Martin Robinson Delany

Martin Robinson Delany , 1812-85, American black leader, b. Charles Town, Va. (now in West Virginia). The son of free blacks, he attended a black school in Pittsburgh and studied medicine at Harvard. He emphasized the practical aspects of black problems. Taking up the cause of emigration (the return of American blacks to Africa), he was largely responsible for the first National Emigration Convention in 1854 and headed an expedition to the Niger valley. In the Civil War he was an army physician. Later he was in the Freedmen's Bureau, served as a trial judge in Charleston, S.C., and lost (1874) the election for lieutenant governor of South Carolina; he was a stern enemy of corruption. His ideas of race appeared in Principles of Ethnology (1879).

Bibliography: See biographies by F. A. Rollin (1868, repr. 1969), D. Sterling (1971), and V. Ullman (1971).

Delany, Martin R[obinson] (1812–85), free‐born black of the present West Virginia, who published a newspaper in Pittsburgh, assisted Frederick Douglass with his journal, attended Harvard Medical School for a year before issuing The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), which argues for emigration of blacks to a state of their own creation. His novel Blake: or The Huts of America, partly serialized (1859) and fully (1861–62), was first issued as a book in 1870. It deals with a West Indian kidnapped into U.S. slavery who escapes to plot an insurrection in his homeland. Delany was the first black major in the U.S. army during the Civil War. Principia of Ethnology (1878) is a defense of blacks' intelligence and achievements.