Martin Robinson Delany An African American Man - 1148 Words

Martin Robinson Delany was an African-American man, born to a free mother and a slave father, on May 6, 1812 (Martin Robison Delany, 2014). Delany’s grandparents were captured and brought to America to as slaves, but it was later found that his maternal grandfather was an African Mandingo prince so he was given freedom and returned to Africa. It was because of this that Delany’s mother, Pati was a free woman. In the 1800’s in Virginia, Pati encountered anger from white’s who found out that she was teaching her children to read. In 1822 she packed up the family leaving her husband behind and moved to Chambersburg, Pennsylvania (Sekora, 2013). His father bought his freedom later and joined the family. Delany began his†¦show more content†¦(Rosenfeld, 1989, pg.802). He severed ties with Frederick Douglass and returned to practice medicine with two doctors in Pennsylvania. In 1850 Martin Delany and two other blacks were accepted into Harvard Me dical School. They were the first blacks to be accepted, but they were unable to complete their education, because of protests from white students saying that admitting blacks compromised the school’s academic standards. The three students were asked to withdraw from school after just a few weeks. Delany was upset because he had letters of recommendation from the white doctors he had been working with so he knew that he deserved to be at Harvard. He believed that education was a major part in the struggle for freedom of black people and that something was wrong if education only liberated the mind without equipping the â€Å"liberated† with means of economic survival (Adeleke, 1994, pg.224). Through his experiences and those of black professionals that he knew, Delany became angry with the treatment of blacks in northern society. In 1852 he wrote his first manifesto The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Polit ically Considered this book expressed Delany’s strong belief that blacks could never have freedom or equality, as a slave or free man, in the U.S. and it was his firm belief that they should migrate back to Africa. In 1859 he wrote Blake which was the accounts of a runaway slave, who at this time was on