MARTIN DELANY
In 1822, Martin�s mother took him and his siblings and fled West Virginia to avoid imprisonment because a Yankee book peddler had been teaching them to read. She took her children north, across the Mason-Dixon line, to the free soil of Chambersburg, Pennsylvania. A year later, Martin�s father bought his freedom and rejoined his family. Meanwhile, young Martin and the other Delany children were able to continue their education.
Nine years later, at the age of nineteen, Delany left home and traveled on foot across the Allegheny Mountains to Pittsburgh, where he remained until 1856. While there, he studied at an African Methodist Episcopal night school. He also studied medicine and , under the tutelage of a white physician, became qualified to practice a variety of medical procedures. In addition, Delany later became an officer of the Pittsburgh Anti-Slavery Society, an Underground Railroad activist, and the organizer of various literary and "moral reform" groups among the growing number of fugitive slaves then settling in Pittsburgh. In 1836, he served as delegate to a National Colored Convention, traveling both to Philadelphia and to New York in this capacity.
During this period, Delany married Catherine Richards. The couple had seven children, six boys and a girl, each named in honor of great Blacks in history. For instance, two of the boys were named Toussaint L�Ouverture and Alexander Dumas and the girl was named Ethiopia Halle. Shortly after his marriage, in 1843, Delany began publishing the first African-American newspaper west of the Alleghenies. Five years later, this excellent paper, The Mystery, went out of business for lack of financial support. Delany then joined Frederick Douglass as co-editor of the North Star. In addition to writing for Douglass�s paper, Delany was extremely active in speaking to Anti-Slavery gatherings throughout the East and Midwest. He made as many as three speeches a day, then, at great danger to himself traveled on horseback at night in order to get to the next town. On one occasion, in Ohio, he barely escaped being lynched for his black nationalist, abolitionist remarks.
After more than a year as co-editor of the North Star, Delany resigned to continue his medical studies in Pittsburgh. After being rejected by the Pennsylvania and New York medical schools, he was admitted to Harvard in 1850. Hardly a month had passed when white students petitioned against his attendance. Delany was expelled, but undaunted, he continued to study medicine under the direction of two sympathetic white physicians. In 1851, he returned to Pittsburgh and used his medical knowledge to combat a tragic cholera epidemic in that city.
In 1852, Delany published one of the first Black Nationalist treatises, The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered. It drew harsh and immediate criticism form white abolitionists, the liberal press, and even Black leaders. Frederick Douglass, for example, ignored it.
In this pamphlet, Delany said that African-Americans would never be able to succeed in American becuase white racisom was so entrenched. He criticized the abolitionists� lack of commitment to racial equality and justice, urged blacks to separate from white society, and recommended emigration to Central America, Africa, or South America. Additionally, Delany wrote of the proud history of the black race at a time when leading American and European intellectuals debated the innate inferiority of the African race.
Delany�s activities after 1852 were typically energetic and wide-ranging. In August 1854, he attracted more than 100 men and women to a National Emigration Convention in Cleveland. By 1858, at the convention�s third meeting, Delany proposed and received approval for a three-year study, the "Topographical, Geological, and Geographical Examination of the Valley of the River Niger." In the meantime, Delany moved his family to Ontario, Canada, where thousands of fugitive slaves were settling to escape the grasp of the slave-catchers encouraged by the Fugitive Slave Act. In 1859, Delany left Canada to journey to Africa and begin his emigration study.
Delany traveled to Abbeokuto (a city-state in present-day Nigeria), where he was able to finalize a treaty with the tribal king, allowing black Americans to establish a self-controlled colony in the region. He later visited businessmen and noblemen in England and Scotland, where he was invited to speak to the prestigious Royal Geographical Society and the International Statistical Congress. In the face of an American delegate�s disparaging remarks about his presence, Delany boldly stated to Prince Albert and the rest of the assembly, "I assure your Royal Highness and his Lordship that I am a man." Upon his return to North America in 1861, Delany made a defiant but unsuccessful effort to recruit Black emigrants for the proposed colony. Delany also found time to publish chapters of a new novel, Blake, The Huts of Africa, in serial form in the Anglo-African Magazine, and he wrote his Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party.
Between 1861 and 1885, Delany practiced medicine, wrote books and articles, and worked for the betterment of black Americans. He was commissioned as a major in the Union Army - the first Black man to hold such a rank. He also served in the Freedman�s Bureau, a governmental commission established to help newly freed slaves. He later fought political corruption as a trial justice. Then Delany wrote several essays about the Civil War, American policies toward Africa, and the destiny of the Black man in America.