David Walker (abolitionist)

David Walker (September 27, 1796 – June 28, 1830) was an outspoken African American activist who demanded the immediate end of slavery. In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, he published Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and self-help in the fight against oppression and injustice.

Historians and liberation theologians cite the Appeal as an influential political and social document of the 19th century, even though Walker was largely ignored for his contribution to ending slavery in the United States before second half of the 20th century. Walker exerted a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and inspired generations of black leaders and activists of all backgrounds.

Early Career

David Walker was born to a free mother and an enslaved father in Wilmington, North Carolina. As a young adult he moved to Charleston, a mecca for upwardly mobile free blacks where he was affiliated with a strong African Methodist Episcopal Church community of activists. Walker subsequently left Charleston and traveled much of the United States. Historian Peter Hinks has suggested he may have made his way to Philadelphia or New York, both home to large free black communities.

Move to Boston and Subsequent Career

David Walker settled in Boston around 1825, where he operated a used clothing store, married Eliza Butler, and immediately became active within the city's black community.

Walker took part in a variety of civic and religious organizations in Boston. He was involved with Prince Hall Freemasonry, an organization formed in the 1780s that stood up the against discriminatory treatment of blacks, a founder of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which opposed colonization, and a member of Rev. Samuel Snowden’s Methodist church. Additionally, Walker served as a Boston agent and a writer for New York's short-lived but influential Freedom’s Journal, the first abolitionist newspaper published by blacks in the United States. Walker also spoke publicly against slavery and racism.

Boston was an auspicious setting for Walker's activism. The city's black community was friendly to newcomers and transients, helping support fugitive slaves, including those who wanted to move on to Canada, as well as free blacks from other areas. And although hardly free from discrimination from whites, blacks in Boston experienced relatively benign conditions compared to other parts of the country. Massachusetts had unofficially ended slavery in a series of court cases at the end of the 18th century and the city was cosmopolitan, with a variety of jobs and trades open to blacks. Boston, moreover, was a center, of abolitionist activity among many blacks and whites.

Just five years after he arrived in Boston, Walker died suddenly in the summer of 1830. Though rumors subsequently suggested that he had been poisoned, most historians believe Walker died a natural death from tuberculosis, as listed in his death record. The disease was prevalent and had claimed Walker’s only daughter, Lydia Ann, the week before. Walker was buried in a South Boston cemetery for blacks. His probable grave site remains unmarked.

Walker's Appeal (1829)

Walker's Appeal sought to undermine racist ideology, encourage black self-help through education and religion, exhort readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression, and press white Americans to uphold the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

As in his public speeches, Walker, in his Appeal, challenged the racism of the early 19th century. He specifically targeted groups like the American Colonization Society, which sought to deport all free and freed blacks from the United States, and public assertions of black inferiority by Thomas Jefferson, who died three years before the publication of Walker's pamphlet. Walker recognized that racist ideology, articulated and encouraged by a man of Jefferson’s stature, posed a powerful long-term threat to the black community and the promise of democracy. As he explained, “I say, that unless we refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.”

Walker's Appeal argued that blacks had to assume responsibility for themselves if they wanted to overcome oppression. As historian Peter Hinks made clear, Walker believed that the “key to the uplift of the race was a zealous commitment to the tenets of individual moral improvement: education, temperance, protestant religious practice, regular work habits, and self-regulation.” Education and religion were especially important to Walker. Black knowledge, he argued, would not only undermine the assertion that blacks were inherently inferior, it would terrify whites. "The bare name of educating the coloured people," Walker wrote, "scares our cruel oppressors almost to death." Those who were educated, Walker argued, had a special obligation to teach their brethren, and literate blacks were urged to read his pamphlet to those who could not. As Walker explained, "[i]t is expected that all coloured men, women and children, of every nation, language and tongue under heaven, will try to procure a copy of this Appeal and read it, or get some one to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them." Just as whites had denied blacks education, moreover, so too had whites endeavored to keep blacks ignorant of God and manipulated his teachings in order to justify slavery. Walker excoriated the hypocrisy of "pretended preachers of the gospel of my Master, who not only held us as their natural inheritance, but treated us with as much rigor as any Infidel or Deist in the world--just as though they were intent only on taking our blood and groans to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ." It fell upon blacks, Walker argued, to reject the notion that the Bible sanctioned slavery and urge whites to repent before God could punish them for their wickedness. As historian Sean Wilentz has maintained, Walker, in his Appeal, "offered a version of Christianity that was purged of racist heresies, one which held that God was a God of justice to all His creatures."

