SOURCE: “The Drift toward Emigration,” in The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization 1787‐1863, University of Illinois Press, 1975, pp. 93‐133.

In the following excerpt, Miller discusses Delany's interaction with other leading figures in the abolitionist movement, his disappointment with their ideas, and his eventual espousal of Black separatism and emigration.

By the summer of 1851, when he first arrived in Canada to lecture on physiology in the weeks before the Toronto convention, Martin R. Delany no longer adhered to the traditional abolitionist shibboleths which he had espoused so frequently and effectively as an editor and orator during the 1840's. At that time he had combined militant abolitionism with less fiery activities on behalf of political antislavery, black suffrage, and the more amorphous principles of moral reform and the “elevation” of the race. After 1850, however, Delany emerged as a leading advocate of nationalist‐emigrationist positions and thus departed sharply...