02/29/2024
Martin Robison Delany (1812 – 1885) was an American abolitionist, journalist, physician, military officer and writer. He was born in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), to a free mother and an enslaved father. Delany was a trained physician’s assistant who treated patients during the cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854 in Pittsburgh, even though many doctors and residents fled the city out of fear of contamination. In 1839, he traveled to the South to observe slavery firsthand and worked alongside Frederick Douglass to publish the North Star, an abolitionist newspaper published from 1847 to 1851. Delany was one of the first three Black men admitted to Harvard Medical School in 1850, but all were dismissed after a few weeks because of widespread protests by white students. During the American Civil War, he was commissioned as a major, becoming the first African-American field grade officer in the United States Army. After the Civil War, Delany settled in South Carolina, where he worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau and became politically active, including in the Colored Conventions Movement, a series of national, regional, and state conventions held during the decades preceding and following the American Civil War. These conventions were a cornerstone of Black organizing in the nineteenth century and brought Black men and women together in a decades-long campaign for civil and human rights.
