Martin
Robinson Delany
was born
a slave in Charleston, Virginia,
on 6th May, 1812. Illegally taught to read by his mother, his father
purchased the family's freedom in 1823.
When Delany was nineteen he moved to Pittsburgh where he attended
the Bethel Church School. A doctor in the town, Andrew McDowell,
employed Delany as his assistant.
In 1843 Delany began publishing the anti-slavery
newspaper, The Mystery. Four
years later, Delany joined Frederick
Douglass on the North
Star. He also attended the Harvard
Medical School (1849-52) and afterwards
established himself as a doctor in Pittsburgh.
Delany continued in the struggle against slavery
and he travelled the country campaigning against the Fugitive
Slave Act. In 1852 Delany published the Destiny
of the Colored People in the United States
(1852) where he recommended emigration out of the United States. In
1859 he led an exploration party to West Africa to investigate the
Niger Delta as a location for settlement.
During the Civil War Delany recruited
soldiers for the Union Army. In 1865
he obtained the rank of major, therefore becoming the first Afro-American
to receive a regular army commission. After the war he worked for
the Freemen's Bureau.
In 1873 Delany became a customs inspector in
Charleston and was an active supporter of the Liberian
Exodus Joint Stock Exchange Company, an organization which arranged
the transport of emigrants to Liberia.
Martin Robinson Delany
died in Wilberforce, Ohio, on 24th January, 1885.
(1)
Martin Robinson Delany, letter to William
Lloyd Garrison (1852)
I
should be willing to remain in this country, fighting and struggling
on, the good fight of faith. But I must admit, that I have not hopes
in this country - no confidence in the American people - with a few
excellent exceptions.
(2) Martin Robinson Delany,
Destiny of the Colored People in the United States (1852)
They
earnestly contended, and doubtless honestly meaning what they said,
that they (the whites) had
been our oppressors and injurers, they had obstructed our progress
to the high positions of civilizations, and now, it was their bounden
duty to make full amends for the injuries thus inflicted on an unoffending
people.
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