Hubert Thomas Delany

Early life and education

Delany was the eighth of ten children born to the Rev. Henry Beard Delany (1858–1928), the first Black person elected Suffragan Bishop of the Episcopal Church in the United States, and Nannette James Logan Delany (1861–1956), an educator. His father, Henry Beard Delany was born into slavery in St. Mary's, Georgia. Delany was born and raised on the campus of St. Augustine's School (now University) in Raleigh, North Carolina, where his father was the Vice-Principal and his mother, a teacher and administrator. Delany was a 1919 graduate of the school.

His sisters Sadie and Bessie Delany were civil rights pioneers in their own right who co-authored the bestselling oral history Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years along with Amy Hill Hearth.

Throughout his early years, Delany believed he would follow in his fathers footsteps and become a clergyman within the Episcopal Church. Having grown up on the campus of historically black Saint Augustine's College where his parents taught, Delany had been protected from the rigid system of racial segregation that gripped North Carolina in the early twentieth century. After finishing high school, Delany soon followed his older siblings to New York City and attended the City College of New York. He worked his way through undergraduate college holding a job as a Red Cap railway Pullman porter at New York Penn Station. During his three years as a law student at NYU Law, Delany was also a teacher in Harlem elementary schools within the New York City Public School system.

First marriage

After receiving his law degree from New York University School of Law in 1926, Delany married the Harlem Renaissance figure Clarissa Scott Delany. Scott, a poet, essayist and educator was also a social worker with the National Urban League working to gather statistics for a "Study of Delinquent and Neglected Negro Children." The two were married only one year before Scott died from kidney disease in 1927.

Legal and political career

From 1926 until 1933, Delany served as Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York appointed by Charles H. Tuttle, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. By 1934, he was the highest paid African American federal appointee in the nation, and had won 493 of the 500 cases he had argued in U.S. District Court. Mayor LaGuardia named him tax commissioner and later a judge in the Court of Domestic Relations.

In 1929, Delany ran for Congress representing New York’s "old" twenty-first district (today's (2015) New York's 13th congressional district, incorporating neighborhoods of Harlem, Inwood, Marble Hill, Spanish Harlem, Washington Heights, and Morningside Heights) in the House of Representatives. After winning the Republican primary but losing the general election to Democrat Joseph A. Gavagan, he gained the respect and friendship of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. Delany won 26,666 (37.9%) of the 70,000 votes cast.

During the Harlem riot of 1935, Delany and Mayor LaGuardia walked through the streets together to try and quiet things down. After the riot, Mayor LaGuardia appointed Delany and others, including E. Franklin Frazier, Countee Cullen, and A. Philip Randolph, to the investigatory commission that found that the riot was caused not by communist agitators but by economic deprivation, racial discrimination, and an unresponsive city government.

Delany joined the law firm Mintzer, Todarelli and Kleid in 1933 but left in 1937 to run his own law practice. Among his many clients was the classical contralto Marian Anderson. In 1939, after the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) refused to allow Anderson to perform in Constitution Hall in Washington D.C., Delany introduced the resolution to the executive board of the NAACP that led to her performing instead on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial As a result of the ensuing furor around the Daughters of the American Revolution denying Anderson, thousands of DAR members, including First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt, resigned from the organization.

On January 1, 1942, Delany was appointed Justice of the Family Court by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia and served until 1955. During his tenure, Judge Delany established himself as a compassionate and humane Justice as well as a strong and passionate advocate for civil rights. His advice on juvenile issues was "eagerly sought by many individuals and organizations." His many admirers and colleagues cited the understanding, fairness and delicacy with which he approached his cases; detractors labeled him too “liberal.” His briefs were often interpreted by his critics as “left-wing views” and were used as the “rationale” for not reappointing him in 1955, despite being backed by several bar associations. The New York Times claimed that Mayor Robert F. Wagner declined to reappoint Delany because he held communist views; Delany believed he was not reappointed because of his vocal and public stand on civil rights and against second-class citizenship for Black Americans. The NAACP and the National Urban League stood up in support of Judge Delany and protested the Mayor’s decision.

