Martin Delany
Martin Robison Delany was an American abolitionist, journalist, physician, military officer, and writer. Delany was an early and influential proponent of black nationalism. Delany is credited with the Pan-African slogan of "Africa for Africans." Born as a free person of color in Charles Town, Virginia, and raised in Chambersburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Delany trained as a physician's assistant. During the cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854 in Pittsburgh, Delany treated patients, even though many doctors and residents fled the city out of fear of contamination. In this period, people did not know how the disease was transmitted.
In 1839, Delany traveled in the South to observe slavery firsthand. Beginning in 1847, he worked alongside Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York to publish the North Star. In 1850, Delany was one of the first three black men admitted to Harvard Medical School, but all were dismissed after a few weeks because of widespread protests by white students. These experiences convinced Delany that black people had no future in the United States, leading him instead to the possibility of settling Black Americans in Africa. Although he visited Liberia, a United States colony founded by the American Colonization Society, and lived in Canada for several years, he returned to the United States when the American Civil War began. When the United States Colored Troops were created in 1863, he recruited for them. Commissioned as a major in February 1865, Delany became the first African American field grade officer in the United States Army.
After the Civil War, he settled in South Carolina, where he worked for the Freedmen's Bureau and became politically active, including in the Colored Conventions Movement. Delany ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor as an Independent Republican. He was appointed as a trial judge, but he was removed following a scandal. Delany later switched his party affiliation. He worked for the campaign of Democrat Wade Hampton III, who won the 1876 election for governor in a season marked by violent suppression of black Republican voters by Red Shirts
Early life and education
Delany was born free in Charles Town, Virginia to Pati and Samuel Delany. Although his father was enslaved, his mother was a free woman. Under Virginia's slave laws, children were considered born into the social status of their mothers. All of Delany's grandparents had been born in Africa. His paternal grandparents were of Mandinka ethnicity, taken captive during warfare and brought as slaves to the Virginia colony. Family oral history said that the grandfather was a chieftain, who had escaped to Canada for a period, and died resisting slavery's abuses.His mother Pati's parents were born in the Niger Valley, West Africa, and were of Mandinka ethnicity. Her father was said to have been a prince named Yafaye, captured with his betrothed Fenda and brought to America as slaves. After some time, their enslaver released them from bondage in Virginia, perhaps based on their noble birth. Yafaye returned to Africa. Graci stayed in the colony with their only daughter Pati. When Delany was just a few years old, attempts were made to enslave him and a sibling. Their mother Pati carried her two youngest children 20 miles to the courthouse in Winchester to argue successfully for her family's freedom, based on her own free birth.
As he grew up, Delany and his siblings learned to read and write using The New York Primer and Spelling Book, given to them by a peddler. Virginia prohibited the education of Black people. When the book was discovered in September 1822, Pati moved with her children to nearby Chambersburg in the free state of Pennsylvania to ensure their continued freedom. They had to leave their father Samuel, but a year later he was allowed to buy his freedom and he rejoined his family in Chambersburg.
In Chambersburg, young Martin continued learning. Occasionally, he left school to work when his family could not afford for him to study. In Pennsylvania, Black children were only educated through the elementary grades, so Delany educated himself by reading. In 1831, at the age of 19, he journeyed west to the growing city of Pittsburgh, where he attended the Cellar School of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He apprenticed with a white physician.
Delany and three other young black men were later accepted into Harvard Medical School, but they were forced to leave after white students protested. The whites reportedly petitioned the school to exclude applicants of color.
Marriage and family
While living in Pittsburgh, in 1843, Delany met and married Catherine A. Richards. She was the daughter of a successful food provisioner, said to be one of the wealthiest families in the city. The couple had eleven children, seven of whom survived into adulthood. The parents stressed education, and some of their children graduated from college.Pittsburgh
Delany became involved with Trinity A.M.E. Church on Wylie Avenue, which had classes for adults. The church was part of the first independent black denomination in the United States, which was founded earlier in the 19th century in Philadelphia. Shortly after, he learned classics, Latin and Greek with Molliston M. Clark, who studied at Jefferson College. During the national cholera epidemic in 1832, Delany became apprenticed to Dr. Andrew N. McDowell, where he learned contemporary techniques of fire cupping and leeching, then considered the primary techniques to treat most diseases. He continued to study medicine under the mentorship of Dr. McDowell and other abolitionist doctors, such as Dr. F. Julius LeMoyne and Dr. Joseph P. Gazzam of Pittsburgh.Delany became more active in political matters. In 1835, he attended his first National Negro Convention, held annually in Philadelphia since 1831. He was inspired to conceive a plan to set up a 'Black Israel' on the east coast of Africa.
