Walker, David

Source:

 African American National Biography

Walker, David

(1796?–6 Aug. 1830),

radical abolitionist and political writer, was born in Wilmington, North Carolina, the son probably of a free black woman and possibly of a slave father. Almost nothing is known about either parent; only a little more is known about Walker's years in the South. Walker was born in a town where by 1800 African Americans predominated demographically over whites by more than two to one. Their influence on the town and the region was profound. Most labor—skilled or unskilled—was performed by black slaves who were the foundation of the region's key industries: naval stores production, lumbering, rice cultivation, building construction, and shipping. The Methodist church in Wilmington was largely the creation of the local black faithful. The skill and resourcefulness of the African Americans amid their enslavement deeply impressed Walker.

Sometime between 1815 and 1820 Walker left Wilmington and made the short journey south to Charleston, South Carolina. He probably decided to move because free blacks composed a much higher percentage of the black population in Charleston than in Wilmington, had far greater economic opportunity there, and had created a number of social and benevolent organizations to serve their needs. How Walker was employed in Charleston is not known. By 1817 a number of the town's black religious leaders formed one of the first branches of the new African Methodist Episcopal church, founded in Philadelphia in 1816 by Richard Allen. Walker was probably exposed to this particular congregation and began then his deep devotion to Allen and his example of racial and religious courage. Walker must also have known of the relentless white efforts to close the church and the bitterness that these attempts engendered in many of its devout members. By 1821 these increasing attacks helped provoke several members to begin plotting a revolt against slavery in the region. This complicated plot—named after the free black carpenter who orchestrated it, Denmark Vesey—coordinated slaves and free blacks in the city with slaves in the surrounding rice parishes to set fire to key points in the city, seize weapons caches, and murder whites indiscriminately in the confusion on a predetermined night in June 1822. However, the conspiracy was revealed very late by an informer, and all the principals were soon arrested, summarily tried, and hanged. Walker was in Charleston at least as late as 1821 and probably for this series of dramatic events in 1822 as well. This may have influenced his later efforts to link black empowerment and resistance in the South with religion.

By 1825 Walker had settled in Boston, Massachusetts, and had opened a used-clothing store near the city's wharves. In 1826 he entered the social life of the black community more fully, marrying a local woman, Eliza Butler, in February and in July becoming initiated into Prince Hall Masonry at African Lodge No. 459, North America's first black Masonic lodge. Membership in this order gave Walker immediate access to most of black Boston's prominent men, and he soon became a leading political force in the community. He also affiliated with a local black Methodist congregation whose minister, Samuel Snowden, was a fiery preacher and an impassioned antislavery activist. They developed a very close friendship. In 1827 Walker championed the United States' first black newspaper, Freedom's Journal, and was its principal agent in Boston. Along with his fellow lodge brothers he helped organize and police several parades, or “African Celebrations,” in the heart of Boston's African American community, the heavily black-settled north slope of Beacon Hill. Walker spoke at one celebration honoring the visit of an African prince, Ibrahima Abd Al-Rahman, recently emancipated in the South. He also played a key role in creating the Massachusetts General Colored Association, formed no later than 1828 and one of the first avowedly black political organizations in the country. In December of that year Walker articulated its essential position: “[T]he primary object of this institution is to unite the colored population, so far, through the United States … and not [withhold] anything which may have the least tendency to meliorate our miserable condition.” By early 1829, a recent inductee into the tiny club of black homeowners in Boston and his community's leading political voice, Walker prepared to undertake his greatest challenge.

On 28 September 1829 Walker published the first edition of the work for which he is best known, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, one of the most influential black political documents of the nineteenth century. Displaying a vehemence and outrage unprecedented among African American authors of the time, Walker's Appeal decried in vivid and personal terms the uniquely savage, un-Christian treatment blacks suffered in the United States, especially as slaves:

"All I ask is, for a candid and careful perusal of … my Appeal, where the world may see that we, the Blacks or Coloured People, are treated more cruel by the white Christians of America, than devils themselves ever treated a set of men, women and children on this earth. (i)"

By depriving African Americans of secular education, the word of God, civil liberties, and any position of social responsibility, white Americans forced blacks closer and closer to the life of brutes. Indeed the most “insupportable insult” that whites hurled at blacks—expressed the most fully, Walker charged, in Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia—was that “they were not of the human family” but descended originally “from the tribes of Monkeys or Orang-Outangs.” Walker feared the profound demoralization such pervasive attitudes would have on African Americans and intended the Appeal to be a clarion to them of their worth as humans, their noble history in Africa, and God's special love for them. Walker's Appeal challenged African Americans to uplift and organize themselves and cast off this oppression that, he proclaimed, God found an intolerable provocation and sinful for them to endure any longer: “[Y]our full glory and happiness … under Heaven, shall never be fully consummated, but with the entire emancipation of your enslaved brethren all over the world” (29).

By late 1829 and throughout 1830 Walker terrified white southern authorities with novel efforts to circulate his pamphlet on their turf. Relying on black and white mariners to introduce the booklet into key southern ports, and sometimes using the mail, Walker sought especially to enlist the support of educated and evangelical black leaders in these towns in reaching out to the local black masses and rallying them to the message of the Appeal. His plan, while never fully formulated or enacted, nevertheless bespoke one of the boldest and most extensive visions of slave empowerment and rebellion ever conceived in antebellum America. Although officials in the South had stemmed the circulation of his book by late 1830, fear of his and his associates' further subversions continued to trouble them into 1831. Several states reacted by strengthening their laws against slave literacy, the circulation of antislavery matter, and contact between transient black seamen and local black residents in ports.

Walker's work remained an inspiration for many young African Americans who, by the early 1830s, were becoming much more assertive in their calls for an end to slavery and racial discrimination. The young black activist Maria W. Stewart summarized black Boston's reverence for him in 1831 when she referred to him in a speech as “the most noble, fearless, and undaunted David Walker.” Although rumors circulated widely that Walker's death in Boston was caused by poisoning from a southern assassin, his death certificate stated the cause as consumption, the same disease from which his infant daughter Lydia Ann had died a few days earlier. David Walker was probably the father of Edwin Garrison Walker, who in 1861 became one of the first blacks admitted to the Massachusetts bar and who earned similar distinction when elected to the Massachusetts legislature in 1866. By the 1890s he had gained national prominence as the president of the Colored National League.

This entry is taken from the American National Biography and is published here with the permission of the American Council of Learned Societies.

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