To the Editors:
You are to be commended for publishing, in your March 12 issue. Theodore Draper’s enlightening essay on that complex and important black activist, Martin R. Delany. Unfortunately, however, the article perpetuates a couple of errors that continue to crop up in historical writings. Draper says, “In 1849 Delany…was admitted into the medical department of Harvard College, from which he was graduated in 1852.” I gather Draper was relying heavily on Benjamin Brawley’s article in the Dictionary of American Biography and on the recent monumental American Negro Reference Book, both of which one might expect to be authoritative.
It is true that, at least as early as 1854, Delany was referred to in the press as “Dr.” and that he was credited with an M.D. degree in two early biographical anthologies on black Americans, W. W. Brown’s The Black Man (1863) and W. J. Simmons’s Men of Mark (1887). Such a work as the revised edition of the Hughes- Meltzer Pictorial History of the Negro says in three different places that Delany was a Harvard graduate; and the claim is echoed in William Loren Katz’s splendid Eyewitness (1967), and in Peter Bergman’s brand new (and error-ridden) Chronological History of the Negro.
During recent years I have intermittently been researching the history of the Negro at Harvard, and have found the facts to be otherwise. Delany did not enter Harvard in 1849. He was, however, admitted—along with two other black students—late in 1850, at age 38, as part of a colonization plan to prepare Negroes for medical practice in Liberia. But there were immediate complaints from some white students, and the medical faculty refused to allow the three black men back the next year. I have not yet had a chance to straighten out some discrepancies in Harvard’s own official records to my full satisfaction; but it is clear that Delany’s sojourn at Harvard was a brief one (despite the claim in the latest edition of the Encyclopedia Americana that he was still a student there in 1852), and that he never received a Harvard degree. Frank Rollin’s rather hagiolatrous 1868 biography of Delany, which Draper repeatedly cites, chose to gloss over the episode by mentioning Delany’s admission to the Medical School and then just saying, “After leaving Harvard,” etc. And I have seen no evidence that Delany later received an M. D. degree from any other institution. (The American Negro Reference Book even goes so far, in one of its several passages on Delany, as to imply that Delany was on the faculty of the Harvard Medical School!)
Furthermore, Delany’s middle name was not Robinson, but Robison—despite Brawley, Bergman et al., and now Draper. Finally, although Rollin might be excused for thinking that there was a medical department in Harvard College, surely Brawley and Draper ought to have known that it is a medical school in Harvard University.
Caldwell Titcomb
Chairman, School of Creative Arts
Brandeis University
To the Editors:
If Mr. Draper’s biographical sketch were a serious attempt to construct a factually accurate account of Delany’s long and varied career, one could perhaps excuse his polemical peroration which apparently motivated the flimsy scholarship of his biographical effort. Unfortunately, his essay is marred by minor errors (for instance, Delany never graduated from Harvard Medical School, his father was a slave, and he testified in 1877, not 1872, about the corrupt practices of a successful white, not black, senatorial candidate) as well as shoddy juxtapositions (e.g., whatever criticism can be leveled at Delany for his support of Hampton in 1876, he certainly did not know that the return of the Democrats to power in South Carolina would lead to black disfranchisement by 1900—fifteen years after his death). Trivial as these errors are they indicate the arrogance of an author willing to use cafeteria-style history to certify his latest attempt to flush out the baddies. More importantly, Mr. Draper’s casual approach to historical research results in a biographical account which elaborates upon the trivial and wrenches the important so thoroughly out of context as to distort the significance of Delany’s life and of his contribution to the continuing black nationalist tradition.
Mr. Draper’s shallowness can also be seen in his insistence upon perceiving the duality in Delany’s thought and actions as necessarily contradictory and then presenting this contradiction as symbolic of subsequent inconsistencies within black nationalism. Moreover, Mr. Draper leads himself astray by his preoccupation with categorizing all black nationalist thought into two camps—emigrationism and “internal statism.” Once he locates the proper rubric—which for Delany is, of course, emigrationism—he can gleefully elaborate upon those aspects of Delany’s life which do not “fit”—and thus, contradict—his categorization.
