His mother Delia was also prominent in the church, and earned a living taking in laundry and cleaning the houses of prosperous white families.

Delia, born into slavery and never able to read and write herself, transferred a sense of dignity and self-esteem to her children, and preached to them about the injustices of racism and the value of education.

He summed up the reasons for this in a journal entry from 1961, saying "so much sickness came from improper places to live – long distances to walk to schools improperly heated… too much work at home – natural conditions common to the poor that take the bright flowers like terrible cold in nature…"[2] Beauford and his younger brother Joseph were both attracted to art from an early age.

Through letters of introduction from Knoxville, he also received what he referred to as a "crash course" in black activist politics and ideas by associating socially during his years in Boston with some of the most sophisticated and radical African Americans of the time, such as James Weldon Johnson, writer, diplomat and rights activist; William Monroe Trotter, founder of the National Equal Rights League; and Butler Wilson, board member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.

"[6] Delaney felt an immediate affinity with this "multitude of people of all races – spending every night of their lives in parks and cafes" surviving on next to nothing.

In New York "he painted colourful, engaging canvasses that captured scenes of the urban landscape…his works from that period express, in an American Modernist vein, not only the character of the city, but also his personal vision of equality, love, and respect among all people".

[7] One of Delaney's works from this period, Can Fire in the Park (oil on canvas, 1946), where a group of men huddle together for warmth and companionship around an open fire, is described by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as a "disturbingly contemporary vignette [which] conveys a legacy of deprivation linked not only to the Depression years after 1929 but also to the longstanding disenfranchisement of black Americans, portrayed here as social outcasts… Despite its sober subject, the scene crackles with energy, the culmination of Delaney's sharp pure colors, thickly applied paints, and taut, schematic patterning.

Abandoning the precise realism of his early academic training, Delaney developed a lyrically expressive style that drew upon his love of musical rhythms and his improvisational use of color."

"[8] He earned a studio space and place to live through his work at the Whitney as a guard, telephone operator and gallery attendant.

His friends included the "poet laureate" of the period, Countee Cullen, artist Georgia O'Keeffe, and writer Henry Miller, among many others.

In Greenwich Village, where his studio was, Delaney became part of a gay bohemian circle of mainly white friends; but he was furtive and rarely comfortable with his sexuality.

When he traveled to Harlem to visit his African-American friends and colleagues, Delaney made efforts to ensure that they knew little of his other social life in Greenwich Village.

He had "a third life" centered on questions concerning the aesthetics and development of modernism in Europe and the United States; primarily influenced by the ideas of his friends, photographer Alfred Stieglitz and the cubist artist Stuart Davis (painter), and the paintings of the European modernists and their predecessors like Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, and Van Gogh.

The pressures of being "black and gay in a racist and homophobic society" would have been difficult enough, but Delaney's own Christian upbringing and "disapproval" of homosexuality, the presence of a family member (his artist brother Joseph) in the New York art scene and the "macho abstract expressionists emerging in lower Manhattan's art scene" added to this pressure.

The Smithsonian American Art Museum notes that "neither early success nor gracious spirit spared Delaney from the obscurity and poverty" that plagued most of his adult life.

Pegging away at a style of painting that few people understand or appreciate, he has disciplined himself, not only physically but spiritually, to live with a kind of personal magnetism in a barren world."

"[12] His years in Paris led to a dramatic stylistic shift from the "figurative compositions of New York life to abstract expressionist studies of color and light.

"[18] Shortly after his return to Paris in January 1970, Beauford began to display early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease.

By the early 1970s, Beauford's sickness coupled with his financial instability made clear that he could no longer cope with daily life.

[19] In the autumn of 1973 his friend, Charles Gordon (Charley) Boggs, wrote to James Baldwin, "Our blessed Beauford is rapidly losing mental control."

The author believed that Delaney's disappearance from the consciousness of the New York art world was linked to "his move to Paris at a crucial moment in the consolidation of New York's position as the world's cultural capital and his work's irrelevance to the history of American art as it was being written by critics" at the time.

The article concludes, "Today [1994] as those histories unravel and are replaced by narratives with a more varied and colorful weave, artists like Delaney can be seen in a new light.

"[22] Baldwin marveled over Delaney's ability to emulate such light in his work despite the darkness he was surrounded by for the majority of his life.

[27] In November 2009, Wells founded a French non-profit association, Les Amis de Beauford Delaney, to support fundraising for a tombstone.