Second marriage

Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia performed the marriage ceremony for Delany and his second wife, Willetta S. Mickey. She, a native of Yonkers, New York, attended Howard University and served as Delany's secretary at the Tax Commission. Mrs. Delany was Founder and President of Adopt-A-Child, an interracial interface program of 14 public and private agencies which came together to find homes for Black, Hispanic and minority children needing adoption who in her own words "were forced to spend their formative years in hospitals, shelters, institutions and boarding homes". She played a vital role in organizing forums and interstate conferences to discuss the inequities and unique issues related to their adoption.

First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt made a visit to Harlem N.Y. to support the efforts of the growing Spence-Chapin Adoption Service in 1954. A reception was given in her honor at the Delany home on 145th street and Riverside Drive (Manhattan) where Judge Delany and his wife Willetta became the first African American family to host an incumbent First Lady. Mrs. Willetta Delany was one of the earliest African American women on the Board of Spence-Chapin Adoption Service along with Mrs. Rachel Robinson, Mrs. Ralph Bunche and Marian Anderson. In support of the agency's outreach efforts, Eleanor Roosevelt was the featured speaker for a Spence-Chapin conference. Mrs. Roosevelt was quoted in The New York Times as saying, “No matter what the color of their skin, all our children must be looked at as the future rich heritage of the country.”

Second class treatment

In 1955, during a stay in Hartford, Connecticut to speak on juvenile delinquency, Judge Delany filed a complaint of second-class treatment with Hartford's Commission on Civil Rights. The Statler Hotel denied him a room even with a reservation, because he was Black. The hotel staff then offered him the use of a cot in a meeting room.

Trial attorney

In 1956, after retiring from the Domestic Relations Court, Delany continued to practice along with attorneys Emile Zola Berman Esq, A. Harold Frost Esq. and George J. Mintzer Esq. The firm litigated within all of the Courts of the State of New York, Federal District and Circuit Courts, and the Supreme Court of the United States.

Consultant to State of Israel

In the Spring of 1956, the Government of Israel invited Delany to Tel Aviv as consultant to the Minister of Justice to study juvenile delinquency and assist in the reorganization of the Domestic Relations Courts of the State of Israel. In late 1956, an article discussing his consultancy and findings was published as "Hubert Delany Reports on Israel" in the official NAACP publication The Crisis.

Martin Luther King trial of 1960

In late 1959, Martin Luther King Jr. was leaving Montgomery, Alabama to return to his father's church, Ebenezer Baptist in Atlanta, Georgia. Just prior to his departure, Alabama authorities charged King with failure to pay income tax. Leading King's legal team, Delany won a historic "not guilty" verdict from an all-white jury in segregated Alabama.

After the trial, King wrote that the verdict was a "turning point" in his life and gave praise to Delany and his other principal lawyer, William Robert Ming: "They brought to the courtroom wisdom, courage, and a highly developed art of advocacy; but most important, they brought the lawyers' indomitable determination to win. After a trial of three days, by the sheer strength of their legal arsenal, they overcame the most vicious Southern taboos festering in a virulent and inflamed atmosphere and they persuaded an all-white jury to accept the word of a Negro over that of white men."

In his autobiography, Dr. King described the trial like this: "This case was tried before an all-white Southern jury. All of the State’s witnesses were white. The judge and the prosecutor were white. The courtroom was segregated. Passions were inflamed. Feelings ran high. The press and other communications media were hostile. Defeat seemed certain, and we in the freedom struggle braced ourselves for the inevitable. There were two men among us who persevered with the conviction that it was possible, in this context, to marshal facts and law and thus win vindication. These men were our lawyers-Negro lawyers from the North: William Ming of Chicago and Hubert Delany from New York."

