David Walker (abolitionist)

For other people named David Walker, see David Walker (disambiguation).

“Can our condition be any worse? – Can it be more mean and abject? If there are any changes, will they not be for the better, though they may appear for the worst at first? Can they get us any lower?”

— Preamble, David Walker’s Appeal, p. 4

Sex, Drugs, and Rock n' Roll

Walker is not recognized in school textbooks for his contribution to ending chattel slavery in the United States, yet many historians and liberation theologians cite Walker’s Appeal as an influential political and social document of the 19th century. They credit Walker for exerting a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and beyond. He has inspired many generations of Black leaders and activists of all backgrounds.

Early career

In west Philadelphia born and raised On the playground is where I spent most of my days Chillin out, maxin, relaxing all cool, And all shooting some b-ball outside of the school When a couple of guys who were up to no good Started making trouble in my neighborhood I got in one lil fight and my mom got scared And said "You're moving with your auntie and uncle in Bel-Air"

Move to Boston and career

Shaped by these and other experiences, Walker settled in Boston in the 1820s. He was drawn to the city as the seaport's Black community was expanding. He saw the connections to the Black maritime culture in the Carolinas and the Atlantic. In the Southeast, Blacks regularly worked semi-autonomously in forestry, as boatmen, as skilled laborers in various occupations, both as free and enslaved persons. He recognized the power inherent in agency among both free Blacks and those enslaved., and immediately became active within the Black community on the west side of Beacon Hill.

He operated a used clothing store near the wharves in the North End. Active in civic associations such as Prince Hall Freemasonry, the Massachusetts General Colored Association, and Rev. Samuel Snowden’s Methodist church, Walker also served as a Boston agent and a writer for the short-lived but influential Freedom’s Journal, a weekly abolitionist newspaper published in New York (this was the first newspaper published by Blacks in the United States). In public speeches and in print articles, as well as The Appeal, Walker called for action to end slavery.

Although not free from discrimination from whites, Black families in Boston lived in relatively benign conditions in the 1820s compared to other parts of the country. The state had unofficially ended slavery by court cases by the end of the 18th century. The city was cosmopolitan, with a variety of trades and jobs available, and there was strong abolitionist activity among many blacks and whites. The level of Black competency and activism in Boston was particularly high. As historian Peter Hinks documents: “The growth of black enclaves in various cities and towns was inseparable from the development of an educated and socially involved local black leadership.”

The Boston Black community was friendly to newcomers and transients, helping support fugitive slaves, including those who wanted to move on to Canada. It welcomed free blacks from other areas. Change-oriented, Prince Hall Freemasons took seriously their tenets and used them as the basis beginning in the 1780s for respect for Blacks. They stood up against discriminatory treatment. Walker joined with those who repeatedly petitioned the Commonwealth for equal rights for all, often speaking publicly against slavery and racism as immoral.

Black cosmopolitanism embodied remnants of African traditions, the common experiences of slavery, and survivors’ advocacy in a hostile, discriminatory world. The community, centered around the African Meeting House, still standing on the north slope of Beacon Hill, demanded first-class citizenship. David Walker was among the founders of the Massachusetts General Colored Association; it opposed colonization and was the first abolitionist organization in Boston committed to freeing African Americans from chattel slavery.

Walker's Appeal (1829)

Walker's 76-page pamphlet combined an indictment of slavery and racism with a passionate call for action by Black men. Its direct, heartfelt tone is at odds with the conventions and “etiquette” of the period that required deference from Black slaves and free persons. Championing immediate, universal, and unconditional emancipation—a revolutionary position for a Black man to take publicly—Walker urged Blacks to break their own physical and psychological chains.

STUNNA WHAT IT IS

As in his public speeches, Walker in The Appeal, challenges the racism evident at the time in “reforms” such as the scheme by the American Colonization Society to deport all free and freed Blacks from the United States. He specifically takes to task Thomas Jefferson, who had died three years before, for his public assertions that Blacks were inferior to Whites and should be “removed beyond the reach of mixture.” Walker recognized that a cohering racist ideology, articulated and encouraged by a man of Jefferson’s stature, posed a powerful long-term threat to the Black community and to the promise of real democracy. He writes: “I say, that unless we refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.”

Walker posited that Blacks had to assume responsibility not only for themselves but for each other. Those who were educated were urged to read the messages in the pamphlet to those who could not. The Appeal aroused fears among white leaders, especially Southern slave owners. Various government bodies immediately labeled it seditious.

“They think because they hold us in their infernal chains of slavery, that we wish to be white, or of their color – but they are dreadfully deceived – we wish to be just as it please our Creator to have made us, and no avaricious and unmerciful wretches, have any business to make slaves of, or hold us in slavery.”

— The Appeal, Article 1, p. 14

Distribution of The Appeal

Three editions of the pamphlet were published within a year. Of the first edition (1829), only seven copies are known to survive; one was bought in 2011 for the University of Virginia. Walker distributed his pamphlet through various Black communication networks along the Atlantic coast. These included free and enslaved Black sailors, other mobile laborers, Black church and revivalist networks, contacts with free Black benevolent societies, and maroon communities. Walker sewed some pamphlets into the clothes that he sold at his store.

By 1830, white authorities suppressed the circulation of the pamphlet whenever they could. In New Orleans, authorities arrested four Black men for owning copies . In North Carolina, vigilantes attacked free Blacks assuming they had copies . Savannah, Georgia, instituted a ban on Black seamen coming ashore because of white fears that they were distributing the incendiary pamphlet . Some Blacks were lynched, others whipped . Yet the document continued to circulate. Plantation owners offered a bounty for Walker’s death . The outrage over Walker's Appeal even manifested itself in state government action as Georgia was willing to grant $10,000 to anybody who could hand over Walker alive, and $1000 to anyone who would murder him.

