November 1850, Delany began to study more seriously the basics of medicine and then started applying to Universities. He tried several before he was accepted along with two black Bostonians sponsored by the American Colonization Society to Harvard University, after presenting letters of recommendation from seventeen physicians from the Pittsburgh area. The month after his arrival, however, a group of white students wrote protesting against their admission. Within three weeks, Delany and the others had been dismissed, despite dissenting opinions from several other students, as well as a faculty.
Furious, Delany left now firmly convinced that reasoned argument and merit cannot persuade the dominant white culture to allow deserving persons of color to rise to leadership positions in the society.
Delany at the age of 40 began the practice of medicine, which he would continue on and off for the rest of his life. During the cholera plague, in summer 1854, he rendered so much valued servicethat he got public notice through a series of resolutions proposed, adopted and presented to him in appreciation of his skill as a physician and of his unselfish and noble sacrifice to the cause of suffering humanity. When nearly every white doctor in Pittsburgh abandoned the city on its outbreak, he remained, organizing a corps of Negro nurses who cared for helpless cholera victims, many of whom under his skillful treatment were restored to health.
Before practicing as a physician, in the falls of 1852-and 1853 Delany had accepted the principalship of a colored school in Pittsburgh. He was also engaging in Pittsburgh in community organizing and assisting in the Underground Railroad to Chatham, West Ontario.
Expedition to Africa:
As he had for long been 'harboring ambitions to visit Africa, which he considered his spiritual home', he conceived a plan of embarking on an Expedition to the Eastern Coast of Africa in search of a "Black Israel."
He however kept the possibility of settling elsewhere in Africa open. On 30th September 1858 he was named Commissioner to explore in Africa, in order to investigate the possibility of establishing a new black nation there, by the Central Board of the third emigration convention held in Chatham. In May 1859 he sailed from New York harbor on the 'Mendi'. He arrived on the shores of Liberia at Cape Palmas on the 10th of July.
Two days later he arrived in Monrovia. In mid August on returning to Cape Palmas he explored the Cavalla River. In mid September he sailed to Lagos where he spent the next five weeks. He traveled along the Ogun River, inland into Yorubaland traveling in the region for nine months. Then on the 27th of December 1859 he signed an agreement with eight chiefs headed by Ogubonna of Balagun, permitting the settling of African Americans on "unused land" in the region in return for using their skills for the community's good. The chiefs agreed that the settlers shall bring with them, in exchange for the privileges accorded, intelligence, education, a knowledge of the Arts and Sciences, Agriculture, and other Mechanical and Industrial Occupations which they shall put into immediate operation by improving lands and in other useful vocations.
In April 1860 Delany explored further inland following the old trade route of the Oyo Empire and on the 10th set sail from Lagos to England where he was honored by the International Statistical Congress though an infuriated American delegation walked out.
When Delany returned to the United States at the end of 1860, he began planning the trip. He started by gathering a group of potential settlers and seeking funding. In the summer of 1861 the settlement of Abeokuta expedition, was ready with passengers and funding. Then it began to falter as Delany chose to stay and fight for the emancipation of the enslaved. Finally the plans fell apart. The treaty was later dissolved due to the outbreak of war in the region, opposition from white missionaries, and the advent of the American Civil War.
Delany, Lincoln, the Emancipation and Empowerment of Blacks:
In 1863 after Lincoln's call for a military draft, Delany began recruiting black men for the Union Army, from Massachusetts', for Rhode Island, for Connecticut, in Cleveland and Chicago, he raised several thousands of enlistees, many of whom joined the newly formed United States Colored Troops. On the 12/15th December 1863 he wrote to the Secretary of War, Edwin M. Stanton, requesting that he made efforts "to command all of the effective black men as Agents of the United States," which was ignored.