In Pittsburgh, Delany played a central role in numerous civic and anti-slavery groups in the late 1830s and early 1840s. He engaged in temperance, literary, and moral reform societies that focused on working toward the advancement of African Americans. Delany also aided in constructing resistance to anti-black violence and discrimination in the city.
By 1843, Delany began publishing public works. Doing so by releasing, The Mystery, a Black-controlled newspaper. His articles and other writings were often reprinted in other venues, such as in abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator. A eulogy which Delany delivered for Rev. Fayette Davis in 1847 was widely redistributed. His activities brought controversy in 1846, when he was sued for libel by "Fiddler" Johnson, a Black man he accused in The Mystery of being a slave catcher. Delany was convicted and fined $650 — a huge amount at the time. His white supporters in the newspaper business paid the fine for him.
While Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison were in Pittsburgh in 1847 on an anti-slavery tour, they met with Delany. In the same year, after a falling-out of sorts occurred between Douglass and The Liberator editor Garrison over the use of violence in the abolition cause and the concept of a strictly African-American-run newspaper, Delany with Douglass conceived of the newspaper developed as the North Star: to give voice to the stories of African Americans from their own accounts. They started publication later that year in Rochester, New York, where Douglass was based. Douglass handled the editing, printing, and publishing, while Delany traveled to lecture, report, and obtain subscriptions.
In July 1848, Delany reported in the North Star that U.S. District Court Justice John McLean had instructed the jury in the Crosswait trial to consider it a punishable offense for a citizen to thwart those trying to "repossess" an alleged runaway slave. His coverage influenced the abolitionist Salmon P. Chase to lead a successful drive to remove McLean as a candidate of the Free Soil Party for the Presidency later that summer.
Medicine and nationalism
While living in Pittsburgh, Delany studied medicine under doctors. He founded his own practice in cupping and leeching. In 1849, he began to study more seriously to prepare to apply to medical school. In 1850, he was accepted into Harvard Medical School after presenting letters of support from seventeen physicians, although other schools had rejected his applications. Delany was one of the first three black men to be admitted there. However, the month after his arrival, a group of white students wrote to the faculty, complaining that "the admission of blacks to the medical lectures highly detrimental to the interests, and welfare of the Institution of which we are members". They cited that they had "no objection to the education and elevation of blacks but do decidedly remonstrate against their presence in College with us."Within three weeks, Delany and his two fellow black students, Daniel Laing, Jr. and Isaac H. Snowden, were dismissed, despite many students and staff at the medical school supporting their being students. Furious, Delany returned to Pittsburgh. He became convinced that the white ruling class would not allow Black people to become leaders in society, and his opinions became more extreme. His book, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, argued that black people had no future in the United States. He suggested they should leave and found a new nation elsewhere, perhaps in the West Indies or South America. More moderate abolitionists were alienated by his position. Some resented his criticizing men who failed to hire colored men in their own businesses. Martin Delany was also actively involved in the Prince Hall Freemasonry movement, which aligned with his efforts to promote civil rights and social progress for African Americans during the 19th century.
Delany worked for a brief period as principal of a colored school before going into practice as a physician. During a severe cholera outbreak in 1854, most doctors abandoned the city, as did many residents who could leave, since no one knew what caused the disease or how to control an epidemic. With a small group of nurses, Delany remained and cared for many of the ill.
Delany is rarely acknowledged in the historiography of African-American education. He is generally not included among African-American educators, perhaps because he neither featured prominently in the establishment of schools nor philosophized at length on Black education.