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David Walker was born in Wilmington, North Carolina. His father was a slave and his mother was free. According to North Carolina law, children born to free mothers were also free. Though he was not a slave, having traveled throughout the South, Walker was familiar with the cruelty of slavery. As a man, Walker moved to Boston, although faced with discrimination, he was able to open a used clothing store. While in Boston, he became a member of the A.M.E church, met prominent Black activists and became involved in the anti-slavery movement. He was also active in the Underground Railroad, helped fugitive slaves with clothing, and wrote numerous articles for the New York City based African American newspaper, the Freedom's Journal. It was during this time in Walker’s life that he wrote a series of articles that would later become a pamphlet entitled, “David 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.” David Walker's Appeal, was arguably the most radical of all anti-slavery documents, and caused a great stir among both Blacks and whites when it was published. Walker’s Appeal challenged the leaders of the world community to abolish slavery, called for slaves to revolt against their masters, and last but certainly not least, denounced the hypocrisy of America’s democracy.
When David Walker’s Appeal was published in1829, the very idea of freedom, equality, and justice for Blacks in America was unthinkable, especially to southern slaveholders. In David Walker’s Appeal, he boldly took the very principles upon which this country was founded, liberty, equality, and justice, and threw them back in the face of white America. Walker charged America with being hypocrites by his very basic call to recognize the humanity in all people when he wrote,
Now I appeal to heaven and to earth, and particularly to the American people themselves whoCan Christian Americans deny these barbarous cruelties?
cease not to declare that our condition is not hard, and that we are comparatively satisfied to rest in wretchedness and misery, under them and their children. Not, indeed, to show me a colored President, a Governor, a Legislator, a Senator, a Mayor, or an Attorney at the Bar. —
But to show me a man of color, who holds the low office of a Constable, or one who sits in a Juror Box, even on a case of one of his wretched brethren, throughout this great Republic!!
The time to rise up and reclaim humanity, which had been stripped away by the white slaveholders, was, to Walker, clearly at hand.
One of the primary elements of Walker's Appeal was to draw upon the ways in which American violated their own professed ideals of Christianity, and he talked about how the cruelty of slavery was a sin against God, and white America would suffer, and be punished by God for the sin of slavery.
Have you not Americans, having subjected us under you,
added to these miseries, by insulting us in telling us to our
face, because we are helpless that we are not of the human
family? I ask you, O! Americans, I ask you, in the name of
the Lord, can you deny these charges?
Walker, uncompromising, undaunted, using very radical language, condemned the institution of slavery wholeheartedly and condemned the complicity of the entire institutional slavery structure in the United States, and very eloquently called for immediate abolition. During this time in America’s history, those against slavery usually called for the gradual abolition of slavery or colonization. Neither was acceptable to Walker. According to Walker, as long as slavery existed, even free blacks were not free since their freedom was minimal.
Can a man of color buy a piece of land and keep it peaceably? Will not some white man try to get it from him even if it is in a mud hole? I need not comment any farther on a subject, which all, both black and white, will readily admit.
David Walker, who had no use whatsoever for American white Christianity, felt the sins of racism and slavery were so intrinsically American that it would be a contradiction for any Black person to be an American. Walker could express his sense of outrage and justice through the language, imagery, and values that he found in the Bible without fear of contradiction because those passages in the Bible emphasizing obedience, humility, pacifism, patience, had been presented to the slaves by white America as the essence of Christianity. On the other hand, those passages that emphasized equality, freedom, and happiness as attributes of this world as well as the next were eliminated from the official sermons reserved for the slave’s religion.
Were I given the opportunity to ask David Walker one question, I would ask him if he recognizes the irony between the freedom of today’s African Americans and that of our “free ancestors”? Given the fact that one of Walker’s beliefs was that no Black person is free in this country until slavery was abolished and that the freedom of the free Negro was an indeed minimal freedom, I see very little difference. Theoretically, we now have civil rights; however, they are systematically being stripped from us through the same legislative branch of government that originally institutionalized slavery. I also think that Walker’s Appeal, is as relevant today as when it was published in 1829.
I think Walker recognized the dangers of his pen, and he predicted that his appeal might cost him his life. Walker understood that the Bible is a very powerful book and that we all must be called to judgment. I think it was important for Walker that the inhumane, brutal, and atrocious treatment of slaves in the name of “Christianity” be exposed, not only to the world but also to the judgment of God. Walker writes, “The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious, and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority”. Walker felt white America had invented for African Americans the most barbarous form of slavery ever known. Yet, he writes,
I have been for years troubling the pages of historians to find out what our fathers have done to the white Christians of America, to merit such condign punishment as they have inflicted on them, and do continue to inflict on us their children.
It was inward turmoil like this, which most likely influenced his passion for the abolition of slavery. Meanwhile, it remains apparent which Christians in America have forgotten “that God rules”...I’m just sayin’
