Major Martin Robinson Delany
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First African-American to receive a regular army commission (1865).
1812-1885
African American intellectual Martin Robinson Delany, a journalist,
physician, army officer, politician, and judge, is best known for his
promotion before the Civil War of a national home in Africa for
African Americans.
Martin Delany was born free in Charlestown, Virginia, on May 6, 1812.
His parents traced their ancestry to West African royalty. In 1822
the family moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, to find a better
racial climate, and at the age of 19 Martin attended an African
American school in Pittsburgh. He married Kate Richards there in
1843; they had 11 children.
In 1843 Delany founded one of the earliest African American
newspapers, the Mystery, devoted particularly to the abolition of
slavery. Proud of his African ancestry, Delany advocated unrestricted
equality for African Americans, and he participated in conventions to
protest slavery. Frederick Douglass, the leading African American
abolitionist, made him coeditor of his newspaper, the North Star, in
1847. But Delany left in 1849 to study medicine at Harvard.
At the age of 40 Delany began the practice of medicine, which he
would continue on and off for the rest of his life. But with the
publication of his book The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and
Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically
Considered (1852; reprinted, 1968), he began to agitate for a
separate nation, trying to get African Americans to settle outside
the United States, possibly in Africa, but more probably in Canada or
Latin America. In 1854 he led a National Emigration Convention. For a
time he lived in Ontario. Despite his bitter opposition to the
American Colonization Society and its colony, Liberia, Delany kept
open the possibility of settling elsewhere in Africa. His 1859-1860
visit to the country of the Yorubas (now part of Nigeria) to
negotiate with local kings for settling African Americans there is
summarized in The Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party
(1861; reprinted, 1969).
When Delany returned to the United States, however, the Civil War was
in progress and prospects of freedom for African Americans were
brighter. He got President Abraham Lincoln to appoint him as a major
in the infantry in charge of recruiting all-African American Union
units.
After the war Delany went to South Carolina to participate in the
Reconstruction. In the Freedmen's Bureau and as a Republican
politician, he was influential among the state's population,
regardless of race. In 1874 he narrowly missed election as lieutenant
governor. In 1876, as the Republicans began losing control of the
state, Delany switched to the conservative Democrats. Newly elected
governor Wade Hampton rewarded him with an important judgeship in
Charleston. As a judge, Delany won the respect of people of all
races. In 1878 he helped sponsor the Liberian Exodus Joint Stock
Steamship Company, which sent one ill-fated emigration ship to
Africa. The next year his The Principia of Ethnology argued for pride
and purity of the races and for Africa's self-regeneration.
When his political base collapsed in 1879, Delany returned to
practicing medicine and later became a businessman in Boston. He died
on January 24, 1885.
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Sources
A recent biography of Delany is Victor Ullman, Martin R. Delany: The
Beginnings of Black Nationalism (1971). A contemporary account is
Frank A. Rollin, Life and Public Services of Martin R. Delany (1868;
repr. 1969). William J. Simmons, Men of Mark (1968), includes a
biographical sketch. For the significance of Delany's black
nationalist thought before the Civil War see Howard H. Bell, A Survey
of the Negro Convention Movement 1830-1861 (1970).
