David Walker

David Walker was born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, around the twenty-eighth of September 1796, the son of a free Black mother and an enslaved father. Under the partus sequitur ventrem doctrine then operative in North Carolina, his status followed his mother's — free.

He moved to Boston in 1825 and established a used-clothing shop on Brattle Street. He used the shop as the operational base for the most consequential abolitionist pamphlet of the antebellum United States.

In September 1829 he self-published 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. The Appeal was a sustained theological, historical, and political argument against American chattel slavery — and an explicit call for armed resistance by the enslaved against their captors. Walker distributed it through Black sailors on the coastal trade, who carried it bound into the linings of clothing he had sold them to ports throughout the slave South.

The pamphlet reached Charleston in early 1830 and produced political alarm across the Southern states. Georgia and North Carolina passed laws making distribution of the Appeal a capital offense; Mississippi placed a ten-thousand-dollar reward on Walker's head, dead or alive. The Appeal galvanized the militant wing of the antebellum abolitionist movement; William Lloyd Garrison cited it as the principal influence on the founding of The Liberator the following year.

Walker was found dead at the door of his shop on the twenty-eighth of June 1830, age approximately thirty-three. Contemporary accounts attributed his death to tuberculosis, but the timing and the public bounty have led most subsequent scholarship to consider poisoning at least possible.

He is honored here as the pamphleteer whose Appeal galvanized militant American abolitionism.