Fourth Annual Martin R. Delany Symposium

Join the African American Program for the Fourth Annual Martin R. Delany Symposium: Organizing and Activism.

The symposium will offer presentations and panels that address organizing and activism rooted in the life, ideas, and legacy of Delany, one the nation’s most influential African American leaders in the 19th century.

Tamika Nunley, Ph.D., William and Sue Gross Professor of History at Duke University, will deliver the keynote address, “At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities,” followed by a question-and-answer session.

In addition to the keynote address, the symposium will feature three panel discussions with visiting scholars from universities and institutions across the country. These sessions will explore Delany’s political thought and activism, Black-led emigration movements, journalism and print culture, military service, gender, and debates over freedom, citizenship, and belonging in the 19th century. Please refer to the schedule below to see a full list of presenters and panel topics.
The program also includes a continental breakfast prior to the Symposium academic program.

Admission

Admission to the symposium costs $50 for non-members, $20 for History Center members and $10 for college students with valid ID. The program will be held in the museum’s fifth floor Mueller Center.

Program admission includes full access to History Center exhibitions.

For more information please contact, Samuel W Black, director of the African American Program, at [email protected].

Symposium Schedule

• 8:30 a.m. – Doors open and continental breakfast

• 9 a.m. – Welcome with Samuel W Black, Director of the African American Program

• 9:10 a.m. – Keynote address and Q&A with Tamika Nunley, Ph.D.

• 10:15 a.m. – Panel 1 begins

• “Martin Robison Delany: Unacknowledged and Unappreciated American Political Theorist” with Tunde Adeleke, emeritus professor, Iowa State University

• “Lost Abolitionist Autograph Book from the Little Town that Ignited the Civil War” with Joel Rothschild, collector and historian

• “Cuba, Nevada, and the Uncertainties of Reconstruction in Thomas Detter’s ‘Octoroon Slave of Cuba’” with Maria Windell, University of Colorado

• 11:15 – Lunch

• 12:05 p.m. – Panel 2 begins

• “To Organize a People for Themselves: Martin Delany and the National Emigration Convention of Colored People” with Trey Daniel, Harvard University

• “Journeys to Africa: Emigration as a Black-led Movement”, with Dolly L. Marshall, historian and preservationist

• “Beyond Missionary Limits: Martin Delany’s Vision and Andrew Cartwright’s Religious Organizing in 1870s Liberia” with Edudzi David Sallah, Gettysburg College

• “From Escape to Emigration: Black Organizing and Utopia in Martin Delany’s Blake” with Adam Syvertsen, Northwestern University

• 12:45 p.m. – Panel 3 begins

• “Military Service and the American Identity: The Reconstruction of the Meaning of Masculinity and Service” with Rozey Hill, data curator, Cornell University

• “Enduring in the Spirit of Martin R. Delany’s Black Liberation Journalism” with Donald Scott, Sr., author, historian, journalist

• “Race and the Fight Over Freedom, Citizenship, and Belonging in Southwestern Pennsylvania” with Lucien Holness, Pennsylvania State University

• “Black Women and Black Nationality in the Nineteenth Century” with Selena Sanderfer Doss, Western Kentucky University

• 1:50 p.m. – Book signing and reception

About the Keynote Speaker

Tamika Nunley is Research Professor of History at Duke University. Along with articles, essays, and reviews, she is the author of At the Threshold of Liberty: Women, Slavery, and Shifting Identities in Washington, D.C. which received the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award, the Pauli Murray Book Prize, and the Mary Kelley Book Prize. Her article, “Thrice Condemned’: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Practice of Leniency in Antebellum Courts,” received the Letitia Woods Brown prize for best article in African American Women’s History and the Anne Braden Prize for best article in Southern Women’s History. Nunley recently released her new book, The Demands of Justice: Enslaved Women, Capital Crime and Clemency in Early Virginia with the University of North Carolina Press. Her work has been featured in The Washington Post, NewsOne, Smithsonian Magazine, Ms. Magazine, and Fortune Magazine. In 2023, the Librarian of Congress named her the Cary and Ann Maguire Chair in Ethics and American history.

About Martin R. Delany

Born in Charles Town, Va. to a free mother, Pati, and enslaved father, Samuel, Delany lived under racial oppression but accomplished much in the years before and after the Civil War. Pittsburgh was where his education in abolitionism, enterprise, medicine, and journalism set him apart from other abolitionists, especially in the region.

In 1843, Delany became publisher of the first African American newspaper west of the Allegheny Mountains, The Mystery. In the 1850s, he enrolled in Harvard Medical School and assumed the leadership of the National Emigration Convention, a decade before President Lincoln would commission him a Major of the 104th United States Colored Infantry in 1865, making him the highest ranking African American field officer in the U.S. Army.