The Film: Interview Transcripts: John Ford

John Ford, historian and school programs director, Sen. John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center, on Martin Delaney and Charles Avery

Martin Delaney is one of my heroes.  He was a tremendous individual.  He migrated to Pittsburgh, and he was an extremely intelligent young man who ultimately went to Harvard Medical School in order to study.  Of course, he made that exodus out of Harvard because they would not accept him as being equal to them, but he continued to study medicine and became Pittsburgh’s first physician. 

Martin Delaney was the first black officer in the Civil War, which ultimately started the universal march for freedom for African-Americans.  He published a newspaper in Pittsburgh called The Mystery, and he did this as a consequence of his alignment with Frederick Douglass, who was in New York at the time.  

Delaney’s partnership with Charles Avery, a member of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society and a philanthropist who established Avery College for African Americans, was one of mutual respect and a mutual goal.  When you have mutual respect for each other and a mutual goal, a lot can be accomplished, and collectively, those two could be responsible for the sanctuary that Africans had in the Pittsburgh area, and also the progress that was made certainly directly before and after the Civil War.

Pittsburgh’s black population

communication within the
African-American community

dialogue between the races

proving Vasco da Gama wrong

.