Tim Wise: Anti-Racist Activist
Posted in Uncategorized on May 8th, 2012 Comments
Tim Wise is among the most prominent anti-racist writers and educators in the United States. Professor Michael Eric Dyson of Georgetown University calls him "One of the most brilliant, articulate and courageous critics of white privilege in the nation." In 2010, Tim was named one of "25 Visionaries Who are Changing Your World," by Utne Reader. Tim has spoken in all 50 states of the U.S., on over 800 college and high school campuses, and to community groups across the nation, including last year at General Assembly of Unitarian Universalists. Tim has also lectured internationally in Canada and Bermuda on issues of comparative racism, race and education, racism and religion, and racism in the labor market.
He spoke at the First Unitarian Church on May 6, 2012 as part of the 200th Birthday of Dr. Martin R. Delany. Martin R. Delany lived an extraordinarily life as a social activist and reformer, black nationalist, abolitionist, physician, reporter and editor, explorer, jurist, realtor, politician, publisher, educator, army officer, ethnographer, novelist, and political and legal theorist.
Born on May 6, 1812, free, in the slave state of Virginia, Martin Delany's response to white supremacy was to create an Africanist vision of Black Nationalism and Pan-Africanism. A pivotal person of the mid-nineteenth century, he is not well known today. He published Mystery, one of the first African-American newspapers, in Pittsburgh in 1843, and co-edited North Star with Frederick Douglass in 1847. He attended Harvard Medical School in 1850, but was expelled by Oliver Wendell Holmes, then president of Harvard, in response to white student's refusal to attend class with a "colored." Delany organized a number of "emigration" conventions to organize a "back to Africa" movement in the United States and Canada in1850's. He did not just talk about emigration, in 1959 he led an expedition to the Niger Valley, where he negotiated a treaty with the kings of the Yoruba for African-Americans to emigrate. His novel, Blake or the Huts of America, published as a serial in The Anglo-African Magazine in 1859 is one of the first presentations of an African American hero in literature and perhaps the first novel by an African American male. Delany became a recruiter for the Union Army in1863 and after meeting with President Lincoln was appointed the first African American officer, a Major, in the Union Army in1865. He worked with the Freedmen's Bureau in South Carolina during Reconstruction and then stayed in Charleston, South Carolina until 1884. During this period he became involved in Charleston real estate and politics, becoming a judge in 1875. Martin R. Delany died in Wilberforce, Ohio on January 24, 1885.
