Martin Robison Delany was the first black American to espouse black nationalism and the first black American Pan-Africanist. A man whose political views were far ahead of his time, he was committed not only to the abolition of slavery but also to the total elevation of black people. An individual of many callings, Delany was a family man, a writer and editor, a practicing physician, a lecturer, an African explorer, the first black major in the United States Army, a trial justice, an ethnologist, and a Reconstruction political activist, who never wavered in his fierce pride in blackness and Africa. Delany's views, evident in his writings and lectures, often alienated him from both black and white Americans who, at best, espoused only an accommodationist philosophy. Notably Delany's Blake; or the Huts of America (1859) was the third novel written by a black American and the first by a black...