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Walker, David
4 articles on Walker, David
Walker, David
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 1737 Includes: Bibliography(b. 1796/7; d. 6 August 1830),
political writer. David Walker was probably born in Wilmington, North Carolina, to a free woman of color. Exactly who his father was has remained uncertain. Because his mother was free, Walker also assumed that status. Wilmington was the commercial center of the state's Lower Cape Fear District, a region rich in naval stores, lumber, and rice. While only a few free blacks resided in Wilmington in the early nineteenth century, the number of black slaves was quite large: in 1800 Wilmington had 1,125 enslaved blacks and 19 free blacks, while whites numbered only 545. Blacks were the foundation of the region's key enterprises. Blacks performed virtually all the labor in the region's vast pine barrens necessary to the production of such naval stores as turpentine, pitch, tar, and rosin. They were ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 6971785?–1830
African American abolitionist, civil rights activist, and advocate of African independence, best known for the fiery pamphlet he wrote in 1829. During the antebellum years, David Walker was prominent among a generation of politically outspoken free blacks that included Frederick Douglass, Martin Robison Delany, and the Reverend Henry Highland Garnet. Walker, according to historian Sterling Stuckey, deserves recognition as “the father of black nationalist theory in America.” His most lasting achievement was his 1829 pamphlet, David Walker's Appeal … to the Colored Citizens of the World, in which he called on African American slaves to revolt against their masters to gain their freedom.The son of a white mother and a slave father, Walker was born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, taking the ...
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Source: African American National Biography
Word Count: 1533 Includes: Further Reading(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 1800African 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. ...
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Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 769(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 ...
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