Books by Edward W. Blyden

African Life and Customs  / Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race

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Books by Martin R. Delany

The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States

Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color   /  Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party

Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry

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Martin Robinson Delany and Edward Wilmot Blyden

Race Men and Pioneer Black Nationalists

By Runoko Rashidi

Dedicated to Dr. John Henrik Clarke and Dr. Yosef A.A. Ben-Yochannan

Among the most acclaimed of the early pioneer advocates of the rights of African people were Martin Robison Delany (1812-1885) and Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832-1912).  They were intellectuals and activists whose lives personified the maxim of Kwame Nkrumah—"Thought without practice is empty, action without thought is blind."

Dr. Martin Robison Delany has been called "the father of Black Nationalism." It was Delany, in fact, who coined the phrase "Africa for the Africans."  Delany was born May 6, 1812 in West Virginia, of a free mother and a father who purchased his own freedom in 1823.  Delany's paternal grandfather was an African chief; his maternal grandfather a Mandingo prince. Born in the South, Delany resorted to learning how to read and write illegally.  Due to his continued desire to learn, he later settled in New York where he attended the African Free School.

Between 1843 and 1846 Delany published his own newspaper--the Mystery. Subsequently, he worked with Frederick Douglass on his weekly newspaper—the North Star.  In 1850, Delany  entered Harvard Medical School as one of its first Black students.  In 1859, he traveled to Africa, where he stayed for nearly a year, searching for a suitable location for emigration.  On February 8, 1865, during the U.S. Civil War, Delany received the commission of Major in the Federal Army—the first Black man to receive such a commission.

Delany was an accomplished author.  Not surprisingly, his favorite subject was history.  One of his books, Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color, With an Archaeological Compendium of Ethiopian and Egyptian Civilization, From Years of Careful Examination and Enquiry, was published in 1879, and detailed the African origins of Nile Valley civilizations.

The racial and historical consciousness of Martin Robison Delany is apparent in the names he gave his children.  One of his son's name was Ramses Placido, named after the mighty Egyptian pharaoh Usemare Ramses II and the Cuban poet and revolutionary.  Other names for his children included Alexander Dumas, Saint Cyprian and Toussaint L'Ouverture. Frederick Douglass said of Delany, "I thank God for making me a man, simply, but Delany always thanks Him for making him a Black man."

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Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden was born August 3, 1832 in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands.  Blyden often remarked that "I would rather be a member of this race than a Greek in the time of Alexander, a Roman in the Augustan period, or Anglo-Saxon in the nineteenth century."  Blyden wrote and traveled extensively.  During a visit to Egypt in 1866 he recorded that:

Of Blyden, the great Marcus Mosiah Garvey (1887-1940) stated that:

In 1869, Blyden's essay entitled "The Negro in Ancient History" appeared in the Methodist Quarterly Review.  In 1887, Blyden's most comprehensive work—Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race—was published.  A monument stands to Dr. Blyden's memory at Freetown, capital of Sierra Leone, West Africa.

In spite of fact that Delany and Blyden struggled during the heart of the nineteenth century, time has not diminished the glory of their deeds.  This brief essay, therefore, is intended as a tribute to those deeds with the hope that it will help to inspire the present generation of African people to continue their noble struggle.

photos above Delany (left); Blyden (right)

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Finding Truth in African Life and Customs

Edward Blyden’s Travels in Africa

Excerpts by Tracy Keith Flemming, Ph.D.

Blyden constructed Africans as the potential “metaphysical and spiritual” agrarian custodians of the world, complementing the “Northern races” who would serve as the urbanized scientific leaders of humanity. Blyden wrote that he had experienced spiritual states in Africa that could not be replicated in the Western world.

Blyden felt that the “development of the Negro on African soil” was critical to the regeneration of the race. The “feminine” character of the African race would balance the “harsh and stern fibre of the Caucasian races,” each branch of humanity playing a crucial, complementary role in the cultivation of universal civilization. The African in his native setting, according to Blyden, would “grow freely, naturally, unfolding his powers in a completely healthy progress” (Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, 20).

His interpretive approach to Africans was becoming increasingly sociological. Early in his 1883 address, Blyden stated what was the foundation of his arguments in support of colonization in Africa and what would become the basis of his praxis at the turn of the century. His analysis and representation of Africans had become more scientific than his former approaches that were saturated by missionizing Christianity.

