David Walker, Early African American political writer

David Walker was born around 1796 in North Carolina, USA most likely to an enslaved father and free mother. He grew up in the South and traveled the United States extensively before settling in Boston, where he ran a used clothing shop and became an early antiracist activist, selling subscriptions to Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned and operated newspaper in the United States.

Between 1826 and 1828, Walker helped found the Massachusetts General Coloured Association in order to, in his own words, “unite the coloured population.” Though Walker and many of his associates were free according to the letter of the law, Walker knew that its spirit tended toward Black bondage and perpetual liability to premature death.

And so, in 1829, he published the stunning pamphlet that has cemented his international legacy, Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America. He circulated it—in many cases illegally—throughout the Atlantic world.

Moving beyond a U.S. frame, Walker identifies “coloured citizens” as a global political class with common interests, justified in employing any means necessary to protect those interests. The first publication to assail anti-black racism directly, Walker’s Appeal aimed not simply to end racial enslavement, but to bring about a new dawn of racial justice. He advocated increasing access to education, rebuilding Christianity, and redistributing wealth such that Black people reap the “gold and silver” that their sweat, blood and tears had generated. As W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1940, Walker’s Appeal proposed no less than a “program of organized opposition to the action and attitude of the dominant white group. […] It involves the use of force of every sort.”

by Erin Forbes