When was martin delany born

Delany tours Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas, observing slave life. Delany founds and edits the Mystery , a black newspaper. Delany co-edits the North Star with Frederick Douglass. Protests from white students force Delany's withdrawal after a only a few weeks. It is viewed as a decisive break with mainstream abolitionism. Delany moves to Canada with his wife, Catherine, and their children. Delany is commissioned a major and becomes the U.

Army's first black field officer. Delany runs as an independent Republican for South Carolina lieutenant governor but loses the election to Richard Howell Gleaves. January 24, Martin R. Delany dies in Ohio. Adeleke, Tunde. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, Delany, Martin Robison. Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader. Edited by Robert S. They went on to have 11 children. Delany resumed his interest in medicine but also founded The Mystery , the first African American newspaper published west of the Allegheny Mountains.

His articles about various aspects of the anti-slavery movement were picked up by other papers and his renown began to spread, but a libel suit against him, filed and won by Fiddler Johnson, forced him to sell the paper. Frederick Douglass quickly hired Delany to write for his paper, The North Star , in , but they didn't always agree on the right course for the abolitionist movement, and the collaboration ended after five years.

In , Delany was one of the three first Black men to enroll in Harvard Medical College, but white protest forced him to leave after the first term. This prompted a trip to Nigeria in the mids to negotiate land for African-American emigrants, as well as exploring Central America and Canada as options.

Delany wrote about what he found there as well as a novel, Blake: Or the Huts of America. The Emancipation Proclamation gave Delany hope that emigration might not be necessary, and he became active in promoting the use of African Americans in the Union Army, recruiting one of his own sons, Toussaint L'Ouverture Delany, to the Massachusetts 54th Regiment.

In , he even reportedly met with President Abraham Lincoln to discuss the possibility of African American officers leading African American troops. After the war, Delany tried to enter politics. A quasi-biography, written pseudonymously by a female journalist under the name Frank A. Rollin— Life and Services of Martin R. Delany —was a stepping stone to serving on the Republican State Executive Committee and running for lieutenant governor of South Carolina.

Although he supported African-American business and advancement, he would not endorse certain candidates if he did not think they were fit to serve. But his support did help elect Wade Hampton governor of South Carolina, and he was appointed trial judge. 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 he published 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 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. Douglass' most famous quote about him underscores Delany's legacy as a spokesman for Black nationalism: "I thank God for making me a man, but Delany thanks Him for making him a Black man.

In effect, this label is the projection of whiteness seeking to categorize the thinking of a free, proud, and determined African. Delany was the most glorious of our thinkers because he took into consideration what was wrong with whites and blacks and demonstrated a remedy.

Martin Delany was a transformatist. This is the name that best describes the philosophy that he articulated. Black Nationalism is usually defined as a philosophy that advocates a commitment to ethnic and cultural identity, self-definition, African unity, self-determination, an intense ethical sense of justice and a fervent desire for independence. Because Delany supported these ideas some writers have manipulated the term Black Nationalist to attach it to him.

One cannot dismiss the intellectual content of the genius who emerged in the middle of the nineteenth century to wrest from whites the control of African definitions, determination, philosophies, and attitudes.

In effect, it is much better, and in fact, clearer to see Delany as he saw himself in his writings, essays and the novel Blake as a transformatist. A person who subscribes to the transformatist ideal refuses to accept servility, subservience, and inferiority, but is one who contends that self-identity and the acceptance of self-determination as a motivator for human maturity can bring about profound realization that one is as human as the next person.

Thus, Delany was perhaps the first founder of a line of thinking or school of thought that would reverberate for generations among black thinkers. I have referred to this school of thought as transformative identity and Martin Delany as the first transformatist. He was a campaigner for transforming identity and creating within the oppressed, that happened to be largely black, a response based on self-determination.

Before Alexander Crummell championed the intellectual capacity of blacks and created the Negro Academy, there was Delany. The generation represented by Delany was one that created a formidable legacy of men and women who defied the odds measured out by racism and discrimination.

I like to think that Delany had his intellectual descendants in those who advanced transformatist ideas. A central idea to Garveyism was that African people in every part of the world were one people and they would never advance if they did not put aside their cultural and ethnic differences and contrast. Malcolm X believed that African Americans must develop their own society and ethical values, including the self-help, community-based enterprises, and seek to achieve internal cooperation and unity.

Fanon produced his greatest works, A Dying Colonialism , and perhaps the most important work on decolonization yet written, The Wretched of the Earth , on the idea of self-determination. In Wretched, Fanon lucidly analyzes the role of class, race, national culture, and violence in the struggle for national liberation.

Fanon became the leading anti-colonial thinker of the twentieth century. Karenga, the founder of Kwanzaa, articulated the view that a cultural crisis was at the heart of despair in the African American community and that a restorative culture or a reconstructed culture would have to be created.

Finally, the character of Martin Delany is shown in his position on the right of a person to defend his home and his family. Delany demonstrated in a speech given in response to the Fugitive Slave Law of that his transformatist ideas would govern his political and physical actions.

Delany exhibits his excellent command of the English language, his knowledge of American history, and his political courage in his oration. Here is what he said when the mayor of Pittsburgh asked him to speak about the Fugitive Slave Law. And one of those ideas is that a man may defend his castle with his life, even to the taking of life. Sir, my house is my castle and in it dwell none but my wife and my children free as the angels in heaven and with a liberty as sacred as the pillars of God.

If any man shall enter that house in search of a slave, be he constable, sheriff or magistrate, or let it be he who sanctioned this act into law, President Millard Fillmore , with his cabinet as his body guard, the declaration of independence dangling above his head as his banner, and the Constitution of his country on his breast as his shield, if he shall enter the threshold of my house and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet may the grave refuse my body a resting place and righteous heaven my spirit a home.

No he cannot enter that house and we both live. I think this speech adequately encapsulates the spirit, dignity, and determination of Delany and portrays the force of his personality and logic of his mind that make him the quintessential transformatist.

I offer homage to him for being such a pioneer in the area of liberation theory. Note : Molefi Kete Asante is the author of seventy-four books and more than five hundred articles.