In his Appeal Walker implored the black community to take action against slavery and discrimination. "What gives unity to Walker's polemic," historian Paul Goodman has argued, "is the argument for racial equality and the active part to be taken by black people in achieving it." Literary scholar Chris Apap has echoed these sentiments. The Appeal, Apap has asserted, rejected the notion that the black community should do nothing more than pray for its liberation. Apap has drawn particular attention to a passage of the Appeal in which Walker encourages blacks to “[n]ever make an attempt to gain freedom or natural right, from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your ways clear; when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed.” Apap has interpreted Walker’s words as a play on the Biblical injunction to “be not afraid or dismayed.” As he points out, “‘be not afraid or dismayed’ is a direct quote from 2 Chronicles 20.15, where the Israelites are told to ‘be not afraid or dismayed’ because God would fight the battle for them and save them from their enemies without their having to lift a finger.” In the Bible, the Israelites are only expected to do is pray, but Walker asserts that the black community must "move." Apap insists that in prompting his readers to "move,” Walker rejected the notion that the blacks should “sit idly by and wait for God to fight their battles--they must (and implicit in Walker's language is the assumption that they will) take action and move to claim what is rightfully and morally theirs.”

Despite the criticism Walker heaped upon the United States, his Appeal did not declare the nation irredeemable. He may have charged white Americans with the sin of turning "coloured people of these United States" into "the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,", but as historian Sean Wilentz has argued, "even in his bitterest passages Walker did not repudiate...republican principles, or his native country." In quoting from the Declaration of Independence at length, in fact, Walker suggested that white Americans only needed to consider their own purported values to see the error of their ways.

Distribution of the Appeal

Three editions of Walker's pamphlet were published within a year. Of the first edition, which was published in fall of 1829, only seven copies are known to survive. Walker distributed his pamphlet through various black communication networks along the Atlantic coast, which included free and enslaved black civil rights activists, laborers, black church and revivalist networks, contacts with free black benevolent societies, and maroon communities.

Southern officials tried desperately to prevent the Appeal from reaching its residents. Blacks in Charleston and New Orleans were arrested for distributing the pamphlet while authorities in Savannah, Georgia instituted a ban on the disembarkation of black seamen. Various southern governmental bodies, meanwhile, labeled the Appeal seditious and imposed harsh penalties on those who circulated it. Despite such efforts, however, by Walker's pamphlet was everywhere by early 1830. Having failed to contain the Appeal, southern officials castigated both the pamphlet and its author. Newspapers in the like the Richmond Enquirer railed against what it called Walker’s “monstrous slander” of the region. Outrage over the Appeal even led Georgia to announce an award of $10,000 to anyone who could hand over Walker alive, and $1,000 to anyone who would murder him.

“There is great work for you to do… You have to prove to the Americans and the world that we are MEN, and not brutes, as we have been represented, and by millions treated. Remember, to let the aim of your labours among your brethren, and particularly the youths, be the dissemination of education and religion.”

— Walker, The Appeal, 32.

The Immediate Significance of the Appeal

The Appeal inspired blacks and whites in the abolitionist movement. Three months after Walker died, for instance, the Boston Evening Transcript noted that blacks regarded the Appeal "as if it were a star in the east guiding them to freedom and emancipation.” Whites, meanwhile, were radicalized by reading Walker's pamphlet. William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most influential American abolitionists, began publishing The Liberator in January 1831 not long after the appearance of the Appeal, and early weekly editions of Garrison's newspaper focused on Walker's pamphlet. Garrison, who believed slaveowners would be punished by God, rejected the violence Walker advocated but nevertheless recognized that slaveowners were courting disaster by refusing to free their slaves. "Every sentence that they write--every word that they speak--every resistance that they make, against foreign oppression, is a call upon their slaves to destroy them," Garrison wrote.

