Delany, Martin Robinson (1812-1885)

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Martin Robinson Delany (1812-1885)

African american nationalist

Early Years. Born 6 May 1812 in Charles Town, Virginia, later the capital of West Virginia, Martin Robinson Delany was a third-generation American. All of his grandparents had been imported from Africa as slaves; his father’s father was a Mandingo prince and his mother’s father was the chieftain of a Golah village. Delany’s father remained enslaved but his mother was free, which meant that Delany was born free. Nevertheless, after a Northern traveler taught Delany and his siblings to read, white harassment induced his mother to move the family to Chambers-burg, Pennsylvania, where they were soon joined by Delany’s father after he was able to purchase his freedom.

Reform Leader. At the age of nineteen Delany moved to Pittsburgh to study divinity and later medicine. He made the city his home for the next quarter of a century, participating in literary and temperance societies as well as the antislavery movement and the call for equal rights for blacks in the North. After briefly publishing his own newspaper, The Mystery, Delany joined the staff of Frederick Douglass’s newspaper, North Star, in 1848. He traveled widely through the Midwest to promote the newspaper, deliver lectures, and report on racial conditions. In November 1850 he enrolled in Harvard Medical School, but because of protest by his fellow students the faculty dismissed him after one term. He returned to Pittsburgh and became active in resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act, but his own experiences and the course of the nation left him doubtful that the United States would ever recognize African Americans as equal citizens.

Emigration. With the publication of The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered (1852), Delany became one of the leading proponents of African American emigration from the United States. “We are a nation within a nation,” Delany declared. “We must go from our oppressors.” After organizing a National Emigration Convention that met throughout the 1850s, he explored potential homelands in Central America and Africa. Between voyages he joined the approximately five thousand blacks who left the United States for Canada after passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. He kept in touch with the antislavery movement in the United States, however, and helped John Brown’s efforts to recruit blacks in Canada for a projected invasion of the South. Delany also advocated emigration in two important publications: Blake; or the Huts of America (1859), a novel about a slave rebellion, and Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1861).

Army Officer. The African American debate over emigration, which assumed a new urgency while the federal government disavowed interference with slavery and refused to enlist black volunteers, quickly subsided after the issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. Delany became a recruiter for the Fifty-fourth Massachusetts Regiment, which had among its ranks his son Toussaint. (All of his children were named for heroic figures of African descent.) Delany continued his recruiting work for several other regiments; commissioned as a major, the highest-ranking African American in the U.S. Army, he ended the war recruiting former slaves in South Carolina. He remained in the state to serve in the Freedmen’s Bureau, helping to develop the educational, judicial, and contractual framework for the transition from slavery to free labor.

Reconstruction. Delany returned to civilian life in the summer of 1868, his eligibility for political office in Radical Reconstruction announced by the admiring Life and Services of Martin R. Delany (1868), written by woman journalist Frances Rollins Whipper under the pseudonym Frank A. Rollin. After serving on the Republican State Executive Committee, however, Delany entered into a coalition with Democrats seeking to “redeem” the state. In 1874 he ran for lieutenant governor on the conservative ticket of the Honest Government League, and two years later he supported the victorious gubernatorial candidacy of former Confederate general Wade Hampton. During the campaign Delany was attacked by a mob of African Americans outraged by his political stance. He soon began to focus again on plans for expatriation, aiding a company that transported emigrants to Liberia. His Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color (1879) drew on biblical interpretation and anthropology to detail the cultural achievements of African peoples and present a final expression of the racial pride that prompted Frederick Douglass to remark, “I thank God for making me a man, but Delany thanks him for making him a black man.” Delany died on 24 January 1885.