MARTIN DELANY

Document signed by MARTIN DELANY, Trial Justice in Charleston, South Carolina, 1877. Measures 8 3/4 x 7 inches. African American intellectual Martin Robinson Delany (1812-1885), 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. President Abraham Lincoln appointed 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.