Dr. King also noted: "I am frank to confess that on this occasion I learned that truth and conviction in the hands of a skillful advocate could make what started out as a bigoted, prejudiced jury, choose the path of justice. I cannot help but wish in my heart that the same kind of skill and devotion which Bill Ming and Hubert Delany accorded to me could be available to thousands of civil rights workers, to thousands of ordinary Negroes, who are every day facing prejudiced courtrooms."

King's wife, Coretta Scott King, discussed the trial in her autobiography: "A southern jury of twelve white men had acquitted Martin. It was a triumph of justice, a miracle that restored your faith in human good."

Low-income housing

In May 1963, Governor of New York Nelson Rockefeller appointed Delany as Chairman of a powerful Temporary State Commission on Low-income Housing. The commission held all the authority of a full legislative public inquiry with the ability to call witnesses and subpoena records. The commission proposed using state funds to help low-income families live in middle-income housing projects and privately owned apartments as a means of promoting integration. By proposing to subsidize low-income families, placing them in middle-income units built with state assistance, the Delany commission ultimately went far beyond the original Rockefeller plan. This early commission became the forerunner to creation of the New York State Urban Development Corporation (UDC) in 1968. The UDC was designed and given broad powers and resources to “improve the physical environment for low-and moderate-income families.” Under Governor Rockefeller, and by 1973, the UDC (known today as the Empire State Development Corporation) had successfully created over 88,000 units of housing for limited income families and the aging.

Death

On December 28, 1990, Delany died at the age of 89 in Manhattan where he lived the majority of his life. He was survived by a wife, Willetta Delany, a daughter, Dr. Madelon Delany Stent; professor of Education at City College of New York and a son, Dr. Harry Mickey Delany; Chairman of the Department of Surgery Jacobi Medical Center and North Central Bronx Hospital, as well as six grandchildren and two great-grandchilden.

Honors and legacy

Many of Delany's papers, photographs and other materials can be found at the New York Public Library's Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem, New York.

Family origins

More often than not, descendents of enslaved Africans are faced with many challenges when attempting to find ancestry prior to the American Civil War. The ancestry of Judge Delany's African American family has been accurately traced back to the mid 18th century with ties to St. Marys, Georgia, Fernandina Beach, Florida and the Danville, Virginia area. This historic account of an African American family is documented by Delany's two older sisters Sadie and Bessie Delany, in the autobiographical bestseller Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years

Children of Bishop Henry Beard Delany

Hubert T. Delany was the eighth of ten children born to the Rev. Henry Beard Delany (1858–1928), the first Black person elected Bishop Suffragan of the Episcopal Church in the United States. His siblings were:

American author, professor and literary critic Samuel R. Delany is the nephew of Hubert T. Delany. He is the author of numerous science fiction books including, Dhalgren, Babel-17 and Return to Nevèrÿon (series) as well as the best-selling nonfiction study Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. His science fiction novels Babel-17 and The Einstein Intersection were winners of the Nebula Award for 1966 and 1967 respectively.

Connection to St. Augustine's University

Founded in 1867 as Saint Augustine's Normal School, the institution first changed its name to Saint Augustine’s School in 1893 and then to Saint Augustine’s Junior College in 1919 when it began offering college-level coursework. Beginning in the mid-1880s, the children of the Rev. and Mrs. Henry Beard Delany were all born, raised and educated on this campus. The Delanys witnessed a growing St. Augustine's become the first school of nursing in the state of North Carolina for African-Americans. Even today, the Delany family is described as the "The First Family of St. Augustine's".

The Delany family began its lengthy relationship with the now historically black college in 1881 when Henry Beard Delany, a former slave from Florida, arrived to study theology. The university further describes the family: "As the children of educators, the younger family members understood the importance of education to the future. Many became teachers committed to working with black students while others received advanced degrees after leaving St. Augustine’s. Lemuel Delany, like his parents, remained at the school and served the black community as a surgeon at St. Agnes Hospital. Bessie Delany became a dentist and one of only two black women practicing in New York at the time. Three of the siblings, including Sarah Delany, the first black person in New York to teach high school domestic science, were lifelong educators. The careers of the other Delany children included a judge, an attorney, and two undertakers."