Together, moreover, the publication of Walker's pamphlet and the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, struck fear into the hearts of slaveowners. Though there is no evidence to suggest that the Appeal specifically informed or inspired Turner, the two events, which occurred just a few years apart, intensified white anxiety in the South about the potential for future insurrections and inaugurated the adoption of laws designed to strip free blacks of what little rights they enjoyed.

Walker, The Public Intellectual

Walker was influenced by the strategies of resistance forged by individual rebels, maroon communities of runaway slaves, independent black church movement leaders, and more.

As a fervent Protestant, he was well-used to ‘making a way out of no-way’. His reading of the Bible led to his judgment that no previous system of slavery in history was as oppressive as that experienced in America.

Walker suggested that blacks had more right to the nation than those who had oppressed them. "America," Walker argued, "is more our country, than it is the whites--we have enriched it with our blood and tears."

In the United States dark skin was deemed by whites a signal of inferiority and non-humanity. He challenged critics to show him “a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family.”

Walker asserted that whites did not deserve adulation for their willingness to free some slaves. As historian Peter Hinks has explained, Walker argued that “[w]hites gave nothing to blacks upon manumission except the right to exercise the liberty they had immorally prevented them from so doing in the past. They were not giving blacks a gift but rather returning what they had stolen from them and God. To pay respect to whites as the source of freedom was thus to blaspheme God by denying that he was the source of all virtues and the only one with whom one was justified in having a relationship of obligation and debt.”

Although individuals and groups had emerged with differing degrees of commitment to equal rights for black men and women by the 1820s and 30s, no national anti-slavery movement existed when the Appeal was published. As historian Herbert Aptheker writes, “[t]o be an Abolitionist was not for the faint-hearted. The slaveholders represented for the first half of the nineteenth century the most closely knit and most important single economic unit in the nation, their millions of bondsmen and millions of acres of land comprising an investment of billions of dollars. This economic might had its counterpart in political power, given its possessors dominance within the nation and predominance within the South.” Walker’s militancy played a pivotal role in solidifying a white abolitionist movement that, in the main, found Walker too strident in his evangelical approach, yet prescient in his attack on chattel slavery.

The Appeal heightens our understanding of the pernicious effects of both slavery and the subservience of and discrimination against free blacks, who threatened the existing racial order by confounding the notion that to be black was to be enslaved. Those outside of slavery were said to need special regulation “because they could not be relied on to regulate themselves and because they might overstep the boundaries society had placed around them.”

David Walker has often been regarded as an abolitionist with Black Nationalist views, in large measure because Walker envisioned a future for black Americans that included self-rule. As he wrote in the Appeal, “Our sufferings will come to an end, in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity. Then we will want all the learning and talents, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves.”

Scholars have often remarked upon the connection between Walker's Appeal and black nationalism. In his 1972 study of The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism, historian Sterling Stuckey suggested that Walker's Appeal "would become an ideological foundation…for Black Nationalist theory.” Though some have subsequently suggested that Stuckey overstated the extent to which Walker contributed to the creation of a black nation, Thabiti Asukile, in a 1999 article on "The All-Embracing Black Nationalist Theories of David Walker’s Appeal", defended Stuckey's interpretation. "Though scholars may continue to debate this," Asukile writes, "it would seem hard to disprove that the later advocates of black nationalism in America, who advocated a separate nation-state based on geographical boundaries during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, would not have been able to trace certain ideological concepts to Walker's writings. Stuckey's interpretation of the Appeal as a theoretical black nationalist document is a polemical crux for some scholars who aver that David Walker desired to live in a multicultural America. Those who share this view must consider that Stuckey does not limit his discourse on the Appeal to a black nationalism narrowly defined, but rather to a range of sentiments and concerns. Stuckey's concept of a black nationalist theory rooted in African slave folklore in America is an original and pioneering one, and his intellectual insights are valuable to a progressive rewriting of African American history and culture."

