David Walker

Walker, David (1785–1830), abolitionist, orator, and author of David Walker's Appeal. Although David Walker's father, who died before his birth, was enslaved, his mother was a free woman; thus, when he was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, in September 1785, David Walker was also free, following the “condition” of his mother as prescribed by southern laws regulating slavery. Little is known about Walker's early life. He traveled widely in the South and probably spent time in Philadelphia. He developed early on an intense and abiding hatred of slavery, the result apparently of his travels and his firsthand knowledge of slavery.

Relocating to Boston in the mid-1820s, he became a clothing retailer and in 1828 married a woman named Eliza. They had one son, Edward (or Edwin) Garrison Walker, born after David Walker's death in 1830. An active figure in Boston's African American community during the late 1820s, David Walker had a reputation as a generous, benevolent person who sheltered fugitives and frequently shared his in-come with the poor. He joined the Methodist Church and in 1827 became a general agent for Freedom's Journal, a newly established African American newspaper. During the two years of the newspaper's existence, he regularly supported the New York City-based publication, finding subscribers, distributing copies, and contributing articles. He was also a notable member of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, an antislavery and civil rights organization founded in 1826. In lectures before the association, Walker spoke out against slavery and colonization, while urging African American solidarity.

In September 1829, he published David Walker's Appeal. In this pamphlet, which quickly went through three editions, he fiercely denounced slavery, colonization, and the institutional exclusion, oppression, and degradation of African peoples. His Appeal was a militant call for united action against the sources of the “wretchedness” of African Americans, enslaved and free. Often reprinted, widely circulated, and highly regarded by a number of African American readers, Walker's Appeal generated a vehement response from white Americans, especially in the South. Several southern state legislatures passed laws banning such “seditious” literature and reinforced legislation forbidding the education of slaves in reading and writing. The governors of Georgia and Virginia and the mayor of Savannah wrote letters to the mayor of Boston expressing outrage about the Appeal and demanding that Walker be arrested and punished. In Georgia, a bounty was offered on him, ten thousand dollars alive, one thousand dollars dead. In the North, newspapers attacked the pamphlet, as did white abolitionists (and pacifists) Benjamin Lundy and William Lloyd Garrison, who admired Walker's courage and intelligence but condemned the circulation of the Appeal as imprudent.

Walker died in the summer of 1830. Although the cause and circumstances of his death are mysterious, many have suspected that he was poisoned. After his death, the Appeal continued to circulate in various editions, including Henry Highland Garnet's 1848 reprinting of the Appeal along with his own “Address to the Slaves” in a single volume. As one of the earliest and most compelling printed expressions of African American nationalism, militancy, and solidarity, the Appeal has remained a vital and influential text for successive generations of African American activists.

Bibliography

• Herbert Aptheker, “One Continual Cry”: David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” (1829–30), 1965.
• Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists, 1969.
• Donald M. Jacobs, “David Walker: Boston Race Leader, 1825–1830,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 107 (Jan. 1971): 94–107.
• Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830–1861, 1974.
• Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth, 1982.
• Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America, 1987.
• David Walker's Appeal, ed. Sean Wilentz (1995)

Gregory Eiselein

For more information on David Walker, visit Britannica.com.

African American abolitionist David Walker (1785-1830) wrote "Walker's Appeal", urging slaves to resort to violence when necessary to win their freedom.

David Walker was born free, of a free mother and slave father, in Wilmington, N.C., on Sept. 28, 1785. He early learned to read and write, and he read extensively on the subjects of revolution and resistance to oppression. When he was about 30, he left the South, because "If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long. As true as God reigns, I will be avenged for the sorrows which my people have suffered." In 1826 Walker settled in Boston, Mass., where he became the agent for Freedom's Journal, the black abolitionist newspaper, and a leader in the Colored Association. For a living he ran a secondhand clothing store.

Walker published an antislavery article in September 1828; with three others, it became the pamphlet Walker's Appeal (1829). The articles were articulate and militant in their bitter denunciation of slavery, those who profited by it, and those who willingly accepted it. Walker called for vengeance against white men, but he also expressed the hope that their cruel behavior toward blacks would change, making vengeance unnecessary. His message to the slaves was direct: if liberty is not given you, rise in bloody rebellion.

Southern slave masters hated Walker and put a price on his head. In 1829, 50 unsolicited copies of Walker's Appeal were delivered to a black minister in Savannah, Ga. The frightened minister, understandably concerned for his welfare, informed the police. The police, in turn, informed the governor of Georgia. As a result, the state legislature met in secret session and passed a bill making the circulation of materials that might incite slaves to riot a capital offense. The legislature also offered a reward for Walker's capture, $10,000 alive and $1,000 dead.

Other Southern states took similar measures. Louisiana enacted a bill ordering expulsion of all freed slaves who had settled in the state after 1825. The slaveholding South was frightened by men like Walker, and their harsh reactions to the threat they saw in Walker's Appeal seemed justified when black slave Nat Turner led his bloody rebellion in 1831.

Most abolitionists disagreed with Walker's advice to the slaves to resort to violence to obtain freedom. White abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who believed in immediate emancipation but thought it could be accomplished through persuasion and argument, did endorse the spirit of the Appeal, however, and ran large portions of it, together with a review, in his paper, the Liberator. On the other hand, Frederick Douglass accepted a more activist position, probably due to Walker's influence and that of Henry H. Garnet, who also called for massive slave rebellions.

Walker died in Boston on June 28, 1830, under mysterious circumstances. His challenge to the slaves to free themselves was an important contribution to the assault on human slavery.

