Education was always the key to Martin Delany's vision of life's possibilities. His very early recognition and use of learning certainly set him apart from the vast majority of his would be followers later in life. His great intellect, ever changing and growing mind, and ability to conceptualize prevented him from ever building a large long lasting political constituency during his life time. But his education, ideas and writings seem to have won him belated recognition today in a more educated world. Delany's ideas, in fact, anticipate the philosophies of both Booker T. Washington's emphasis on learning trades and practical learning as well as the more refined black pride of W.E.B. Du Bois: two men who, ironically bitterly opposed one another. The following is the story of how Martin learned how to learn:
The peddler could just as well been giving the Delany children a bomb to throw when on that day in 1818 in Charles Town, (then) Virginia, he reached into his wagon filled with pewter and slipped them a copy of the famed "New York Primer For Spelling and Reading."
Nothing frightened white property owners as much as the educated freed blacks teaching their enslaved black persons how to read, write, and, even worse, think of worlds beyond, worlds promising them their own freedom beyond slavery.
Pati Delany, Martin's mother, and her mother, Graci Peace, cared for the Delany children near Hickman's Seminary. When Pati left to work in homes as a laborer or seamstress, her children would slip off to the arbor in their back yard and were soon able to read and write a little.
Since 1806, what the Delany children were doing under the arbor was against the law and they risked delivering their entire family back into slavery as punishment if caught, or taken to the nearby alms house were they would be rented out to farmers.
When enslaved blacks living near or in Charles Town made journies on the dusty county roads, as when they visited family on Sundays, they were stopped to present permission papers from their owners by patrols. Some such papers that fell under the eyes of these local marshalls looked crudely written. The Delany children were soon suspected.
One day a sheriff pulled his horse by the little home Graci Peace then owned on Charles Street, asking the children what they were doing. Having his answer, he wheeled his horse around and galloped away. Pati Delany was crestfallen when they innocently told her when she came home later about their visitor. She knew it was time to move out of Virginia.
With the help of a town banker named Randal Brown, her family collected their belongings that September day, in 1822 and taking the money from the recent sale of Graci Peace's home, they left for Martinsburg, about fifteen miles away, calling it a visit to see her enslaved husband and their father, Samuel, who worked at a plantation. In truth, Pati and her children and mother just kept going crossing, the Potomac River at Williamsport and on to their new life in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania.
Perhaps using some of the earnings from the sale of Graci Peace's home in Charles Town, Samuel soon paid for his freedom and joined his family in their new home in a free land. Samuel Delany's troublesome refusal to let Edward (or Thomas) Violett whip him for any reason made Samuel's offer to "sell himself" attractive.
