He knew something about his own origins, but, like most Africans who had been forced into bondage and who had lost their language, Delany could not go beyond a few generations. Identity was important to Delany as it is to most people. These were characteristics that made him proud of his race. There was something he felt in the nature of the black man’s spirit that had come from the pressures of enslavement that made him adaptable, resilient, and willful. Physically, he was jet black in complexion and was known to say, according to the famous historian Benjamin Quarles, that he was different from Frederick Douglass who thanked God for making him a man Delany thanked God for making him a black man. Some refused to see themselves in any sense of identity but “colored American.” Delany escaped the prison of inferiority that was created by the practice of white supremacy and found his strength in the acceptance of his innate capabilities as a man. This was the case with Martin Delany during a time when many blacks hated their origins because they identified Africa with slavery. The second law of intelligence is to have a healthy sense of self. One is to have a clear sense of one’s situation-psychological, social, economic, cultural, and spiritual. One can easily ask, “What made Delany extraordinary and intelligent in Lincoln’s mind?” I ask this question because Lincoln’s estimation of blacks in general was negative. Delany was not the least among these giants and in some instances might have been considered the superior in intellect and action to some of them, including the eloquent Douglass.Ībraham Lincoln introduced Martin Robison Delany to Secretary of War Stanton as “this most extraordinary and intelligent black man.” Pennington, orator and minister Alexander Crummell, philosopher and minister Frederick Douglass, abolitionist and orator and William Wells Brown, novelist. Among his contemporaries in the struggle for genuine African liberation were James McCune Smith, a physician and professor James W. Martin Delany lived during an extraordinary time in the history of African people.
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