In African Life and Customs his usage of scientific racial ideology took a form that shifted from a monotheistic advocacy of pan-African nationalism to an Africanized, pantheistic pan-Africanism, one that would have a significant impact on the later development of Du Boisian Afrocentrism in the early twentieth century and cultural Afrocentrism of the mid-twentieth century and beyond (Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Afrotopia: The Roots of African American Popular History). . . .

Africa had its own ancient traditions, traditions that Blyden, as we have seen, had earlier claimed that Africans did not possess. His reference to “Gold Coast Native Institutions,” a work by one of his disciples, Joseph Ephraim Casely Hayford, revealed Blyden's morphed understanding and representation of Africans:

“Spiritualism,” according to Blyden, was central to African epistemologies. “Everywhere in Pagan Africa there is this intercourse.” He further suggested, “Spiritualism is penetrating the higher circles of Society” (African Life and Customs  71-72). By this time, Blyden viewed Christianity from a spiritualist standpoint, arguing that the Christianity that was practiced in the Atlantic world was not the doctrine promulgated by Jesus. His dismissal of Christianity did not entail a rejection of the message of Jesus himself. Blyden's approach was now defined by an African primordialism that incorporated, or assimilated, the Gospels.

Blyden was convinced during the latter years of his life and travels in Africa and the Atlantic world that racial distinctions determined the existence of all human beings. His was not a hierarchical envisioning of humanity. But he fervently believed that races developed along distinct lines and that the efforts of Christian missionaries had an especially deleterious effect upon the development of Africans. He felt that an appreciation of native laws, customs, and societies was the best approach to pan-Africanism in the twentieth century. Technological advances in transportation such as the steamship and the railway; the pressures of the industrializing Atlantic market economy; increases in the number of books and newspapers available to natives; increasing literacy in the English language among natives; and the increasing number of natives who travelled to Europe in order to “see things for themselves” had led to monumental changes in Africa.

Africans were becoming increasingly aware of the imperfections of the Western world. Blyden stated,

Blyden's ideological formulations in African Life and Customs stemmed not only from his travels, but also in conjunction with his evolving autobiography as a minister of Christianity and later as a self-proclaimed “Minister of Truth” upon resigning from the Presbyterian Church in September 1886.

The self-reflexive writings of Blyden were a precursor to “African modes of self-writing” that emerged among colonial and postcolonial African intellectuals during the twentieth century, a mode of writing that breathed new life into African struggles for independence and truth. Blyden's conservative yet revolutionary ideas played a major role in the development of black nationalism and pan-Africanism during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.—CGT

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African Life and Customs By Edward W. Blyden African Life and Customs is an essential collection of Edward Wilmont Blyden's articles that examines the socioeconomic structure of African society. A native of St. Thomas, West Indies, Blyden (1832-1912) lived most of his life on the African continent. He was an accomplished educator, linguist, writer, and world traveler, who strongly defended the unique character of African and its people. In African life and Customs, Blyden examined the culture of pure Africans those untouched by European and Asiatic influences. He identified the family as the basic unit in African society and polygamy as the foundation of African families. He described African social systems as cooperative; everyone worked for each other. No one went without work, food, or clothing. Blyden challenged white racial theorists who held Africans were inferior and whose arguments supported their preconceived ideas. He assumed Africans to be distinct rather than inferior, and he analyzed African culture within the context of African social experiences.

Although some regarded Blyden s views as controversial during his time, today, upon reevaluation, his work is seen by many as an important attempt to perform a holistic analysis of African society. African Life and Customs is an impressive African centered interpretation of African culture.

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Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race By Edward W. Blyden As a writer, Blyden is regarded widely as the "father of Pan-Africanism". His major work, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (1887), promoted the idea that Islam, a major religion in sub-Saharan Africa, has a more unifying and fulfilling effect on sub-Saharan Africans than Christianity. Also a major religion in Africa, the latter was introduced mostly by European colonizers and Blyden believed it had a demoralizing effect, although he continued to be a Christian. He thought Islam was more authentically African, although it had been introduced by Arab colonizers. This work was controversial in Great Britain, both for its subject and because many people at first did not believe that a black African had written it. In later printings, Blyden included his photograph as the frontispiece.—Wikipedia

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Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader Edited by Robert S. Levine Introduction Martin Robison Delany (1812-85) lived an extraordinarily complex life as a social activist and reformer, black nationalist, abolitionist, physician, reporter and editor, explorer, jurist, realtor, politician, publisher, educator, army officer, ethnographer, novelist, and political and legal theorist. A sketch of his career can only hint at the range of his interests, activities, and accomplishments.