Walker died in 1830 under circumstances not fully known. He was reportedly found dead slumped in a doorway on his street. According to popular lore and some earlier historians, he was murdered - probably poisoned . Most historians today, however, believe Walker died a natural death from tuberculosis, as listed in Boston city records. The disease was rampant at the time and had claimed Walker’s only daughter the week before.

Walker was buried in a South Boston cemetery area for Blacks. His probable grave site remains unmarked.

“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, p 32

Walker, The Public Intellectual

Walker was influenced by the strategies of resistance forged by individual rebels, maroon communities of runaway slaves, the independent Black church movement leaders, and more. As a fervent Protestant, he was well-used to ‘making a way out of no-way’. Walker read extensively. He displayed an insatiable thirst to find ways out of oppression for all of African descent.

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. Here, dark skin color was judged by whites as 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.”

David Walker’s courageous defiance was a marvel. He, along with his associates, 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.” Walker took seriously the words of the Declaration of Independence. As a patriot he took issue with Blacks being excluded from the vaunted principles that had recently birthed the Republic.

Should white persons be thanked for granting freedom to some slaves? No, said Walker: “Whites 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.”

Local papers in the South such as the Richmond Enquirer railed against Walker’s “monstrous slander” of the South. The fear of free Blacks in particular, and all of African descent in general, multiplied.

It is important to remember that no national anti-slavery movement existed at the time The Appeal was published. Certainly individuals and groups existed with differing degrees of commitment to equal rights for Black men and women. 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 wise in his attack on chattel slavery.

As historian Herbert Aptheker writes: “To 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.”

The story of The Appeal heightens our understanding of the definition of the problem as being both slavery and the visibility of those free Blacks who were seen as unfit to interact in general society. Those outside of slavery were said dismissively 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.”

While scholarly sources cite David Walker’s Appeal, public schools in the US have tended not to include this text in their core curricula . And this pattern has been largely repeated with respect to David Walker and the important public intellectual role he played.

“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

The Significance of The Appeal

The Appeal was written during the time of national debates about what to do about confiscation of slave property: the enslaved. Three months after Walker died, 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.”

While no documentation suggests that the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 was informed or inspired by The Appeal, anxiety among whites escalated amid continuing skirmishes with maroon communities, and other local organizing by slaves. William Lloyd Garrison, journalist, began publishing The Liberator in January 1831. The early weekly editions were full of discussions of The Appeal.

Whites began to form national anti-slavery organizations in the 1830s. Already existing were more than 50 Negro abolitionist organizations “throughout the country having valuable experience and most eager to join forces with the newcomers.” Thus The Appeal is viewed as radicalizing the national abolitionist movement.

For the progress of the race: The lasting influence of Walker's Appeal

The spirit of David Walker lives on. Rev. Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, The Rev. Doctor Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, liberation theologians and many more 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.”

Aptheker writes: “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.”

David Walker's Family

In February 1826, David Walker married Eliza Butler, member of a prominent African American Boston family. From 1827 to 1829 David and Eliza Walker were tenants at what is now 81 Joy Street, near the African Meeting House on the north side of Beacon Hill.

Walker died in 1830. Their one surviving son, Edwin Garrison Walker, was born a few months after his father’s death.

Mrs. Walker later married Alexander Dewson, a recent arrival from Hawaii. The Dewsons together raised Edwin Garrison Walker who later married Hannah Jane Van Vronker from Lowell.

Edwin Garrison Walker became a lawyer and fathered two children. In 1866 he was the first African American to be elected to the Massachusetts legislature. In 1893 Republican Governor Benjamin Franklin Butler nominated Edwin G. Walker to be justice of the Charlestown, Massachusetts District Court. The nomination, the first for an African American, was rejected by the Governor’s Council. Edwin G. Walker died on January 12, 1901 in Boston.

Bibliography

• Aptheker, Herbert. 1965. “One Continual Cry”: David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829-1830): Its Setting and Its Meaning. Humanities Press.
• Eaton, Clement. 1936. “A Dangerous Pamphlet in the Old South,” Journal of Southern History, 2, pp. 512–534.
• Hahn, Steven. 2009. Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom. Harvard University Press.
• Harding, Vincent. 1981, There Is A River: The Black Struggle for Freedom in America. Vintage Books
• Hinks, Peter P. 1997. To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance. Pennsylvania State University Press
• ____, Ed. 2000. David Walker’s Appeal To The Coloured Citizens of The World. Pennsylvania State University Press.
• Horne, Gerald. 1988. Thinking and Rethinking U.S. History, Council on Interracial Books for Children.
• Horton James Oliver; Horton, Lois E. 1997. In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community, and Protest Among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860. Oxford University Press.
• ____ Eds. 2006. Slavery and Public History: The Tough Stuff of American History. The New Press.
• Johnson, Charles; Smith, Patricia; WGBH Series Research Team. 1998. Africans in America: America’s Journey Through Slavery. Harcourt, Brace and Company
• Mayer, Henry. 1998. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and The Abolition of Slavery. St. Martin’s Press.
• Mitchell, Verner. 2002. “David Walker, African Rights, and Liberty,” in Trotman, C. James, Ed., Multiculturalism: Roots and Reality. Indiana University Press.
• Sesay, Chernoh Momodu. 2006. Freemasons of Color: Prince Hall, Revolutionary Black Boston, and the Origins of Black Freemasonry, 1770—1807. Dissertation, Northwestern University.
• Walker, David. 1829. Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles. D. Walker.
• Zinn, Howard, 2003. A People’s History of the American States: 1492 to the Present. Harper Collins Publishers.

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