Martin Robinson Delany and Edward Wilmot Blyden

Race Men and Pioneer Black Nationalists

By Runoko Rashidi

Dedicated to Dr. John Henrik Clarke and Dr. Yosef A.A. Ben-Yochannan

Among the most acclaimed of the early pioneer advocates of the rights of African people were Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885) and Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912).  They were intellectuals and activists whose lives personified the maxim of Kwame Nkrumah—"Thought without practice is empty, action without thought is blind."

Dr. Martin Robison Delany has been called "the father of Black Nationalism." It was Delany, in fact, who coined the phrase "Africa for the Africans."  Delany was born May 6, 1812 in West Virginia, of a free mother and a father who purchased his own freedom in 1823.  Delany's paternal grandfather was an African chief; his maternal grandfather a Mandingo prince. Born in the South, Delany resorted to learning how to read and write illegally.  Due to his continued desire to learn, he later settled in New York where he attended the African Free School.

Between 1843 and 1846 Delany published his own newspaper--the Mystery. Subsequently, he worked with Frederick Douglass on his weekly newspaper—the North Star.  In 1850, Delany  entered Harvard Medical School as one of its first Black students.  In 1859, he traveled to Africa, where he stayed for nearly a year, searching for a suitable location for emigration.  On February 8, 1865, during the U.S. Civil War, Delany received the commission of Major in the Federal Army—the first Black man to receive such a commission.

Delany was an accomplished author.  Not surprisingly, his favorite subject was history.  One of his books, Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, With an Archaeological Compendium of Ethiopian and Egyptian Civilization, From Years of Careful Examination and Enquiry, was published in 1879, and detailed the African origins of Nile Valley civilizations.

The racial and historical consciousness of Martin Robison Delany is apparent in the names he gave his children.  One of his son's name was Ramses Placido, named after the mighty Egyptian pharaoh Usemare Ramses II and the Cuban poet and revolutionary.  Other names for his children included Alexander Dumas, Saint Cyprian and Toussaint l'Ouverture. Frederick Douglass said of Delany, "I thank God for making me a man, simply, but Delany always thanks Him for making him a Black man."

Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden was born August 3, 1832 in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.  Blyden often remarked that "I would rather be a member of this race than a Greek in the time of Alexander, a Roman in the Augustan period, or Anglo-Saxon in the nineteenth century."  Blyden wrote and traveled extensively.  During a visit to Egypt in 1866 he recorded that:

Of Blyden, the great Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940) stated that:

In 1869, Blyden's essay entitled "The Negro in Ancient History" appeared in the Methodist Quarterly Review.  In 1887, Blyden's most comprehensive work--Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race—was published.  A monument stands to Dr. Blyden's memory at Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone, West Africa.

In spite of fact that Delany and Blyden struggled during the heart of the nineteenth century, time has not diminished the glory of their deeds.  This brief essay, therefore, is intended as a tribute to those deeds with the hope that it will help to inspire the present generation of African people to continue their noble struggle.

photos above Delany (left); Blyden (right)

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Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader Edited by Robert S. Levine

Introduction

Martin Robison Delany (1812-85) lived an extraordinarily complex life as a social activist and reformer, black nationalist, abolitionist, physician, reporter and editor, explorer, jurist, realtor, politician, publisher, educator, army officer, ethnographer, novelist, and political and legal theorist. A sketch of his career can only hint at the range of his interests, activities, and accomplishments. Born free in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), the son of a free seamstress and a plantation slave, Delany in the early 1820s was taken by his mother to western Pennsylvania after Virginia authorities threatened to imprison her for teaching her children to read and write.

In 1831 he moved to Pittsburgh, where he studied with Lewis Woodson and other black leaders, and began his lifelong commitment to projects of black elevation. He organized and attended black conventions during the 1830s and 1840s and during this same period apprenticed as a doctor and began his own medical practice. In 1843 he founded one of the earliest African American newspapers, the Mystery, which he edited until 1847. In late 1847 he left the Mystery and teamed up with Frederick Douglass to coedit the North Star, the most influential African American newspaper of the period. After an approximately eighteen-month stint with Douglass, Delany attended Harvard Medical School for several months but was dismissed because of his color.

Outraged by Harvard's racism and the Compromise of 1850, in 1852 he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, a book-length critique of the failure of the nation to extend the rights of citizenship to African Americans, and a book that concludes by arguing for black emigration to Central and South America or the Caribbean. Delany's emigrationism conflicted sharply with Douglass's integrationist vision of black elevation in the United States. In response to Douglass's national black convention of 1853, Delany in 1854 organized and chaired a national black emigrationist convention, where he delivered "The Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent," the most important statement on black emigration published before the Civil War.

