The Delany Family of Raleigh

The photographs on this page, brought to life.

The Reverend H. B. Delany of North Carolina, from a 1904 survey of Black Episcopal clergy. George F. Bragg, Afro-American Church Work and Workers, 1904. Via Wikimedia Commons.

A man born into slavery in 1858 raised ten children on a college campus, and two of his daughters lived long enough to tell the whole story themselves. Henry Beard Delany was born at St. Mary's, Georgia, on the fifth of February 1858. His parents were enslaved; his father was a ship's and house carpenter. After the war the family went to Florida and he went to a school run by the Freedmen's Bureau. In 1881 he enrolled at St. Augustine's School in Raleigh, North Carolina. He graduated in 1885 and never really left: teacher, then chaplain, then vice-principal. He designed the school's chapel in 1895 and helped design St. Agnes Hospital in 1909. He was ordained a deacon in 1889 and a priest in 1892. On the fifteenth of May 1918 he was elected suffragan bishop, unanimously, and consecrated that November — the first Black bishop in the Diocese of North Carolina and one of the first two in the Episcopal Church in the United States. Sources word that distinction differently and we have not been able to settle it here; some say first in the country, some say second. He married Nannie James Logan in 1886. She had come to St. Augustine's as a student in 1877 and stayed on to teach. Her mother was a free African-American woman and her father a white Virginia farmer. They had ten children, every one of them born on that campus, and those children became teachers, doctors, dentists, attorneys, a judge and a surgeon. Hubert paid his own way through City College of New York working as a railway porter and ended up a New York judge. Two of the daughters are why you may have heard of the family. Sadie — Sarah Louise, born in September 1889 — took a bachelor's degree at Columbia in 1920 and a master's in 1925, and became the first Black person permitted to teach domestic science at the high-school level in New York City. She taught until 1960. Bessie — Annie Elizabeth, born in September 1891 — took her dental degree at Columbia in 1923, the only Black woman among a hundred and seventy students, and became the second Black woman licensed to practice dentistry in the state of New York. She kept an office on Seventh Avenue in Harlem with her brother until she retired in 1956. They lived together their whole adult lives — Harlem, then the Bronx while it was still countryside, then a house with a garden in Mount Vernon. In September 1991 a New York Times reporter named Amy Hill Hearth wrote them up. The book that came out of it in 1993, when they were 104 and 102, sold more than five million copies and stayed on the bestseller lists for two years. It went to Broadway in 1995 and ran 308 performances. Bessie died in September 1995 at 104. Sadie died in January 1999 at 109, and was buried in Raleigh. If you are a Delany, or your family passed through St. Augustine's, add what you know below. Compiled by MyHistoryStone from published reference sources, August 2026. Corrections welcome.