Hubert Thomas Delany

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 his wife Nannette James (Logan) Delany (1861–1956), an educator.

Henry Beard Delany was born into slavery in St. Mary's, Georgia, but later became educated and advanced as a priest and the first African-American bishop in the Episcopal Church.

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.

Hubert Thomas Delany (May 11, 1901 – December 28, 1990) was an American lawyer and civil rights pioneer, and politician.

He served as Assistant U.S. Attorney, the first African American appointed as Tax Commissioner of New York and one of the first African Americans appointed as a judge in New York City.

Judge Delany was on the board of Directors for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and the Harlem YMCA, and became an active leader in the Harlem Renaissance.

He also served as a Vice President of the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

Delany was a 1919 graduate of the school.

His older sisters Sadie and Bessie Delany were civil rights pioneers in their own right, as a teacher and dentist in New York City, respectively.

They co-authored the bestselling oral history, Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters' First 100 Years, along with Amy Hill Hearth, and became famous at the ages of 103 and 101.

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 shielded from the rigid system of racial segregation that dominated North Carolina in the early twentieth century.

After finishing high school, Delany soon followed his older siblings to New York City, where he 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.

Delany graduated from the City College of New York in 1923.

He received his law degree from New York University School of Law in 1926 and was a member of Sigma Pi Phi Fraternity, the first Greek-letter organization to be founded by African-American men.

Delany had a long career serving as both a justice in the New York City Domestic Relations Court as well as an attorney and adviser to civil rights activists Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., US Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., and poet Langston Hughes.

He also advised clients in the entertainment and sports industries, including famed opera singer Marian Anderson, singer and actor Paul Robeson, cartoonist E. Simms Campbell, bandleader Cab Calloway, and Major League Baseball color line breaker Jackie Robinson.

After receiving his law degree from New York University School of Law in 1926, Delany married Clarissa Scott Delany, active in the Harlem Renaissance.

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."

Scott died from kidney disease in 1927, after they had been married a year.

Delany later married again, to Willetta S. Mickey, in a ceremony performed by Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia.

A native of Yonkers, New York, she had attended Howard University.

The couple met while she 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 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.

After graduation and passing the bar, from 1927 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.

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.

He won the Republican primary but lost the general election to Democrat Joseph A. Gavagan.

Nonetheless, Delany gained the respect and friendship of Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia.

Delany won 26,666 (37.9%) of the 70,000 votes cast.

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 appointed Delany in 1934 as city tax commissioner.

He later appointed Delany as a judge on the Court of Domestic Relations in 1942.

First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt made a visit to Harlem in 1954 to support the efforts of the growing Spence-Chapin Adoption Service.

Judge Delany and his wife Willetta became the first African American family to host an incumbent First Lady, giving a reception from Mrs. Roosevelt at their home on 145th street and Riverside Drive.

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."