David Walker Research Paper

My name is David Walker and I was an abolitionist reformer during the Antebellum Era. I was born in 1796 in Wilmington, North Carolina. When I was born, my father was an enslaved man and my mother was a free woman. Due to the states’ rights at that time I inherited my mother’s free title. However, being a free man never kept me from witnessing the horrors of slavery. As time went on and slavery continued, I felt the urge to leave my hometown because, “I could not remain where I must hear slaves’ chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical enslavers”. My choice to leave to Boston, Massachusetts in 1815 when I was 19 years old, was mostly enforced by my continuous urge to fight against slavery and to share my abolitionist views on slavery with the rest of the country. I would not have been able to do anything in my little hometown of Wilmington. While in Boston I became greatly involved in the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which was an organization that was opposed to all slavery and racism. I had found my calling, but I wanted to take this association a step further and in order to do so, I started writing speeches and documents that I would read aloud to the public that were
about the uprising against slavery. Also, I joined the “Freedom’s Journal”, that was the first newspaper led by African Americans, and I worked for them as an agent.
Just as an agent, I did not really have a say in what was put in the newspaper and I felt this gnawing need to speak my mind on fighting back.
So, in 1829 I published a pamphlet entitled “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”. In my appeal, I used references from the bible and the Declaration of Independence to argue my view on abolition and the antislavery movement. Some people such as William Lloyd Garrison, denounced my appeal by saying I was advocating violence. However, back then violence was what slaves needed to regain their humanity; I was not trying to use violence as a reprisal
tactic. As my appeal pamphlet spread across America, the want of my death from many southerners was increasing as well. Soon, people were offering awards for my dead body and my friends from Boston wanted me to move to Canada, but I did not want to back down. If they wanted to kill me that badly I should let them because my legacy would live on even past my death. On August 6, 1830 I died at the age of 33. However my legacy lived on and changed the tone of the abolition reform movement into a more violent one.

“You may do your best to keep us in wretchedness and misery, to enrich you and your children; but God will deliver us from under you. And wo, wo will be to you if we have to obtain our freedom by fighting.”
—David Walker