MARTIN ROBISON DELANY
May 6, 1812, Charles Town, Virginia, January 24, 1885, Ohio,
African American abolitionist, physician, and editor of THE MYSTERY, AND THE NORTH STAR in the pre-Civil War period; his espousal of black nationalism and racial pride anticipated expressions of such views a century later.
Martin In search of quality education for their children, the Delanys moved to Pennsylvania when Martin was a child. At 19, while studying nights at an African American church, he worked days in Pittsburgh. Embarking on a course of militant opposition to slavery, he became involved in several racial improvement groups. Under the tutelage of two sympathetic physicians, he achieved competence as a doctor’s assistant as well as in dental care, working in this capacity in the South and Southwest (1839).
Returning to Pittsburgh, Delany started a weekly newspaper, The Mystery, which publicized grievances of blacks in the United States and also championed women’s rights. The paper won an excellent reputation, and its articles were often reprinted in the white press. From 1846 to 1849 he worked in partnership with the abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, where they published another weekly, The North Star. After three years Delany decided to pursue formal medical studies; he was one of the first blacks to be admitted to Harvard Medical School during his first year he had to leave due to racial tensions and laws. He eventually went back and became a leading Pittsburgh physician.
In the 1850s Delany developed an overriding interest in foreign colonization opportunities for African Americans, and in 1859–60 he led an exploration party to West Africa to investigate the Niger Delta as a location for settlement. In protest against oppressive conditions in the United States, Delany moved in 1856 to Canada, where he continued his medical practice. At the beginning of the Civil War (1861–65) he returned to the United States and helped recruit troops for the famous 54th Massachusetts Volunteers, for which he served as a surgeon. In February 1865, Delany was made a major (the first black man to receive a regular army commission) and was assigned to Hilton Head Island, South Carolina, to recruit and organize former slaves for the North. When peace came in April he became an official in the Freedmen’s Bureau, serving for the next two years.
Delany resumed emigration initiatives when the black vote was suppressed, serving as chairman of the finance committee for the Liberia Exodus Joint Stock Steamship Company. In 1879 he published The Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, with an Archeological Compendium and Egyptian Civilization, from Years of Careful Examination and Enquiry, which detailed the cultural achievements of the African people as touchstones of racial pride. But in 1880 he returned to Ohio, where his wife had been working as a seamstress, to practice medicine and help earn tuition for his children attending Wilberforce College
Martin Delany died of tuberculosis on January 24, 1885, in Wilberforce, Ohio. He has been described as a Renaissance man: publisher, editor, author, doctor, orator, judge, U.S. army major, and the first African American to visit Africa as an explorer and entrepreneur. few months after his death, all of his papers, which could have further clarified his position on issues for subsequent scholars, burned in a fire at Wilberforce University in Ohio.