Print
Email
Look It Up
AT A GLANCE
David Walker's Appeal
4 articles on David Walker's Appeal
David Walker's Appeal
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 2067 Includes: BibliographyIn the fall of 1829 David Walker wrote Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. Walker circulated this scathing pamphlet throughout the South in late 1829 and 1830, especially in the coastal regions. Relying on his knowledge of the covert communication networks of African Americans in the South, among whom he had spent his youth, Walker tapped the energies of mariners, runaways, itinerants, preachers, settled free blacks, and slaves to craft a strategy of distribution remarkable for its geographical reach. He aspired to place his pamphlet in the hands of people who shared his convictions and would disseminate its words broadly. From its opening sentences, Walker's Appeal indicted American slavery and all its deepest assumptions of black racial inferiority: "We Coloured People of these United" ...
Read full articleDavid Walker's Appeal
Source: The Oxford Companion to United States History
Word Count: 349(1829). David Walker's An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, a seminal work of black nationalist doctrine, called for violent resistance against slavery and white supremacy. Evoking a spirit of race pride, the pamphlet challenged all African Americans to overcome their apathy and rise up in defense of their rights and freedoms. Walker (1785–1830), born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, moved to Boston in 1827. There he opened a second-hand clothing store and worked as an agent of the Freedom's Journal, the first black weekly newspaper. Walker privately published his pamphlets, scholars believe, and clandestinely transported them to southern ports with the aid of northern seaman.Divided into a preamble and four articles, Walker's Appeal culled ideas from the Declaration of Independence ...
Read full articleDavid Walker's Appeal
Source: The Concise Oxford Companion to African American Literature
Word Count: 726First published in pamphlet form in Boston, Massachusetts, in September of 1829, David Walker's Appeal, the full title of which is 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, was a bold attack on American slavery. The initial printing may have totaled only a few hundred copies, but before its author's death in 1830, the pamphlet had gone through three editions and had been circulated not only among abolitionists in the North but among blacks in the South as well. The Appealcoupled an unsparing critique of the United States's hypocrisy in sanctioning chattel slavery with an incendiary call to blacks, both slave and free, to resist slavery, actively and, if need be, violently. ...
Read full articleDavid Walker's Appeal (1829)
Word Count: 1820A powerful expression of raging humanity, the pamphlet that has become known simply as David Walker's Appeal was perhaps the most militant antislavery statement of the nineteenth century. It shook all who read it, black or white, with its denunciation of American slavery and racism, unmitigated by any fear of condemnation or retaliation. The young man who wrote this startling document was born free, sometime between 1785 and 1797, in Wilmington, North Carolina, a town where black Americans outnumbered white Americans by two to one. While it is believed that Walker's mother was free and his father a slave, it is not known where he received the education that is so apparent in the writing of his Appeal. Sometime between 1815 and 1820 he moved to the cityFreedom's ...
Read full article