Martin R. Delany

Abstract

Martin Robison Delany (b. 1812–d. 1885) was an African American writer, editor, physician, politician, soldier, and theorist of race, emigration, and Black nationalism. Delany was born free in present-day West Virginia to a free mother and an enslaved father. In 1831, Delany moved to Pittsburgh where, in 1843, he established The Mystery (1843–1847), Pennsylvania’s first African American newspaper. His efforts with The Mystery gained the attention of Frederick Douglass, who invited Delany to co-edit The North Star. As co-editor and correspondent, Delany toured free African American communities, fundraising and writing editorials about issues facing African Americans. By the early 1850s Delany had emerged as a free Black leader and an important voice on colonization. In 1852 he wrote The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, arguing for African American emigration to Central and South America. He subsequently imagined Africa as the site for a new nation founded and governed by African Americans and devoted to the general uplift of “the African race.” In 1859, he led the first American expeditionary tour into Africa, where he entered into a treaty with the Egba peoples of Abeokuta to establish a new nation on their lands. Delany detailed his expedition and plans for the new nation in his 1861 Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party, but his vision never came to pass. During this time Delany conceived and wrote the manuscript for Blake; or, the Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba, his only novel, which depicts an inchoate slave insurrection that envelops the United States, Canada, Cuba, and Africa. Blake was published serially in The Anglo-African Magazine (January–July 1859) and then in The Weekly Anglo-African (November 1861–April 1862). However, the final chapters of the novel are no longer extant. During the Civil War, Delany became the first African American major in the US Army. After the collapse of Reconstruction, Delany apparently abandoned his postwar ideas of racial equality. His 1879 Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color with an Archaeological Compendium of Ethiopian and Egyptian Civilization promoted his newly articulated polygenetic racial theory and presented Africa as a symbolic site for Black social and cultural regeneration. He continued to champion selective Black emigration to Africa through the final years of his life. After his death, Delany lapsed into obscurity until the 1960’s, when Black Nationalist historians restored his writing to public consciousness. Since that time, Delany has been of perennial interest to scholars of American literature, history, and culture.