Delany, Martin Robinson - dəlāˈnē, 1812–85, American black leader, b. Charles Town, Va. (now in West Virginia). The son of free blacks, he attended a black school in Pittsburgh and studied medicine at Harvard. He emphasized the practical aspects of black problems. Taking up the cause of emigration (the return of American blacks to Africa), he was largely responsible for the first National Emigration Convention in 1854 and headed an expedition to the Niger valley. In the Civil War he was an army physician. Later he was in the Freedmen's Bureau, served as a trial judge in Charleston, S.C., and lost (1874) the election for lieutenant governor of South Carolina; he was a stern enemy of corruption. His ideas of race appeared in Principles of Ethnology (1879). See biographies by F. A. Rollin (1868, repr. 1969), D. Sterling (1971), and V. Ullman (1971). The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright© 2004, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Lernout & Hauspie Speech Products N.V. All rights reserved. |
These long-ignored debates have much to offer contemporary students of African American Leadership
The differences between Frederick Douglas and Martin Delany have historically been reduced to a simple binary pronouncement: assimilationist versus separatist. Now Robert S. Levine restores the relationship of these two important nineteenth-century African American writers to its original complexity. He explores their debates over issues like abolitionism, emigration, and nationalism, illuminating each man's influence on the other's political vision. He also examines Delany and Douglas's debates in relation to their own writings and to the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe.
Though each saw himself as the single best representative of his race, Douglas has been accorded that role by history -- while Delany, according to Levine, has suffered a fate typical of the black separatist: marginalization. In restoring Delany to his place in literary and cultural history, Levine makes possible a fuller understanding of the politics of antebellum African American leadership.