Further Reading

Walker's Appeal is available in recent editions: Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles [by] David Walker; An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America [by] Henry Highland Garnet (1948; reprinted 1969 with an introduction by W. L. Katz and a brief sketch of Walker's life); David Walker's Appeal, edited by Charles M. Wiltse (1965); and One Continual Cry: David Walker's Appeal … Its Setting and Its Meaning, edited by Herbert Aptheker (1965). A brief biography of Walker appears in Historical Negro Biographies, edited by Wilhelmena S. Robinson (1968). Lerone Bennett, Jr., Pioneers in Protest (1968), contains a chapter on Walker. Walker figures in the surveys by John Hope Franklin, From Slavery to Freedom: A History of American Negroes (1947; 3d rev. ed. 1968), and Lerone Bennett, Jr., Before the Mayflower: A History of the Negro in America, 1619-1962 (1962; 4th ed. 1969).

Walker, David b Calcutta, 18 July 1934). British designer. He studied at Central School of Arts and Crafts and began his career with Joan Littlewood at Theatre Workshop. He has created costume designs for many ballet and opera companies, including Royal Ballet, Joffrey Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet, and Houston Ballet. His designs include The Dream (1964), the 1965 revival of Ashton's Cinderella —both for the Royal Ballet —and The Nutcracker (Boston Ballet, 1979 and 1995).

(1785-1830), abolitionist. As the author of An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), Walker was one of the earliest and most militant voices among black abolitionists. Widely regarded as a founding text of black nationalist thought, Walker's Appeal was an impassioned indictment of slavery and a cry of outrage against ignorance, Christian hypocrisy, and colonization. At a time when few could imagine an American future without slavery, the pamphlet challenged blacks, slave and free, to seize control of their lives, develop their own leadership and institutions, and shoulder the burden of their liberation. Walker shocked his readers by calling upon slaves to rebel and overthrow slavery by force.

Born a free black in Wilmington, North Carolina, Walker's early life is obscure. His father was a slave, who may have died before David was born, and his mother was free. Walker acquired books and a remarkable education and traveled widely throughout the South before moving to Boston during the mid-1820s. Thus he both witnessed the ravages of slavery and experienced the bitter, anomalous life of a free black in antebellum America. By 1827 Walker was operating a "slop shop" on Brattle Street in Boston, near the wharves, where he sold old clothes to sailors preparing to go to sea. In 1828, he became an agent of the first black weekly newspaper, Freedom's Journal, and a frequent street-corner and lecture hall speaker against slavery.

During 1829-1830, the seventy-eight-page Appeal went through three editions and gained widespread notoriety. Even fellow abolitionists such as Benjamin Lundy and Harriet Martineau disapproved of the incendiary quality of the pamphlet. A handsome price was placed on Walker's head in Georgia after some sixty copies turned up in Savannah. Among Walker's clandestine methods for distributing his pamphlet was to sew copies into the trousers and jackets he sold to sailors departing for the South. Only a few weeks after publication of the third edition in June 1830, Walker was found dead in the doorway of his shop, a victim of poison, a common theory had it.

Few have doubted that his eloquent voice met with other than a violent death in exchange for his challenge to the American conscience. Walker wrote with unsurpassed anger, evangelical zeal, scathing irony, and an uncompromising assertion of the philosophy of natural rights. The Appeal is nothing less than a jeremiad against slavery and racism. "Oh Americans," he wrote, "when God Almighty commences his battle on the continent of America, for the oppression of his people, tyrants will wish they were never born!" He invoked the Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the spirit of pan-African unity in addressing his white audience. Although Walker viewed America as a land of brutal contradictions, he claimed the birthright of all blacks as Americans through their "blood and tears." He insisted that the nation live up to its creed or pay a terrible price. He will always be remembered for his brave use of the pen to forge black nationalist theory and to confront the American conscience with the consequences of unredeemed oppression.

Bibliography:

Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (1987); Charles M. Wiltse, ed., David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1965).

Author:

David W. Blight

See also Abolitionist Movement; Black Nationalism; Free Negroes, 1619-1860; Slavery.

David Walker may refer to:

• Dave Walker (born 1945), British musician, member of the band Fleetwood Mac
• David Walker (abolitionist) (1785–1830), American black abolitionist
• David Walker (author), writer of the novel Harry Black
• David Walker (bishop), Australian Roman Catholic bishop
• David Walker (Canadian politician) (born 1947), Canadian politician who served in the Canadian House of Commons
• David Walker (banker) (born 1939), British banker, ex-chairman of Morgan Stanley International
• David Walker (congressman) (died 1820), United States Representative from Kentucky
• David Walker (cricketer) (1913–1942), English cricketer
• David Walker (diplomat), former High Commissioner to Bangladesh and Ghana
• David Walker (journalist), co-anchor of CNN's first newscast
• David Walker (football coach), former college football star and assistant coach at the University of Pittsburgh
• David Walker (game developer), founder of the Computer Entertainment Developers Association
• David Walker (racing driver) (born 1941), Australian racing driver who drove for Lotus
• David Walker (RAF officer), Air Marshal in the Royal Air Force
• David Walker (singer), American singer of Southern Gospel music
• David A. Walker (marine consultant)
• David Allan Walker, Master of the Household of the Royal Household of the Sovereign of the United Kingdom
• David Davis Walker (1840–1918), American businessman
• David G. Walker (born 1946), British pianist, singer and composer
• David James Walker (1905–1995), Canadian politician
• David M. Walker (astronaut) (1944–2001), United States astronaut for NASA
• David M. Walker (U.S. Comptroller General) (born 1951), seventh Comptroller General of the United States
• David S. Walker (1815–1891), Florida governor
• David T. Walker, American guitarist

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