Martin Robison Delany

Martin Robison Delany (May 6, 1812 – January 24, 1885) was an American abolitionist, journalist, physician, military officer, and writer. Delany was an early and influential proponent of black nationalism. Delany is credited with the Pan-African slogan of "Africa for Africans." Born as a free person of color in Charles Town, Virginia (now Charles Town, West Virginia), and raised in Chambersburg and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Delany trained as a physician's assistant. During the cholera epidemics of 1833 and 1854 in Pittsburgh, Delany treated patients, even though many doctors and residents fled the city out of fear of contamination. In this period, people did not know how the disease was transmitted.

In 1839, Delany traveled in the South to observe slavery firsthand. Beginning in 1847, he worked alongside Frederick Douglass in Rochester, New York to publish the North Star. 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. These experiences convinced Delany that black people had no future in the United States, leading him instead to the possibility of settling Black Americans in Africa. Although he visited Liberia, a United States colony founded by the American Colonization Society, and lived in Canada for several years, he returned to the United States when the American Civil War began. When the United States Colored Troops were created in 1863, he recruited for them. Commissioned as a major in February 1865, Delany became the first African American field grade officer in the United States Army.

After the Civil War, he settled in South Carolina, where he worked for the Freedmen's Bureau and became politically active, including in the Colored Conventions Movement. Delany ran unsuccessfully for Lieutenant Governor as an Independent Republican. He was appointed as a trial judge, but he was removed following a scandal. Delany later switched his party affiliation. 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.