Black History Makers: Dr. Martin Delany

Martin Delany rose from humble beginnings to become one of the more important figures of 19th Century American history. His father, an enslaved man named Samuel Delany, was the son of an African chieftain from the Gola tribe who was captured and sold into slavery in Virginia. Samuel married Pati, a free woman from Angola, and their son Martin was born on May 6, 1812 in Charlestown, Virginia (now West Virginia)

Dr. Martin Delany, physician and Union Army officer during the Civil War…

After Delany's father bought his own freedom, the family moved to Pennsylvania, where young Martin, who had originally learned to read while still in captivity, later undertook formal education at Jefferson College.

In 1833, following a cholera outbreak in Pittsburgh, Delany became an apprentice under abolitionist oriented medical doctors Andrew McDowell, F. Julius Lemoyne and Joseph Gazzam. In 1850, Delany became one of the first three blacks admitted to Harvard Medical School; following protests from their white classmates, the three black students eventually discontinued their formal medical studies although Delany, who had begun learning the profession as an apprentice, later established his own private practice in Pittsburgh.

Prior to medical school, Delany had met prominent abolitionists Frederick Douglass and William Lloyd Garrison, the publisher of the "Liberator" newspaper. Soon thereafter, Delany began writing his own articles that were often featured in Douglass’s "The North Star" newspaper. One of Delany’s philosophical causes was a "Back to Africa" doctrine that was strongly opposed by Douglass and other mainstream abolitionists who believed that enslaved Blacks, upon securing freedom, had a right to remain in the United States.

During the Civil War, while President Abraham Lincoln routinely refused Frederick Douglass's repeated requests for Black soldiers to be called to serve under the leadership of Black officers, Delany, after meeting with and impressing Lincoln, was commissioned as a major—the highest ranking Black officer in the war—and was assigned to the 52nd Colored Regiment. 

Following the war, Delany worked with the Freedman's Bureau and later became an influential figure in South Carolina Republican politics until the Northern occupation of the South ended following the Compromise of 1876, an agreement that found Rutherford B. Hayes installed as President over Samuel Tilden I'm exchange for the removal of all federal occupation forces from the South.

The 1876 Compromise allowed many former Confederate soldiers to obtain political office, including Democrat Wade Hampton, a Confederate general who Delany helped get elected governor by persuading Blacks to shun the Republican Party which had fought to secure their freedom a decade earlier. To Delany's dismay (and Black South Carolinians chagrin), Gov. Hampton and his fellow former Confederates almost immediately began drafting Jim Crow laws that stymied Black educational, social, and political advancement until well into the 1960's!

Distraught, Delany chose to leave the South forever and moved to Wilberforce, Ohio, where he died in 1885.

Lest we forget…