Martin R. Delany, as a “father of black nationalism” (certainly Henry Highland Garnet and, in a more ambiguous manner, Frederick Douglass, were other progenitors), clearly represents the “double-consciousness” of Afro-Americans which W. E. B. DuBois classically depicted more than sixty years ago. To an extent greater than perhaps any significant black leader, Delany combined a wide variety of responses to the racism of the white majority. Thus, he serves as a “father” of several black nationalisms—not merely emigrationism. In his novel, Blake, for example, he conceived of unified slave rebellions and spoke as a revolutionary nationalist. He also was an early Pan-Africanist or Pan-Black Nationalist, joining with Alexander Crummell, James Theodore Holly, and Garnet, among others, to assert the consanguinity of all black peoples. In addition, Delany’s black nationalism stressed racial pride and cohesion and, with Douglass, he anticipated Booker T. Washington in postulating a philosophy centered around self-help and self-elevation. Quite naturally—if unfortunately from a contemporary perspective—Delany also paralleled Douglass and Washington in championing capitalistic enterprise and in maintaining that blacks must imitate the dominant white society’s preoccupation with bourgeois values. Consequently, when Delany exhorted blacks to elevate themselves through increased racial consciousness and racial cohesion—a strongly nationalistic position which existed independent of his forays into emigrationism—his economic views reflected his long, if unhappy, involvement with white society. Most significantly, however, Delany’s realization of the intensity and persistence of white racism and his call for racial unity are as relevant today as they were during his own time. This, then, was his legacy to such men as Marcus Garvey and Malcolm X.
Floyd J. Miller
Department of History
University of Minnesota
To the Editors:
The rush of authors and publishers into the Black market is a mixed blessing. Persons, events, and documents whose existence was known only to a few scholars, buffs, and “folk” have gotten well-deserved attention. It has been commonly observed that the structure of bookmaking is such that the fruits of rediscovered material are denied to its authors’ descendants and the community in whose behalf they labored. More serious is the fact that in the hands of incompetent interpreters, the very documents born of Black people’s experience in America have become means for continuing the five century long psycho-political attack against them.
Martin R. Delany wrote in the preface to his Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered:
The colored people are not yet known, even to their most professed friends among the white Americans; for the reason, that politicians, religionists, colonizationists, and abolitionists, have each and all, at different times, presumed to think for, dictate to, and know better what suited colored people, than they knew for themselves; and consequently, there has been no knowledge of them obtained, than that which has been obtained through these mediums. [page 10, original edition]
Ironically, Delany’s life and work became a vehicle for perpetuating the very situation he protested in the hands of Theodore Draper. To the admittedly complex thought of Martin R. Delany, Mr. Draper brings the trite observation that his Black nationalism was not based “on a deeply rooted, traditional attachment to another soil and another nation.” Presumably feeling required to suggest some interpretation, Draper comes up with the idea that “Delany’s Black nationalism was based on unrequited love, on rejection by whites…,” thus dragging out of the plantation house a favorite rationalization of liberal white supremacists.
The notion that the actions of Black people are best understood to be based on love or hatred of “ol’ massa” is inadequate, morally and intellectually. Frederick Douglass, speaking to Massachusetts abolitionists in 1865 said, “I am not asking for sympathy at the hands of abolitionists…. I think the American people are disposed often to be generous rather than just…. What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not empathy, but simply justice….” Delany, Douglass’s former colleague, would have understood these words. Draper, apparently, cannot.
Delany’s writings and actions cannot be comprehended without sensitivity to the real dilemmas of any attempt to fashion a politics of Black liberation and survival in the United States. The words “Politically Considered” in the title of the book above quoted must be taken with full seriousness. Unfortunately, Draper’s inability or unwillingness to do more than parade a series of documents not only fails to illuminate the dilemma, it adds unnecessary confusion.
For example, Draper fails to mention that the heart of Delany’s Condition, etc. is chapter XVI in which he quotes the “Fugitive Slave Law of 1850” in its entirety. The political meaning for Delany was that the liberty and property, even of free Black people, was made totally insecure by this Act, and for this reason he proposes emigration. No psychological probing is necessary to explain why “he suddenly burst forth” with his book in 1852.
Draper adds further confusion when he tries to reconcile the scheme for establishing a new nation in Africa contained in the Appendix to Delany’s book with the different plan in the main body of the text. Delany makes quite clear in the Preface to The Condition etc. that the Appendix was written in 1836. “The plan of the author, laid out at twenty four years of age…” (page 9 original edition). Draper’s statement that “as late as 1851 it seems [Delany] was still opposed to all emigrationism….” is therefore incorrect. Delany was laying plans for a new nation of American Black émigrés before he began publishing the Mystery in 1843. The fundamental idea that “the claims of no people…are respected by any nation until they are presented in a national capacity” was expressed by Delany quite early. There is a real mystery here, but its solution is more likely to be found in Immanuel Kant, the French Revolution, and Zionism than in a feeling of “rejection by whites.”
Delany’s quest for justice for our “broken people” is carried on today by the Black Panthers, the Republic of New Africa, the Nation of Islam, as well as others. He is truly the “father” and Draper follows Harold Cruse, Lerone Bennett, E. M. Essein-Odum, Herbert Aptheker and others in calling attention to his significance. In the process, Draper locates new material (some of which, like the “highly revealing international incident” at the International Statistical Conference in London in 1860, could have been better left out)….