“This country is as much ours as it is the whites, whether they will admit it now or not, they will see and believe it by and by.”

— Walker, Article IV, p. 58

For the Progress of the Race: The Lasting Influence of Walker's Appeal

The spirit of David Walker lives on. Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, a number of liberation theologians and many others have respectfully followed in David Walker’s footsteps. Echoes of Walker’s Appeal can be heard most vividly, for example, in Frederick Douglass’s famous 1852 speech, “The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro.”

Historian Herbert Aptheker has noted that “Walker’s Appeal is the first sustained written assault upon slavery and racism to come from a black man in the United States. This was the main source of its overwhelming power in its own time; this is the source of the great relevance and enormous impact that remain in it, deep as we are in the twentieth century. Never before or since was there a more passionate denunciation of the hypocrisy of the nation as a whole--democratic and fraternal and equalitarian and all the other words. And Walker does this not as one who hates the country but rather as one who hates the institutions which disfigure it and make it a hissing in the world.”

Bibliography

• Abzug, Robert H. "The Influence of Garrisonian Abolitionists' Fears of Slave Violence on the Antislavery Argument, 1829-40." The Journal of Negro History 55 (January 1970), 15-26.
• Apap, Chris. “’Let no man of us budge one step’: David Walker and the Rhetoric African American Emplacement.” Early American Literature 46 (June 2011), 319-350.
• Aptheker, Herbert. “One Continual Cry”: David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829-1830): Its Setting and Its Meaning. Humanities Press, 1965.
• Asukile, Thabiti. “The All-Embracing Black Nationalist Theories of David Walker’s Appeal.” The Black Scholar 29.4 (1999), 16-24.
• Eaton, Clement. “A Dangerous Pamphlet in the Old South.” Journal of Southern History 2 (August 1936), 512–534.
• Garnet, Henry Highland. Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life. New York: J.H. Tobitt, 1848.
• Goodman, Paul. Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.
• Hahn, Steven. The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009.
• Harding, Vincent. There Is A River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. New York: Vintage Books, 1981.
• Hinks, Peter P. introduction and editor's note to David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, by David Walker, xi-xliv. University Park, Penn: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000.
• Hinks, Peter P. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997.
• Horne, Gerald, et al. Thinking and Rethinking U.S. History. New York: Council on Interracial Books for Children, 1988.
• Horton, James Oliver. "Generations of Protest: Black Families and Social Reform in Ante-Bellum Boston." The New England Quarterly 49 (June 1976), 242-256.
• Horton James Oliver and Lois E. Horton. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860. Oxford University Press, 1997.
• Horton, James Oliver, ed. Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American History. New York: The New Press, 2006.
• Johnson, Charles and Patricia Smith. WGBH Series Research Team. Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1998.
• Mayer, Henry. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and The Abolition of Slavery. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998.
• McHenry, Elizabeth. Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002.
• Mitchell, Verner. “David Walker, African Rights, and Liberty,” in James C. Trotman, ed., Multiculturalism: Roots and Reality. Bllomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 2002.
• Sesay, Chernoh Momodu. Freemasons of Color: Prince Hall, Revolutionary Black Boston, and the Origins of Black Freemasonry, 1770—1807. Dissertation, Northwestern University, 2006.
• Walker, David. Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles. Boston: D. Walker, 1829.
• Wilentz, Sean. introduction to David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, by David Walker, vii-xxiii. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995.
• Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the American States: 1492 to the Present. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 2003.

See also

• List of African-American abolitionists

External links

• Walker's Appeal, at Documenting the American South
• David Walker’s Appeal in Virginia, at Virginia Memory
• Works by David Walker at Project Gutenberg
• Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, MassMoments, “David Walker Found Dead June 28, 1830,”
• WGBH, Africans in America documentary
• Library of Congress, “Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period”

Walking Tours

The National Park Service, Boston African American National Historic Site, offers walking tours in Boston, MA. of the Black Beacon Hill community that include comprehensive narratives concerning David Walker and his audacious pamphlet. An online version of the tour is also available. See [1]. Contact 14 Beacon Street, Suite 401, Boston, MA 02108, 617-742-5415