Martin Robinson Delany to Frederick Douglass, November 22, 1853
MARTIN ROBINSON DELANY TO FREDERICK DOUGLASS
Pittsburgh, [Pa.] 22 Nov[ember] 1853.
FREDERICK DOUGLASS, ESQ. :—
According to the note of explanation some time since received from you,1This communication from Douglass to Martin R. Delany has not survived.
I am satisfied to exonerate you from any design at disparagement, in the
publication of the private note from me in connection with the first issue
of the Call for a National Emigration Convention.2The National Emigration Convention of Colored People, led by the African American nationalist Martin R. Delany, was held at the Congregational Church in Cleveland, Ohio, on 24-26 August 1854. Over one hundred delegates, including twenty-four women, met to discuss the practicality of emigration. Only those promoting emigration were allowed to participate, and a representative of the opposition, John Malvin, was denied the opportunity to speak. The National Board of Commissioners was formed to compete with Douglass’s National Council and to formulate a plan to assist blacks with emigration. As a temporary solution, the board recommended buying land in Canada, but eventually wanted to enable blacks to relocate to the West Indies or to South and Central America. Proceedings of the National Emigration Convention of Colored People, 1854, 5, 7, 21, 28, 30, 37, 43; Levine, Politics of Representative Identity, 97, David D. Van Tassel and John J. Grabowski, eds., The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History (Bloomington, Ind., 1996), 732. This I should have, in
justice to you, published sooner, but that you were absent from home some
time after I received your note; and the EDITOR3William Howard Day. of the Aliened American
will please do me the favor to publish so much of my note as pertains to
this explanation
In your paper of Nov. 18th, No. 48, Vol. 6, in remarking upon my note
to Mr. JOHN JONES,4John Jones (1816-79), often referred to by contemporaries and the press as the “most prominent colored citizen of Chicago," was the freeborn son of a free mulatto mother and a German named Bromfield. A native of Greene County, North Carolina, Jones was later apprenticed to a Tennessee tailor. Jones worked until he could save $100, then moved in 1841 to Alton, Illinois, and married Mary Richardson, whom he had met in Tennessee. In 1845 the couple moved to Chicago, where Jones taught himself to read and write and where he set up a tailor shop that catered primarily to whites. A successful businessman, Jones owned property worth an estimated $85,000 before Chicago’s Great Fire of 1871. He lectured throughout Illinois, stressing economic success and social integration as fundamental goals for black advancement. He was vice president of the 1853 Colored National Convention held in Rochester, New York, and participated in the Illinois Colored Convention of 1856. Jones’s speaking took on added fervor in 1853 when he fought laws discouraging black migration to Illinois, and again in 1864 when he led the successful fight for the repeal of Black Laws. Jones’s home was a way station for the Underground Railroad and a meeting place and guest home for fellow abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and John Brown. Lib., 18 May 1860; Chicago Tribune, 12 March 1875, 22 May 1879; Allen H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto, 1890-1920 (Chicago, 1967), 6, 55, 77, 107, 111; Harold F. Gosnell, Negro Politicians: The Rise of Negro Politics in Chicago (1935; Chicago, 1967), 81-82, 111; Arna Bontemps and Jack Conroy, They Seek a City (Garden City, N.Y., 1945), 28-36; DANB, 366-67. of Illinois, among other things you say:
“The reader, to understand the injustice of this letter, should bear in
mind that Mr. JONES has never written one word for our columns, in any
manner reflecting upon M. R. Delany.”
In your paper of October 28th,5Antiemigration resolutions adopted at the Illinois Colored State Convention were published by John Jones, chair of the committee, in the 28 October 1853 issue of Frederick Douglass’ Paper. In a letter to Douglass, published in the 18 November 1853 issue of Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Delany took issue with the resolution, suggesting that Jones and his committee had impugned Delany’s character and his motives. Douglass followed the publication of Delany’s letter with a brief response: “Well; this is decidedly one of the most querulous, dictatorial, uncharitable, hasty, and unprovoked assaults upon a worthy man which it has been our fortune or misfortune to meet with. The reader, to understand the injustice of this letter, should bear in mind that Mr. Jones has never written one word for our columns, in any manner reflecting upon M. R. Delany.” FDP, 28 October, 18 November 1853. No. 25, I also find the following:
“We copy from the Chicago Daily Tribune the resolutions on Colo-
nization, submitted by the Chairman of the Committee, JOHN JONES, and
adopted by the Convention.”
After coupling my name with the odious enemies of our race, Coloni-
zationists, by a preceding resolution on that subject, then comes the reso-
lution “reflecting upon M. R. Delany:”
“Resolved, That we are opposed to the Call for a National Emigration
Convention, as put forth by M. R. DELANY; and we discover in it a spirit
of disunion, which, if encouraged, will prove fatal to our hopes and aspi-
rations as a people in this country.”
The italics are my own. I know of no other logical meaning to apply
to the term spirit, when used in such a connection, than design; this is its
true meaning, and nothing else. How then comes Mr. Douglass to attempt
to exonerate Mr. Jones from reflecting on me, by the evasion that he “had
never written one word for HIS columns, in any manner reflecting upon
M. R. Delany.” If not written for your columns, they were written and re-
ported by Mr. JONES, and copied into your columns; and you either meant
something or nothing by publishing them, before you had published any
other item of the proceedings of that body. You call it dictatorial, because
a man will not permit himself, designedly, to be misrepresented. Perhaps
you, and those who think with you, may misrepresent others as you think
proper, and no one dare to question your right to do so. If this be so, please
omit me in the general conclusion. I thank you for permitting my note
to appear in your columns, humbly endeavoring to avoid the charge of
“dictation.”
All I ask is not to be misrepresented. I more than ask it—I demand it,
as I will not as I never have done, intentionally misrepresented any person.
Yours for God and humanity,
M. R. DELANY.
PLSr: FDP, 2 December 1853.