Born free in Charles Town, Virginia (now West Virginia), the son of a free seamstress and a plantation slave, Delany in the early 1820s was taken by his mother to western Pennsylvania after Virginia authorities threatened to imprison her for teaching her children to read and write.

In 1831 he moved to Pittsburgh, where he studied with Lewis Woodson and other black leaders, and began his lifelong commitment to projects of black elevation. He organized and attended black conventions during the 1830s and 1840s and during this same period apprenticed as a doctor and began his own medical practice. In 1843 he founded one of the earliest African American newspapers, the Mystery, which he edited until 1847. In late 1847 he left the Mystery and teamed up with Frederick Douglass to coedit the North Star, the most influential African American newspaper of the period. After an approximately eighteen-month stint with Douglass, Delany attended Harvard Medical School for several months but was dismissed because of his color.

Outraged by Harvard's racism and the Compromise of 1850, in 1852 he published The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, a book-length critique of the failure of the nation to extend the rights of citizenship to African Americans, and a book that concludes by arguing for black emigration to Central and South America or the Caribbean. Delany's emigrationism conflicted sharply with Douglass's integrationist vision of black elevation in the United States. In response to Douglass's national black convention of 1853, Delany in 1854 organized and chaired a national black emigrationist convention, where he delivered "The Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent," the most important statement on black emigration published before the Civil War.

In 1856 Delany moved to Canada, where he set up a medical practice, wrote regularly for Mary Ann Shadd Cary's Provincial Freeman, and met with the radical abolitionist John Brown to discuss the possibility of fomenting a slave insurrection in the United States. During the late 1850s his views on emigration underwent a significant change. Instead of advocating black emigration to the southern Americas, he now argued for African American emigration to Africa. By 1859 he had obtained the funds that allowed him to tour the Niger Valley, and in December of that year he signed a treaty with the Alake (king) of Abeokuta that gave him the land necessary to establish an African American settlement in West Africa.

In search of financial support for the project, he toured Great Britain and garnered international attention for his participation at the 1860 International Statistical Congress in London. Around this same time he published a serialized novel, Blake (1859, 1861-62) in an African American journal. He also published a book-length account of his travels and negotiations in Africa, Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party (1861). Delany's African project collapsed in the early 1860s when the Alake renounced the treaty, and by 1863 he was recruiting black troops for the Union army.

From 1863 to 1877, Delany recommitted himself to the integrationist U.S. nationalistic vision that had been central to his work with Douglass at the North Star. He achieved national fame for meeting with Abraham Lincoln in 1865 and shortly thereafter receiving a commission as the first black major in the Union army. Following the war, Delany served for three years as an officer at the Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina, and he remained in South Carolina through the late 1870s as he attempted to make Reconstruction work in a stronghold of the former Confederacy. He published two major pamphlets for newly enfranchised African Americans, University Pamphlets (1870) and Homes for the Freedmen (1871), and in 1874 ran for lieutenant governor of South Carolina on the Independent Republican slate, losing by only 14,000 votes.

Disillusioned by the Republicans' half-hearted commitment to Reconstruction, Delany in 1876 endorsed Wade Hampton, the Democratic candidate for governor of South Carolina, and was nearly killed by shots from a black militia at a Hampton rally. Hampton won the election, but Reconstruction came to an end in 1877, and a disillusioned Delany turned his attention to helping southern blacks who wished to emigrate to Liberia. In 1879, as he was seeking a federal appointment that would allow him to finance his own emigration to Africa, he published Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color (1879), an ethnographic study that, like his earlier Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry (1853), expressed a Pan-African pride in blacks' historical, cultural, and racial ties to Africa.

Surveying Delany's dynamic and creative career a year after his death in 1885, the African Methodist Episcopal priest James T. Holly proclaimed that Delany was "one of the great men of this age," a person whose life was "filled with noble purposes, high resolves, and ceaseless activities for the welfare of the race with which he was identified," and who "has given us the standard of measurement of all the men of our race, past, present, and to come, in the work of negro elevation in the United States of America." . . . .—UNCPress

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Robert S. Levine is professor of English and director of graduate studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. His books include Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the Politics of Representative Identity.

