Happy Birthday to physician, abolitionist, nationalist, military officer, and writer Martin Robison Delany (b. May 6, 1812, in Charles Town, VA), whose story exemplifies how complicated people are in the past and present. Among his many paradoxes he was a conservative nationalist, an abolitionist accommodationist, and a Pan-Africanist who supported color-blind policy. As historian Tunde Adeleke makes clear in his book on Delany, it is these seeming contradictions and imperfections that show the humanity in people. Aseleke writes, “The tradition of compartmentalizing black leaders into rigid ideological categories is essentially political and now anachronistic. It does not adequately and accurately reflect and represent the true character and disposition of black leaders. It is therefore necessary to come to terms with the ambivalence and complexities of black leaders in history. There was nothing inherently saintly, angelic, or devilish about nineteenth-century black leaders. They were human beings…”
Recommended reading to learn more:
Citations: Tunde Adeleke, Without Regard to Race: The Other Martin Robison Delany (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), https://archive.org/details/withoutregardtor00adel; “Martin Robison Delany,” lithograph (location unknown, c. 1865), collection of the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (Washington, D.C.), public domain, https://www.si.edu/object/martin-robison-delany:npg_NPG.76.101.
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