Martin Robison Delany (May 6, 1812 – January 24, 1885) was an American abolitionist, journalist, physician, military officer and writer who was arguably the first proponent of black nationalism.

[4] In 1850, Delany was one of the first three black men admitted to Harvard Medical School, but all were dismissed after a few weeks because of widespread protests by white students.

He worked for the campaign of Democrat Wade Hampton III, who won the 1876 election for governor in a season marked by violent suppression of black Republican voters by Red Shirts and fraud in balloting.

Their mother Pati carried her two youngest children 20 miles to the courthouse in Winchester to argue successfully for her family's freedom, based on her own free birth.

When the book was discovered in September 1822, Pati moved with her children to nearby Chambersburg in the free state of Pennsylvania to ensure their continued freedom.

In 1831, at the age of 19, he journeyed west to the growing city of Pittsburgh, where he attended the Cellar School of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

[9] Delany and three other young black men were later accepted into Harvard Medical School, but they were forced to leave after white students protested.

His activities brought controversy in 1846, when he was sued for libel by "Fiddler" Johnson, a Black man he accused in The Mystery of being a slave catcher.

[18] In July 1848, Delany reported in the North Star that U.S. District Court Justice John McLean had instructed the jury in the Crosswait trial to consider it a punishable offense for a citizen to thwart those trying to "repossess" an alleged runaway slave.

His coverage influenced the abolitionist Salmon P. Chase to lead a successful drive to remove McLean as a candidate of the Free Soil Party for the Presidency later that summer.

However, the month after his arrival, a group of white students wrote to the faculty, complaining that "the admission of blacks to the medical lectures highly detrimental to the interests, and welfare of the Institution of which we are members".

Martin Delany was also actively involved in the Prince Hall Freemasonry movement, which aligned with his efforts to promote civil rights and social progress for African Americans during the 19th century.

During a severe cholera outbreak in 1854, most doctors abandoned the city, as did many residents who could leave, since no one knew how the disease was caused nor how to control an epidemic.

[26] In August 1854, Delany led the National Emigration Convention in Cleveland, Ohio,[27] along with his friend James Monroe Whitfield, the abolitionist poet, and other black activists.

In Chatham, he assisted in Underground Railroad activities, helping resettle American refugee slaves who had reached freedom in Canada.

[8] The same year, he was a member of the Chatham Vigilance Committee that sought to prevent former slaves from being returned to the United States and brought back into slavery, such as the case of Sylvanus Demarest.

[29] In response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852), in 1859 and 1862, Delany published parts of Blake; or the Huts of America: A Tale of the Mississippi Valley, the Southern United States, and Cuba in serialized form.

He traveled for nine months and signed an agreement with eight indigenous chiefs in the Abeokuta region, in today's Nigeria, that would permit settlers to live on "unused land" in return for applying their skills for the community's good.

[citation needed] The treaty was later dissolved due to warfare in the region, opposition by white missionaries, and the advent of the American Civil War.

After the cheering had subsided, Mr. Dallas made no sign, but the negro in question, who happened to be Dr. Martin R. Delany, from Canada, rose, amid loud cheers, and said: 'I pray your Royal Highness will allow me to thank his lordship, who is always a most unflinching friend of the negro, for the observation he has made, and I assure your Royal Highness and his lordship that I am a man.'

[citation needed] In 1863, after Abraham Lincoln had called for a military draft, the 51-year-old Delany abandoned his dream of starting a new settlement on Africa's West Coast.

His efforts in Rhode Island, Connecticut, and later Ohio raised thousands of enlistees, many of whom joined the newly formed United States Colored Troops.

Although the government had already rejected a similar appeal by Frederick Douglass, Lincoln was impressed by Delany and described him as "a most extraordinary and intelligent man" in a written memo to his Secretary of War Edwin Stanton.

A journalist was surprised when Delany addressed the issue of ill-feelings between black freedmen and mulattos (or "browns", free people of color and mixed race) in Charleston.

He said that two mulattos had informed authorities about Denmark Vesey's plans for a rebellion in 1822 conspiracy, rather than trying to promote racial healing and empowerment between the groups.

Encountering Delany at a black church in South Carolina several weeks after the end of the Civil War, journalist Whitelaw Reid described him as "a coal-black negro, in the full uniform of a Major of the army, with an enormous regulation hat" and "no lack of flowing plume, or gilt cord and knots," who, while giving an ill-received speech, was noisily interrupted by the arrival of Salmon P. Chase, Chief Justice of the Supreme Court.

[42] Delany shocked white officers after the war by taking a strong position in supporting redistribution of land to freedmen.

The latter was a paramilitary group of mostly white men who worked to suppress black voting as "the military arm of the Democratic Party.

[8] Delany is interred in a family plot at Massies Creek Cemetery in Cedarville, Ohio, next to his wife Catherine, who died July 11, 1894.

In 2006, after many years of fundraising, The National Afro-American Museum and Cultural Center was able to raise $18,000 (~$26,179 in 2023) to have a monument built and placed at the grave site of Delany and his family.