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Reviews

Martin R. Delany (1812-85) has been called the "Father of Black Nationalism," but his extraordinary career also encompassed the roles of abolitionist, physician, editor, explorer, politician, army officer, novelist, and political theorist. Despite his enormous influence in the nineteenth century, and his continuing influence on black nationalist thought in the twentieth century, Delany has remained a relatively obscure figure in U.S. culture, generally portrayed as a radical separatist at odds with the more integrationist Frederick Douglass.

This pioneering documentary collection offers readers a chance to discover, or rediscover, Delany in all his complexity. Through nearly 100 documents--approximately two-thirds of which have not been reprinted since their initial nineteenth-century publications--it traces the full sweep of his fascinating career. Included are selections from Delany's early journalism, his emigrationist writings of the 1850s, his 1859-62 novel, Blake (one of the first African American novels published in the United States), and his later writings on Reconstruction. Incisive and shrewd, angry and witty, Delany's words influenced key nineteenth-century debates on race and nation, addressing issues that remain pressing in our own time.—Publisher. UNC Press

Editor Levine's anthology provides a rich picture of the life and career of an extraordinary man. Written in Delaney's words, it collectively serves as a stirring, personal history of the tumultuous civil rights movement, from slavery to the beginnings of Jim Crow.—Charleston Post and Courier

Rich in its implications for the present and future, this superb gathering of source material should be of particular value to students of American culture, the African diaspora, and American history. An indispensable work that should quickly take its place among the foremost documentaries of our time.—Sterling Stuckey, University of California, Riverside

In this richly diverse but also in-depth collection, Robert Levine allows Martin R. Delany to reveal himself to us in all his confrontational, confounding complexity. Delany's writings, in turn, provide provocative and informative details about ways in which nineteenth-century African Americans argued and acted to define themselves in the United States and in the African diaspora. Levine's judicious selections and erudite annotations provide just the right accompaniment to Delany's strong and vibrant voice.—Frances Smith Foster, Emory University

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Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader Edited by Robert S. Levine   Acknowledgments Introduction A Note on the Texts   Part 1. Pittsburgh, the Mystery, Freemasonry   Prospectus of the Mystery Not Fair Liberty or Death Young Women Self-Elevation Tract Society Farewell to Readers of the Mystery Eulogy on the Life and Character of the Rev. Fayette Davis The Origin and Objects of Ancient Freemasonry   Part 2. The North Star   Western Tour for the North Star True Patriotism Sound the Alarm Liberia Political Economy Domestic Economy Southern Customs--Madame Chevalier Annexation of Cuba The Redemption of Cuba Letter to M. H. Burnham, 5 October 1849 Delany and Frederick Douglass on Samuel R. Ward   Part 3. Debating Black Emigration   Protest against the First Resolution of the North American Convention The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States Letter to Oliver Johnson, 30 April 1852 Letter to William Lloyd Garrison, 14 May 1852 Letter to Frederick Douglass, 10 July 1852 Delany and Douglass on Uncle Tom's Cabin Letter to Douglass, 30 May 1853 Call for a National Emigration Convention of Colored Men Letter to Douglass, 7 November 1853 Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent Political Aspect of the Colored People of the United States What Does It Mean? Letter to Garrison, 19 February 1859 Blake; or, The Huts of America Comets   Part 4. Africa   A Project for an Expedition of Adventure Letter to Henry Ward Beecher, 17 June 1858 Canada.--;Captain John Brown Martin R. Delany in Liberia Official Report of the Niger Valley Exploring Party The International Statistical Congress Africa and the African Race Letter to James T. Holly, 15 January 1861 Letter to Robert Hamilton, 28 September 1861 Letter to James McCune Smith, 11 January 1862 Letter to the Weekly Anglo-African, 22 January 1862 The Moral and Social Aspect of Africa   Part 5. Civil War and Reconstruction   Letter to Edwin M. Stanton, 15 December 1863 The Council-Chamber.--President Lincoln The Colored Citizens of Xenia Monument to President Lincoln: Two Documents Prospects of the Freedmen of Hilton Head Triple Alliance Letter to the Colored Delegation, 22 February 1866 Letter to Andrew Johnson, 25 July 1866 Letter to Henry Highland Garnet, 27 July 1867 Reflections on the War University Pamphlets Homes for the Freedmen Delany and Frederick Douglass, Letter Exchange, 1871 Delany for Lieutenant Governor: Two Speeches The South and Its Foes Delany for Hampton Politics on Edisto Island   Part 6. The Republic of Liberia   Letter on President Warner of Liberia, 1866 The African Exodus Principia of Ethnology: The Origin of Races and Color Letter to William Coppinger, 18 December 1880 Chronology Selected Bibliography Index

