Martin Delany was an abolitionist, journalist, physician, and writer. With this quadrilingual gift, he had a vast impact on helping to create a “safe space” for African Americans.
Martin Robinson Delany was born free in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), on May 6, 1812. Delany was the son of a slave and grandson of a prince, according to family reports. All of his grandparents had been brought over from Africa to be slaves, but his father's father was by some accounts a village chieftain, and his mother's father a Mandingo prince. His mother, Pati, may have won her freedom because of this and she worked as a seamstress, while her husband Samuel was an enslaved carpenter. Delany spent his life working to end slavery. He was a successful physician—one of the first African Americans admitted to Harvard Medical School—who used his influence to educate others about the evils of slavery with a number of abolitionist publications. He later served in the Civil War. Delany died on January 24, 1885, in Wilberforce, Ohio.
He traveled through the Midwest, down to New Orleans and over…show more content… He then became active in promoting the use of African Americans in the Union Army, recruiting one of his own sons, Toussaint L'Ouverture Delany, to the Massachusetts 54th Regiment. In 1865, he even reportedly met with President Lincoln to discuss the possibility of African-American officers leading African-American troops. As a Civil War major in the 104th Regiment of the United States Colored Troops, Delany became the highest-ranking African American in the military up to that point. After the war, Delany tried to enter politics. A quasi-biography, written pseudonymously by a female journalist under the name Frank A. Rollin—Life and Services of Martin R. Delany (1868)—was a stepping stone to serving on the Republican State Executive Committee alongside, running for lieutenant governor of South
