In October 1876, Martin Delany, the Black abolitionist later called the father of Black nationalism, endorsed Democratic Party candidate Wade Hampton for Governor from a platform in South Carolina. Black people in the crowd booed him from the stage. Very few would follow Delany’s defection to the Democrats that election. Hundreds would be killed by Democrat mobs as they tried to vote against Hampton, the ex-Confederate General who had been among the nation’s wealthiest slaveholders. Hampton’s victory would usher in a “Redeemer” government to end Reconstruction in the Blackest state in the Union.
Why did Delany endorse Hampton? It is the great question of his political career, if often overlooked in celebrations of his radicalism. In some accounts, it evidences Delany’s contrarian inconsistency—once to the left of Frederick Douglass, had he shifted to the right? One account implies that Delany owed Hampton a political favor for securing a pardon from conviction for embezzling church funds. Others suggest, incongruously, he was choosing class over race. In some accounts, Delany just got old, developing, as many old radicals do, the “mature intelligence and discretional wisdom,” to temper the ambitions of younger activists. In all histories, the Hampton endorsement was a mistake. Delany saw it that way too. After 1876, he returned to ideas about emigration to Liberia, with little apparent attention to the once all-consuming politics of Reconstruction.
Delany was one of the century’s great theorists of race and his 1870s shift remains an irreconcilable contradiction in that thinking. The shift, however, also evidences a consistent principle in his political thinking: his reflex to see in all events new possibilities for organizing. What makes Delany stand out as a thinker, especially compared to other prominent anti-slavery activists like Douglass, Garrison, and Stowe who believed in moving people by moral argument from one position to another, was his insistence on interest-based coalitions. He believed that events created new combinations of political power, and, reactive to events, one could force the emergence of new coalitions. This through-line, evident in both his fiction and his political prose, explains not only his late-Reconstruction defection to the Democrats, but also his strategies for revolt and revolution.