David Walker (September 28, 1796August 6, 1830) was an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Though his father was enslaved, his mother was free; therefore, he was free as well (partus sequitur ventrem). In 1829, while living in Boston, Massachusetts, with the assistance of the African Grand Lodge (later named Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts), he published An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, a call for black unity and a fight against slavery, which James T. Campbell called a "watershed in the history of black nationalism."Campbell, Songs of Zion, 1995, pp. 22.

The Appeal brought attention to the abuses and inequities of slavery and the responsibility of individuals to act according to religious and political principles. At the time, some people were aghast and fearful of the reaction that the pamphlet would provoke. Southern citizens were particularly upset with Walker's viewpoints and as a result there were laws banning circulation of "seditious publications" and North Carolina's "legislature enacted the most repressive measures ever passed in North Carolina to control slaves and free blacks".

His son, Edward G. Walker, was an attorney and in 1866, was one of the first two black men elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature.

Early life and education Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. His mother was free. His father, who had died before his birth, had been enslaved. Since American law embraced the legal principle of partus sequitur ventrem, , Walker inherited his mother's status as a free person.

Walker found the oppression of fellow black people unbearable. "If I remain in this bloody land," he later recalled thinking, "I will not live long ... I cannot remain where I must hear slaves' chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical enslavers." Consequently, as a young adult, he moved to Charleston, South Carolina, a Mecca for upwardly mobile free black people. He became affiliated with a strong African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME Church) community of activists, members of the first black denomination in the United States. He later visited and likely lived in Philadelphia, a shipbuilding center and location of an active black community, where the AME Church was founded.

Marriage and children Walker settled in Boston by 1825;David Walker: Black Wilmington Abolitionist. Cape Fear Historical Institute. Retrieved April 22, 2013. slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts after the American Revolutionary War. On February 23, 1826, he married Eliza Butler, the daughter of Jonas Butler. Her family was an established black family in Boston. Their children were Lydia Ann Walker (who died July 31, 1830, of lung fever at the age of one year and nine months in Boston), and Edward G. Walker (1831–1901).

Career He started a used clothing store in the City Market. He next owned a clothing store on Brattle Street near the wharfs. There were three used clothing merchants, including Walker, who went to trial in 1828 for selling stolen property. The results are unknown.

He aided runaway slaves and helped the "poor and needy". Walker took part in civic and religious organizations in Boston.Garnet, vi. He was involved with Prince Hall Freemasonry, a fraternal organization formed in the 1780s that stood up against discriminatory treatment of black people; became a founder of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which opposed colonization of free American Black People to Africa; and was a member of Rev. Samuel Snowden's Methodist church.Garnet, vii. Walker also spoke publicly against slavery and racism.Wilentz, xiii.

Thomas Dalton and Walker oversaw the publication of John T. Hilton's An Address, Delivered Before the African Grand Lodge of Boston, No. 459, June 24, 1828, by John T. Hilton: On the Annual Festival, of St. John the Baptist (Boston, 1828).Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 116.

Although they were not free from racist hostility and discrimination, black families in Boston lived in relatively benign conditions in the 1820s. 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."Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 94. By the end of 1828, Walker had become Boston's leading spokesman against slavery.

Freedom's Journal

Walker served as a Boston subscription sales agent and a writer for New York City's short-lived but influential Freedom's Journal (1827–1829), the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans."Freedom's Journal" , article on website for Stanley Nelson, The Black Press: Soldiers without Swords (documentary), PBS, 1998, accessed May 30, 2012."David Walker" , PBS, Africans in America Resource Bank. Retrieved April 22, 2013.

Walker's Appeal Publication history

In September 1829, Walker published his appeal to Black people (enslaved or free), entitled Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829. The first edition is quite rare; a second and then a third edition appeared in 1830.Hinks, introduction and editor's note, xlv. Walker's second edition, of 1830, expressed his views even more strongly than the first edition. Walker appealed to his readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression, regardless of the risk, and to press white Americans to realize that slavery was morally and religiously repugnant.

The Appeal was semi-forgotten by 1848; a great deal of other abolitionist writing, much inspired by Walker, had appeared in those 18 years. It received a new life with its reprinting in 1848 by the black minister Henry Highland Garnet, who in another 17 years would be the first Black man ever to address the U.S. Congress. Garnet included the first biography of David Walker, and a similarly themed speech of his own, his "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America", which was perceived as so radical that it was rejected for publication when delivered, in 1843. The abolitionist John Brown played a role in getting the volume of Garnet printed.

Core issues

Racism Walker challenged the racism of the early 19th century. He specifically targeted groups such as the American Colonization Society, which sought to deport all free and freed black people from the United States to a colony in Africa (this was how Liberia was established).Hinks, introduction and editor's note, xxvi–xxxi. He wrote against published assertions of black inferiority by the late President Thomas Jefferson, who died three years before Walker's pamphlet was published. Walker also focused on the equality of black men throughout his work, Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles, Together With a Preamble to the Colored Citizens of the World, But in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829 "But is Mr.Jefferson's assertions true? viz. "that it is unfortunate for us that our Creator has been pleased to make us black." We will not take his say so, for the fact. The world will have an opportunity to see whether it is unfortunate for us, that our Creator made us darker than the whites." Walker also explained: "We are MEN, as well as other people; to them, I say, that unless we refute Mr. Jefferson's arguments respecting us, we will only establish them."Walker, 18. This again is another call for the black community to take a stand against discrimination from whites."

He rejected the white assumption in the United States that dark skin was a sign of inferiority and lesser 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", referring to the period when they were enslaved in Egypt.Walker, 12.

Equal rights By the 1820s and '30s, individuals and groups had emerged with degrees of commitment to equal rights for black men and women, but no national anti-slavery movement existed at the time Walker's Appeal was published.See Aptheker, 1965, for discussion on this point. As historian Herbert Aptheker wrote:

Aptheker was referring to the Slave Power thesis that argued slaveholders used their economic and political influence to control the United States government prior to the American Civil War. The three-fifths clause of the United States Constitution counted three-fifths of the enslaved population of a state towards its representation in Congress and the electoral college; as enslaved people could not vote, this clause amounted to additional representation for large slaveholding states beyond what their free populations would normally warrant. Both the Democratic and Whig parties saw abolitionism as a threat to party unity and opposed efforts to introduce slavery as an issue in national politics. Although white southerners comprised a small minority of the overall U.S. population, 11 of 15 presidents to serve prior to the Civil War came from slaveholding southern families, and none except John Adams and John Quincy Adams was elected without carrying a majority of southern electoral votes.

Effects of slavery The Appeal described the pernicious effects of both slavery and the subservience of and discrimination against free black Americans. Walker explains how coloured people in the United States are viewed by saying "that we, (coloured people of the United States of America) are the most wretched, degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began, and that the white Americans having reduced us to the wretched state of slavery, treat us in that condition more cruel (they being an enlightened and Christian people) than any heathen nation did any people whom it had reduced to our condition." 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."Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 204.

Call to action

Resist oppression