In early 1865 Delany in an audience with Lincoln 'proposed a corps of black men led by black officers' who when marched into the south would serve to win over Southern blacks. Although a similar appeal by Douglass had already been rejected, Lincoln was impressed by Delany whom he described as "a most extraordinary and intelligent man." A few weeks later, Delany was commissioned as a major, becoming the first black line field officer in the U.S. Army. After the war, he served under General Rufus Saxton in the 52nd U.S. Colored Troops. He was later transferred to the Freedman's Bureau, serving as subassistant commissioner to Hilton Head on the South Seas Islands where he shocked white officers with his oratory, and strong call for the right of freed blacks to own land. He was mustered out of the Freedman's Bureau and shortly afterward resigned.
Later life, After the War and Public Service:
Following the war, Delany continued to be politically active. As a Republican politician, he was influential among the state's population, in spite of his race. From December 1865 to January 1866 he responded to plans by blacks on South Sea Island to confiscate planters' land by appealing to them to improve their business and negotiating skills to attract better prices from Northern agents for cotton they would grow under contract on land owned by Southern planters. He thus helped black cotton farmers improve their lot.
On August 1866 Delany was cleared of stealing charges when investigation showed he was only trying to obtain higher prices for black farmers from Northern agents for their cotton.
Delany also tried to be fair and even-handed in his responses to public issues. He argued against blacks, when he saw fit as when in August 1867 he opposed in a private letter reprinted in The New York Tribune, the proposed U.S. vice Presidential candidacy on an abolitionist ticket with Wendell Phillips of a young black man, J.J. Wright, arguing that he needed more experience and education. He opposed the candidacy of a black man for mayor of Charleston,
Delany unsuccessfully sought various posts such as those of Minister Resident and Consul General in Liberia and lieutenant governor of South Carolina.
He was appointed as a Trial Justice in Charleston. While sitting there in 1875 trumped up charges of "defrauding a church" were brought against him. Despite strong support attesting to his character, he was convicted and forced to resign. He served a one year term in jail. On September 1876 he was pardoned by the Republican governor.
However, Governor Chamberlain refused to give him back his job. Delany as a result switched to the conservative Democrats supporting its candidate, Wade Hampton, who Delany believed was a moderate who advocated education for all voters for governor. Hampton was elected partly due to black swing votes encouraged by Delany, and placed on a special commission to decide the U.S. Presidential election, which left candidate Rutherford B. Hayes with enough popular votes, but short of the needed electoral votes. In exchange for pulling U.S. troops out of the south as sought by Hampton and other southerners on the commission, Hampton and the others in the southern bloc on the Commission backed Hayes as the winner.
In 1877 Governor Hampton reappointed Delany as Trial Justice. As a judge, Delany won the respect of people of all races.
In the later 1870s, with the gains of the Reconstruction period beginning to be methodically and permanently rolled back by more conservative and violent elements of the state's political machinery, and as the Republicans began losing control of the state to Democrats a more extremely racist group took control of government from the moderates and removed Delany from his reappointed post as trial justice.
In reaction to whites' regaining power in the summer of 1877 Charleston based blacks came together and started planning emigration to Africa again this time to sail to Liberia. In 1877, they formed the 'Liberia Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company'. Delany was chairman of its finance committee. A year later, they purchased a ship - the Azor - for the voyage. Delany as president of the board organized the voyage and helped to sponsor the enterprise which sent one ill-fated emigration ship to Africa.
Published Works:
On September 1851 Delany was attending a convention in Toronto, Canada when he got so inspired by impressions of Canada that he began to write.
His landmark book, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered published in 1852 argued that blacks had no future in the United States and therefore advocated the need for them to leave and start anew with founding a new nation elsewhere in Central and South America or elsewhere. This alienated virtually all abolitionist leaders who resented his criticism of those who failed to hire able colored men in their businesses and for not giving leadership positions to blacks in their organizations.
He advanced his emigrationist argument in his manifesto "Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent" which appealed especially to educated and commercially successful Northern freed blacks.
Delany in 1855 wrote an introduction to William Nesbit's "Four Months In Liberia" citing his "graphic portrayal of the infamy of that most pernicious and impudent of all schemes for the perpetuity of the degradation of our race, the American Colonization Society, because it was organized in the South by slaveholders, propagated by those who support it, still continues to be carried on under the garb of philanthropic aid and Christianity, through the medium of the lowest deception and hypocrisy.
