“Martin Delany’s Blake and the Transnational Politics of Property.” American Literary History 15, no. “Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy.” African American Review 34, no. Project Avalon, Yale University, (accessed June 6,2008).īrooks, Joanna. “The Rights of Persons.” Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), 412. Project Avalon, Yale University, (accessed June 6, 2008).īlackstone, William. “On Praemunire.” Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), 114. “’serving Two Masters’: Integration Ideals and Client Interests in School Desegregation Litigation.” Yale Law Journal 85, no. New York: Basic Books, 1987.īell, Derrick. And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice. American Periodicals Series Online, 1740–1900, ProQuest Information and Learning Company, (accessed May 1,2007).īell, Derrick. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.Īnnual Meeting of the Colonization Society. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. Instead, a great deal of critical attention has focused on African Americans as subject to American law rather than agents of its production. The contributions of Delany and other African American writers to American legal thought often have been overlooked because many were not practicing attorneys. 1 Furthermore, he was part of a larger literary community in which African American writers challenged white readings of the Constitution and judicial decisions regarding African American citizenship, personal freedom, and property in the pages of the periodical press. He drew on his knowledge of jurisprudence while debating the meaning of the Constitution with Frederick Douglass in the pages of The North Star. Delany himself was familiar with statutory law and British and American common law. He believed that African Americans had to be well versed in the law in order to make effective arguments against slavery and racism. While perhaps best known today for his fictional interventions into the cultural and legal milieu of the 1850s, Delany had a lifelong interest in the law. Martin Robison Delany’s engagement with the American legal system extended far beyond the pages of his first and only novel, Blake or, The Huts of America (published serially 1859, 1861–62).

Blake by martin delany