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Although the book takes its subject only up to 1966—when Marshall Stearns died of a heart attack shortly after the manuscript was completed—it's still essential reading for anyone interested in jazz, in dance, and in the American musical theater.—FindArticles

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AALBC.com's 25 Best Selling Books

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Fiction

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#10 - John Henrik Clarke and the Power of Africana History  by Ahati N. N. Toure

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#19 - John Oliver Killens: A Life of Black Literary Activism by Keith Gilyard

#20 - Alain L. Locke: The Biography of a Philosopher by Leonard Harris

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#22 - 2012 Guide to Literary Agents by Chuck Sambuchino
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#24 - 101 Things Every Boy/Young Man of Color Should Know by LaMarr Darnell Shields

#25 - Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class  by Lisa B. Thompson

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Salvage the Bones A Novel by Jesmyn Ward On one level, Salvage the Bones is a simple story about a poor black family that’s about to be trashed by one of the most deadly hurricanes in U.S. history. What makes the novel so powerful, though, is the way Ward winds private passions with that menace gathering force out in the Gulf of Mexico. Without a hint of pretension, in the simple lives of these poor people living among chickens and abandoned cars, she evokes the tenacious love and desperation of classical tragedy. The force that pushes back against Katrina’s inexorable winds is the voice of Ward’s narrator, a 14-year-old girl named Esch, the only daughter among four siblings. Precocious, passionate and sensitive, she speaks almost entirely in phrases soaked in her family’s raw land. Everything here is gritty, loamy and alive, as though the very soil were animated. Her brother’s “blood smells like wet hot earth after summer rain. . . . His scalp looks like fresh turned dirt.” Her father’s hands “are like gravel,” while her own hand “slides through his grip like a wet fish,” and a handsome boy’s “muscles jabbered like chickens.” Admittedly, Ward can push so hard on this simile-obsessed style that her paragraphs risk sounding like a compost heap, but this isn’t usually just metaphor for metaphor’s sake. She conveys something fundamental about Esch’s fluid state of mind: her figurative sense of the world in which all things correspond and connect. She and her brothers live in a ramshackle house steeped in grief since their mother died giving birth to her last child. . . . What remains, what’s salvaged, is something indomitable in these tough siblings, the strength of their love, the permanence of their devotion.—WashingtonPost

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Incognegro: A Memoir of Exile and Apartheid By  Frank B. Wilderson, III Wilderson, a professor, writer and filmmaker from the Midwest, presents a gripping account of his role in the downfall of South African apartheid as one of only two black Americans in the African National Congress (ANC). After marrying a South African law student, Wilderson reluctantly returns with her to South Africa in the early 1990s, where he teaches Johannesburg and Soweto students, and soon joins the military wing of the ANC. Wilderson's stinging portrait of Nelson Mandela as a petulant elder eager to accommodate his white countrymen will jolt readers who've accepted the reverential treatment usually accorded him. After the assassination of Mandela's rival, South African Communist Party leader Chris Hani, Mandela's regime deems Wilderson's public questions a threat to national security; soon, having lost his stomach for the cause, he returns to America. Wilderson has a distinct, powerful voice and a strong story that shuffles between the indignities of Johannesburg life and his early years in Minneapolis, the precocious child of academics who barely tolerate his emerging political consciousness. Wilderson's observations about love within and across the color line and cultural divides are as provocative as his politics; despite some distracting digressions, this is a riveting memoir of apartheid's last days.—Publishers Weekly

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The White Masters of the World

From The World and Africa, 1965

By W. E. B. Du Bois

W. E. B. Du Bois’ Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization (Fletcher)

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Ancient African Nations

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posted 18 November 2007