The work brought attention to the abuses and inequities and political tenets.At time,some people were outraged and fearful that the reaction the pamphlet would have.Many abolitionists through the views were extreme.
Historians and liberation theologians cite the Appeal as an influential political and social document of the 19th century.David exerted a radicalizing influence on the abolitionist movements of his day and inspired future African American leaders and activists.
His son Edward Garrison Walker,was an attorney and one of the first African American men elected into the Massachusetts State Legistature in 1866.
David was born in the Cape Fear area of North Carolina.His mama was free and his daddy,who had died before his birth,had been enslaved.Since American law embraced the principle partus sequitur ventrem,literally "that which is brought forth follows the womb," David inherited his mama's status asa free person.
Despite his freedom he found the oppression of fellow African Americans 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 African Americans.He became affliated with a strong African Methodist Episcopal Church community of activists,members of the first African American denomination in the United States.He later visited and likely lived in Philadelphia, a shipbuilding center and location of an active African America community,where the AME Church the AME Church was founded.
David settled in Boston by 1825,slavery had been abolished in Massachusetts after the American Revolutionary War.He started a used clothing store in the city market.He married between 1826 & 1828.His wife may been Emily or Eliza,a fugitive slave.Another theory is that she was Eliza Butler,from a notable African American family in Boston.David next owned a clothing store on Brattle Street near the Wharfs.He aided runaway and helped the "poor and needy."
David took part in a variety of civic and religious organizations in Boston.He was involved with Prince Hall Freemasonry,an organization formed in the 1780s that stood up the against discriminatory treatment of African Americans; became a founder of the Massachusetts General Colored Association,which opposed colonization of free African Americans to Africa,and was a member of Rev.Samuel Snowden's Methodist church.David also spoke publicly against slavery and racism.
Thomas Dalton and David oversaw the publication of John Telemachus Hilton's An address,delivered before the African Grand Lodge of Boston,No.459,June 24th,1828,by John Telemachus Hilton: On the Annual Festival of St.John the Baptist (Baptist,1828).
Although they were not free from racism hostility and discrimination,African American families in Boston lived in realtively benign conditions in the 1820s.The level of African American competency and activism in Boston was particulary 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 African American leadership.
There were three used clothing merchants,including David,who went to trial in 1828 for selling stolen property.The results are unknown.
David served as a Boston subscription sales agent and a writer for New York City's short-lived but influential Freedom's Journal (1827-29),the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans,in the United States.
By the end of 1828,David became Boston's leading spokesman against slavery.
In September 1829,David published his appeal to African American people entitled Walker's Appeal in Four Articles;Together 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.The purpose of the document was to encourage readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression,regardless of the risk,and to press white Americans to realize the moral and religious failure of slavery.
David challenged the racism of the early 19 century.He specitifically targeted groups like the American Colonization Society,which sought to depot all free and freed African Americans from the United States to a colony in Africa (this was how Liberia was established).He wrote against published assertions of black inferiority by the late President Thomas Jefferson,who died three years before David's pamphlet was published.As he explained,"say,that unless we refute Mr.Jefferson's arguments respecting us,we will only establish them.
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 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.
By the 1820s and 30s,inviduals and groups had emerged with degrees of commitments to equal rights for African Americans men & women,but no national anti-slavery movement existed at the time David's Appeal was published.
The appeal described the pernicious effects of both slavery and the subservience of and discrimination against free Africa Americans.Those outside of slavery were said to neeed regulation "because they could be relied on to regulate themselves they might overstep the boundaries society had placed around them.
David's appeal argued that African Americans had to assume responsibility for themselves if they wanted to overcome oppression.According to historian Peter Hinks, David believed that the "key to the uplift of the race was a zealous commitment to the tenets of individuals moral improvement: education,temperance,protestant religious practice,regular work habits,and self-regulation.
David has often been regarded as an abolitionist with Black Nationalist views,in large measure because David envisioned a future for African Americans that included selfrule. As wrote in the Appeal,Our suffering will come to an end,in spite of all the Americans this side of eternity.Then we will want all the learning and talents,and perhaps more,to govern ourselves.
David distributed his pamphlet through African American communication networks along the Atlantic coast,which included free and enslaved African American civil rights activists,laborers,African American church and revivalist networks,contacts with free African Americans benevolent societies,and Maroon communities.
Southern officials worked to prevent the appeal from reaching its residents.African Americans in Charleston and New Orleans were arrested distributing the pamphlet while authorities in Savannah,Georgia instituted a ban on the disembarkation of African American seamen.Various southern governmental bodies,meanwhile,labeled the Appeal seditious and imposed harsh penalties on those who circulated it.Despite such efforts,David's pamphlet was widespread by early 1830.Having failed to contain the Appeal,southern offcials criticized both the pamphlet and its author.Newspaper like the Richmond Enquirer railed against what it called Walker's "monstrous slander" of the region.Outrage over the Appeal even led Georgia to announce an award of $10,000 to anyone who could hand over David alive,and $1,000 to anyone who would murder him.
David Appeal did not gain the favor of most abolitionist or free African Americans because its message was considered too radical.
A handful of white antislavery advocates were radicalized by the pamphlet.The Boston Evening Transcript noted in 1830 that some African Americans regarded the Appeal "as if it were a star in the east guiding them to freedom and emancipation.White southerns" fears about black-led challenge to slavery-fears the Appeal storked-came to pass just a year later in the Nat Turner Rebellion,which inspired them to adopt harsher laws in an attempt to sudue and control slaves and free African Americans.
William Lloyd Garrison one of the most influential American abolitionists,began publishing The Liberator in January 1831 not long after the Appeal was published.Early weekly editions of William's newspaper,in fact,largely focused on David's pamphlet.William,who belived slaveowners would be punished by god, rejected the violence David advocated but recognized that slaveowners were courting disaster by refusing to free their slaves."Every sentence that they write-every word that they speak-every resistance that they make,against foreign oppression,is a call upon their slaves to destroy them," William wrote.
David's Appeal and the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831 struck fear in into the hearts of slave owners.There is no evidence to suggest that the Appeal specifically informed or inspired Nat,the two events,which occurred just a few years apart,intensified white anxiety in the South about the potential for future insurrections.Southern states passed laws restricting free blacks and slaves.Many white people in Virginia and neighboring North Carolina speculated that Nat may have been influenced by David's appeal or other abolitionist literature.
Just five years after he arrive in Boston,David died suddenly in the summer of 1830.Through rumors suggested that he had been poisoned,most historians believe David died a natural death from tuberculosis,as listed in his death record.The disease was prevalent and his only daughter,Lydia Ann,had died a walk before David him self passed away.David is buried in a South Boston cemetery for African Americans.His probable grave site remains unmarked.
When Daid died his wife was unable to keep up the annual payments to George Parkman for the purchase for their home.She subsequently lost their home,an eventually David himself had,in a sense,predicted in his Appeal:
"But I must,really,observe that in this very city,when a man of color,dies if he owned any real estate it must generally falls into the hands of some white persons.The wife and children of the deceased may weep and lament if they please,but the estate will be kept snug enough of its white possessor.
His son Edward Garrison Walker was born after David's death.In 1866 he became the first African American elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature.
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