Martin Delany wrote this 95 page treatise on the origin of races at a time when even educated circles used scientific sophistry to explain the superiority of the Euro American or white race of people. It was also a time charged by the appearance of Charles Darwin's scientific work. "The Origin of Species" in 1859 explained the evolution of the human race from lower mammals and life forms driven by the force of natural selection by which the most fit of any species survived while the lesser species perished. Darwin also published closer to the time of Delany's work "The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex" in 1871.
Delany wrote "The Origin of Race and Color" to counter the implication that could be drawn from Darwin's work that races of human beings represent different levels of evolution in man. His last published work of any significance, the aging Delany reaffirmed his old principles and informed opinion that the very first human civilizations in Egypt and Ethiopia were created by persons of the black race. He also argues, through scientific argument (which the designer of this WEB site feels unqualified to adequately evaluate), that contrary to the assertion that the white race of humans evolved from black or other races, seeks to show that human races stem from three basic skin colors with the Indian (red) or Adamic race the first. He uses historical and biblical sources to support this view. He also tries to blunt fears supported by misused or "politicized" scientific conjecture that racial intermixing and procreation could end the white race. Delany argues that the white and black skinned races are too primary as colors and as races for either to ever be eradicated from the face of the earth. Of course, late 19th and early 20th century science was preoccupied with questions of race, preoccupations that took their most extreme and horrible form in the theories used by Nazi Germany to justify looting the possessions of and finally taking the lives of Jews by the millions.
Delany blames countless invasions of armies for destroying much evidence of early Egyptian and Ethiopian cultures. He offers Noah and his sons and daughters in law as representing as yet unmixed racial group after the great flood. Delany reinterprets the writings by the Duke of Argyll on a bas relief found in Nubia depicting a kneeling black person to suggest an exalted view of the depicted black personage.
He also explores similarities in the early pictorial writings of early Egyptian and Ethiopian dynasties as well as comparing alphabets, pointing again to a rich civilization of persons with black or dark skin and wooly hair.
In the chapter entitled "Modern and Ancient Ethiopia," Delany writes that the men do the heavy work while women performed easier work, not the case in actuality in Africa today, or perhaps then.
In the last chapter, Delany debates issues of racial purity that was so common then, yet repugnant to modern minds, when he describes the "Malay" race as "abnormal," leaving open the possibility of considering the entire Malay people as inferior, basing this on color theory without regard for the infinity of qualities that constitute any human being.
However, in all fairness to Delany and his contemporaries, Delany was simply entering into public discourse defensively against overmuch pseudo scientific theory labeling men with black skin as inferior. And, as he did all his long life, he "fought" for his human rights commanding all the resources available, intellectual, moral or emotional, within the context and mores of the time in which he lived. It is unfair to ask for more of anyone. It is unfair to judge him or anyone by standards any other than the very ones the "judgee" lives within.
