When racist Harvard abused a Pittsburgh doctor

In the mode of Capt. Renault in the WW II film Casablanca, some readers may be shocked, shocked to discover that prestigious American schools have slavery connections. One of them involves Pittsburgh and a Black resident of the city mistreated by Harvard Medical School.

Speaking of Harvard, in late April America’s oldest and wealthiest university announced it will invest $100 million in penance for getting rich off slavery. The descendants of both the 70 slaves held by presidents, donors, faculty and staff and the university’s Indigenous victims are to benefit. President Lawrence Bacow announced that a committee will recommend specifics.

Harvard follows Georgetown University in doing this. In 2016, Georgetown announced open enrollment for descendants of 272 slaves it sold to avoid bankruptcy in 1838. Less noise was made about the reality that its president from 1874 to 1883, Father Patrick Francis Healy had himself been a slave, as were his high-ranking Jesuit siblings.

Their long suffering Black mother was the concubine of their white Irish immigrant father. Mom remained behind in Georgia as their father sent her children sent north for education and freedom, never to be seen by her again before her death. It appears that many of the children lived as white people.

This most recent news about Harvard and slavery surfaces as the U.S. Supreme Court is poised to decide the matter of whether Harvard (and the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill) unlawfully racially discriminates in admissions. Newly confirmed for a seat on the Court is Harvard double alumnus and Harvard board official, Ketanji Brown Jackson. She plans to recuse herself in the case.

Here in Pittsburgh, where slavery endured until 1856, local Black medicine man Martin Delany was declared ready for formal medical education by his white mentors. They included Dr. Francis Julius LeMoyne (benefactor of Black LeMoyne-Owen College in Memphis).

Delany was born in 1812 in Charles Town, Va., which is West Virginia today. Although his father was a slave, his mother was not. Having migrated to Pittsburgh, he married into the city’s wealthiest Black family when he wed Catherine Richards, whose mother was Irish. Her Black father, Charles, and grandfather, Benjamin, had signed the petition to create Allegheny County in 1787.

Catherine and Martin Delany were an abolitionist power couple. He created the advocacy newspaper, The Mystery. She sold subscriptions. He also collaborated on the Frederick Douglass owned North Star newspaper, which advocated the demise of slavery.

In 1850, Delany was admitted to Harvard medical school with with two other young Black men. Although parts of 1840s Boston and Cambridge were hotbeds of abolitionism, in those same sectors belief in abolition did not necessarily mean belief in equality.

The dean of Harvard’s medical school was Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., father of the future U.S. Supreme Court justice. Opposition to the Black men enrolled at the school was intense, although not unanimous.

Although he had admitted the students, only three weeks into their first semester, Dean Holmes wrote to the trio, dismissing them for studying Ivy League medicine while Black. That ended the formal medical education of Martin Delany, but his civil rights activism cranked up, even as his epidemic-driven medical practice activities in Downtown Pittsburgh picked up as well.

Angered by the Harvard outrage, the doctor saw Black nationalism as an attractive solution. He wrote “The Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States, Politically Considered” in 1852. He saw no viable future for Blacks in America. His brand of Black nationalism saw Blacks settling in the Caribbean or South America.

During America’s attack against itself — the Civil War — President Abraham Lincoln appointed Maj. Martin Delany the first Black line officer in U.S. Army history.

The historian Sam Black, director of African American Programs at the Heinz History Center, presents a compelling examination of the life and times of Martin Robison Delany in the long-running From Slavery to Freedom exhibition. Including a life-sized rendering of the hero, the presentation can be experienced at Pittsburgh’s Heinz History Center.