In 1856 Delany moved to Canada, where he set up a medical practice, wrote regularly for Mary Ann Shadd Cary's Provincial Freeman, and met with the radical abolitionist John Brown to discuss the possibility of fomenting a slave insurrection in the United States. During the late 1850s his views on emigration underwent a significant change. Instead of advocating black emigration to the southern Americas, he now argued for African American emigration to Africa. By 1859 he had obtained the funds that allowed him to tour the Niger Valley, and in December of that year he signed a treaty with the Alake (king) of Abeokuta that gave him the land necessary to establish an African American settlement in West Africa.

In search of financial support for the project, he toured Great Britain and garnered international attention for his participation at the 1860 International Statistical Congress in London. Around this same time he published a serialized novel, Blake (1859, 1861-62) in an African American journal. He also published a book-length account of his travels and negotiations in Africa, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1861). Delany's African project collapsed in the early 1860s when the Alake renounced the treaty, and by 1863 he was recruiting black troops for the Union army.

From 1863 to 1877, Delany recommitted himself to the integrationist U.S. nationalistic vision that had been central to his work with Douglass at the North Star. He achieved national fame for meeting with Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and shortly thereafter receiving a commission as the first black major in the Union army. Following the war, Delany served for three years as an officer at the Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina, and he remained in South Carolina through the late 1870s as he attempted to make Reconstruction work in a stronghold of the former Confederacy. He published two major pamphlets for newly enfranchised African Americans, University Pamphlets (1870) and Homes for the Freedmen (1871), and in 1874 ran for lieutenant governor of South Carolina on the Independent Republican slate, losing by only 14,000 votes.

Disillusioned by the Republicans' half-hearted commitment to Reconstruction, Delany in 1876 endorsed Wade Hampton, the Democratic candidate for governor of South Carolina, and was nearly killed by shots from a black militia at a Hampton rally. Hampton won the election, but Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, and a disillusioned Delany turned his attention to helping southern blacks who wished to emigrate to Liberia. In 1879, as he was seeking a federal appointment that would allow him to finance his own emigration to Africa, he published Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color (1879), an ethnographic study that, like his earlier Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry (1853), expressed a Pan-African pride in blacks' historical, cultural, and racial ties to Africa.

Surveying Delany's dynamic and creative career a year after his death in 1885, the African Methodist Episcopal priest James T. Holly proclaimed that Delany was "one of the great men of this age," a person whose life was "filled with noble purposes, high resolves, and ceaseless activities for the welfare of the race with which he was identified," and who "has given us the standard of measurement of all the men of our race, past, present, and to come, in the work of negro elevation in the United States of America." . . . .

Source: http://uncpress.unc.edu/chapters/levine_martin.html

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Robert S. Levine is professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His books include Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity.

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Reviews

Martin R. Delany (1812-85) has been called the "Father of Black Nationalism," but his extraordinary career also encompassed the roles of abolitionist, physician, editor, explorer, politician, army officer, novelist, and political theorist. Despite his enormous influence in the nineteenth century, and his continuing influence on black nationalist thought in the twentieth century, Delany has remained a relatively obscure figure in U.S. culture, generally portrayed as a radical separatist at odds with the more integrationist Frederick Douglass.

This pioneering documentary collection offers readers a chance to discover, or rediscover, Delany in all his complexity. Through nearly 100 documents--approximately two-thirds of which have not been reprinted since their initial nineteenth-century publications--it traces the full sweep of his fascinating career. Included are selections from Delany's early journalism, his emigrationist writings of the 1850s, his 1859-62 novel, Blake (one of the first African American novels published in the United States), and his later writings on Reconstruction. Incisive and shrewd, angry and witty, Delany's words influenced key nineteenth-century debates on race and nation, addressing issues that remain pressing in our own time.

—Publisher. UNC Press

Editor Levine's anthology provides a rich picture of the life and career of an extraordinary man. Written in Delaney's words, it collectively serves as a stirring, personal history of the tumultuous civil rights movement, from slavery to the beginnings of Jim Crow.

—Charleston Post and Courier

Rich in its implications for the present and future, this superb gathering of source material should be of particular value to students of American culture, the African diaspora, and American history. An indispensable work that should quickly take its place among the foremost documentaries of our time.

—Sterling Stuckey, University of California, Riverside

In this richly diverse but also in-depth collection, Robert Levine allows Martin R. Delany to reveal himself to us in all his confrontational, confounding complexity. Delany's writings, in turn, provide provocative and informative details about ways in which nineteenth-century African Americans argued and acted to define themselves in the United States and in the African diaspora. Levine's judicious selections and erudite annotations provide just the right accompaniment to Delany's strong and vibrant voice.

—Frances Smith Foster, Emory University

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posted 18 November 2007