More than one noted historian has said Martin Delany lived several lifetimes rolled into one. His fertile mind and the principled conscience to which he felt absolutely beholden led him across three continents and countless experiences and challenges. This timeline captures the scope of his vast and important odyssey. (NOTE: Capitalized words denote names of major new residences of MRD. Entries within parentheses are "indirect influences" on MRD's life path.)
MRD studies medicine and applies unsuccessfully to U. of Penn, Jefferson Medical College, Albany and Geneva, NY Medical Schools.
Fugitive Slave Act places property rights above human rights, ruling that an enslaved person, as "property," is stealing himself as property when running away from a master, and can therefore be grabbed anywhere and returned to slavery. Seen as "property," the enslaved also cannot defend themselves in court.
MRD tells a crowd in Pittsburgh: "Sir, my house is my castle. . .If any man approaches that house in search of a slave. . .if he crosses the threshold of my door, and I do not lay him a lifeless corpse at my feet, I hope the grave may refuse my body a resting place, and righteous Heaven my spirit a home. O, no! He cannot enter that house and we both live."
MRD goes to Harvard Medical School in Cambridge, MA to apply for admission carrying letters of support from seventeen physicians from the Pittsburgh area, gathered by Dr. LeMoyne. MRD is accepted along with two black Bostonians sponsored by the American Colonization Society, Isaac H. Snowden and Daniel Laing, Jr.
White medical students submit to the School's faculty a resolution: "That we deem the admission of blacks to the medical Lectures highly detrimental to the interests, and welfare of the Institution of which we are members. . .That we have no objection to the education and elevation of blacks but do decidedly remonstrate against their presence in College with us."
Dr. O. W. Holmes
Despite dissenting opinions from 48 (out of 116) other students, a faculty vote disclaiming the power to expel the three students, Dean and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Delany's preceptor in anatomy and physiology, approves their dismissal.
MRD leaves Harvard Medical School having been allowed to complete only one of two four month terms. Martin Delany no longer believes reasoned argument and merit can persuade the dominant white culture to help deserving persons of color to become leaders in the society.
MRD is invited by activist Henry Bibb to a convention in Toronto, Canada.
Inspired by impressions of Canada, MRD begins to write: "Sometimes I sat, sometimes I stood, writing when and where I could, a little here, a little there; 'Twas here, and there and everywhere." (Ullman, p. 140)
MRD chairs Anti Colonization Meeting in Philadelphia.
MRD publishes "The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered." This landmark book alienates virtually all abolitionist leaders by advocating the need for blacks to leave America and start anew with a new nation in Central and/or South America.
His book also attacks white abolitionists for discrimination, in not hiring able blacks within their businesses and for disallowing leadership positions to blacks in their organizations. He reserves some praise for William Lloyd Garrison.
MRD writes Frederick Douglass, upbraiding him for ignoring his new book calling American blacks to return to Africa or go to South America and begin their own nations.
MRD accepts the principalship of a colored school in Ward No. 7 in Pittsburgh. He writes in his spare time.
Harriet B. Stowe
Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," is published, causing a sensation for its clear depiction of the cruelty of southern slavers, but also misrepresents enslaved blacks by the passive persona of "Uncle Tom." MRD, using his first hand experience traveling in the South, begins writing his "reply" to "Uncle Tom's Cabin," called "Blake: Or The Huts of America," about the secret travels through slave communities by an insurrectionist. Modern scholars have concluded his portrayal of antebellum black culture as among the most accurate.
MRD delivers his forty page treatise on racial segregation among Freemasons in the United States in violation of the true principles of the Order, considered the first such account on Black Freemasonry. He implies that England's Freemason leadership could adjudicate this contention favorably for the black members.
"During the cholera plague in Pittsburgh in 1854, where he (MRD) was then in practice as a physician, he (MRD) rendered much valued service to the city and to sufferers from this dread malady that public notice in the form of a series of resolutions were proposed, adopted and presented to him in appreciation of his his skill as a physician and of his unselfish and noble sacrifice to the cause of suffering humanity. When nearly every white doctor in Pittsburgh left the city on the appearance of this disease, Dr. Delany remained and organized a corps of Negro nurses of both sexes who cared for those helpless white and black cholera victims, many of whom under his skillful treatment were restored to health." (From a speech by John Edward Bruce in speech at St. Martin's Church, New York City, 7/5/1920).
MRD leads 145 participants in the 4 day National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, reading his manifesto, "Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent." This convention stands defiantly opposite in time to a convention backed by Frederick Douglass. The emigrationist argument appeals especially to educated and commercially successful Northern freed blacks.
This body, which included Mrs. Catherine Delany and 28 other voting women, and is considered the foundation stone for black nationalism in American history, voted to approve a resolution: "that, as men and equals, we demand every political right, privilege and position to which the whites are eligible in the United States, and we will either attain to these, or accept nothing." (Ullman, p. 155).
MRD is in Pittsburgh doing community organizing and assisting in the Underground Railroad to Chatham, West Ontario.
In an attack against the American Colonization Society, MRD writes an introduction to William Nesbit's "Four Months In Liberia." He writes of Nesbit's "graphic portrayal of the infamy of that most pernicious and impudent of all schemes for the perpetuity of the degradation our race, the American Colonization Society. I say most pernicious, because it was organized in the South by slaveholders, propagated by their aiders and abettors, North and South, and still continues to be carried on under the garb of philanthropic aid and Christianity, through the medium of the basest deception and hypocrisy." (Ullman, pp. 174+5).
