Martin Delany - May 6, 1812 – January 24, 1885
Considered by many to be the father of Black Nationalism, Martin Delany was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, the first African-American Field Officer in the U.S Army, and one of the earliest African Americans to encourage a return to Africa. Martin R. Delany entered Harvard Medical School in 1850 to get a formal medical degree (along with two other black students) but was expelled after only three weeks as a result of petitions to the school from white students. Two years later he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, claiming that even abolitionists would never accept blacks as equals and thus the only solution to finding black equality lay in the emigration of all African Americans back to Africa. “We are a nation within a nation, we must go from our oppressors,” he wrote. Trained as a physician, he treated patients during the cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854 in Pittsburgh, when many doctors and residents fled the city. He worked with Frederick Douglass to publish the North Star. Active in recruiting blacks for the United States Colored Troops, he was commissioned as a major, the first African-American field officer in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.
Considered by many to be the father of Black Nationalism, Martin Delany was an African-American abolitionist, journalist, physician, the first African-American Field Officer in the U.S Army, and one of the earliest African Americans to encourage a return to Africa. Martin R. Delany entered Harvard Medical School in 1850 to get a formal medical degree (along with two other black students) but was expelled after only three weeks as a result of petitions to the school from white students. Two years later he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered, claiming that even abolitionists would never accept blacks as equals and thus the only solution to finding black equality lay in the emigration of all African Americans back to Africa. “We are a nation within a nation, we must go from our oppressors,” he wrote. Trained as a physician, he treated patients during the cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854 in Pittsburgh, when many doctors and residents fled the city. He worked with Frederick Douglass to publish the North Star. Active in recruiting blacks for the United States Colored Troops, he was commissioned as a major, the first African-American field officer in the U.S. Army during the Civil War.
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