Martin Delany

Martin Robison Delany was born on 6 May 1812 in Charles Town, Virginia, now in West Virginia. In Pennsylvania, where Black children received only an elementary education, he educated himself by reading, and he later apprenticed with a white physician and became one of the leading Black intellectuals and activists of his era.

Delany became involved in Pittsburgh's reform and civil rights circles, and from 1843 began publishing public works. In 1847 he joined Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York, to publish the North Star, the abolitionist newspaper, and he went on to become an influential writer on Black political thought.

In 1850 Delany was one of the first three Black men admitted to Harvard Medical School, though all three were dismissed after only a few weeks because of widespread protests by white students. He nevertheless practised medicine, and he became a leading voice for Black nationalism and emigration, convinced that racism in the United States was too deeply entrenched to be overcome in his lifetime.

During the Civil War Delany helped recruit Black soldiers for the Union Army. He invited Mary Ann Shadd Cary to recruit Black volunteers in Indiana, and in February 1865 he was commissioned a major, becoming the first African American field grade officer in the United States Army.

After the war Delany worked for the Freedmen's Bureau and later became involved in politics in South Carolina, shifting his party affiliation over the years. He died on 24 January 1885 and is remembered as a physician, journalist, soldier and writer who argued for Black pride and self-determination long before those ideas became widely accepted.