In 1859 and 1862, Delany published parts of Blake: Or The Huts of America, a novel in response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin which was much earlier on March 1853 published, causing a sensation for its clear depiction of the cruelty of southern slavers, though it misrepresented enslaved blacks by the passive persona of "Uncle Tom." Delany, using his first hand experience traveling in the South, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, observing slave life, began writing about these secret travels by an insurrectionist through slave communities which modern scholars have concluded is among the most accurate portrayals of antebellum black culture. The first half of Part One was serialized in The Anglo-African Magazine,from January to July 1859. The rest of Part One was serialized in the Weekly Anglo African Magazine from 26th November 1861-to 24th May 1862.
Blake tells the story of a fugitive slave who travels across the South and in Cuba organizing insurrection. In Virginia's Dismal Swamp, he was glad to hear the names of Nat Turner, Denmark Veezie, and other leaders of slave revolts being mentioned. and thought these were "the kind of fighting men they then needed among the blacks," Blake spreads the news of their past heroic deeds throughout the slave community.
Blake reworked several "plantation songs" advocating black resistance and independence as well as black activism and rebellion. It was the first novel by a black man to be published in the United States though it was not published in complete book form until 1970.
In 1878, his The Principia of Ethnology which argued for pride and purity of the races and for Africa's self-regeneration was published. Delany also published "The Origin of Races and Color" in Charleston, S.C. in response to Charles Darwin, expounding his views on the origins of racial color using a combination of scientific, archaeological and Biblical sources.
Delany's son, Charles Lenox got drowned in 1878 in the Savannah River.
When his political base collapsed in 1879, Delany resumed practicing medicine as well as later became a businessman in Boston.
In May 1880 realizing that he had to do more to meet the needs of his family more, especially paying college tuition fees for two of his children Delany withdrew from the "Azor" settlement voyage to Africa board. Then in December he returned home with his family in Xenia, Ohio. On the 24th of January 1885 Martin R. Delany died of tuberculosis.
Final Assessment:
Delany has shown himself as an extraordinarily gifted man, a fiercely independent thinker, a widely traveled man as well as a wide-ranging and insightful writer, who has the drive and motivation to match words with action as far as he could. Despite all this magnificent life as described him, he remains relatively unknown. He emerged as a symbol of black separatism during the Black Power and Black Arts movements of the 1960s and 1970s, and as a result he has been portrayed as the opposite of more moderate figures, like Douglass to King thanks to the Carter G. Woodson-inspired New Negro history movement. Attention is now being drawn to the extraordinary complexity of his career. The complexity and complications have been extended to his character as he seems difficult to fix to any group or ideology as writes Paul Gilroy. The destruction of his papers in a fire at Wilberforce University in Ohio on April 14, 1865, has not helped this situation as it has left scholars uncertain as to which of his writings they haven't read, and how comprehensive is their understanding of his mind. Martin Delany has been listed among the 100 Greatest African Americans.
Further Reading
Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-19-507832-2. p. 236.
Gilroy, Paul. "The Black Atlantic". Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
Glasco, Laurence Admiral, The WPA history of the Negro in Pittsburgh, Univ of Pittsburgh Press, 2004, ISBN 0822942321
Adeleke, Tunde. Without Regard to Race: The Other Martin Robison Delany. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003.
Delany, Martin Robison. Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader. Edited by Robert S. Levine. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.
Sterling, Dorothy. The Making of an Afro-American: Martin Robison Delany, 1812-1885. New York: Da Capo Press, 1996
Levine, Robert S. Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997.
Mr. Lincoln and Freedom: Martin Delany
West Virginia University library
Martin R. Delany in Encyclopedia Virginia
Arthur Edgar E. Smith
Senior Lecturer,
Department of Language Studies
Fourah Bay College,
University of Sierra Leone
