Summary Of Four Articles By David Walker

Life: Racial discrimination is deeply rooted in the pages of American history as David Walker describes people of color are the most “Wretched, degraded, and abject set of beings ever lived (1). Exploring from this perspective of Walker’s writing: Appeal in Four Articles, he argues that the punishment inflicted on African Americans were without cause. In comparison to the Israelites in Egypt, or the Helots in Sparta and slavery as it was known for the Romans was in no comparison to the oppression of African Americans in the United States. “But we, (colored people) and our children are brutes!! And of course, are and ought to be SLAVES to the American people and their children forever! To dig their mines and work their farms; and thus, go on enriching them, from generation to another with our blood and our tears!!” (Walker,1829). In examining the claim, the profound cruelty at the hands of slave traders and owners allude to how African Americans were treated as
Walker wrote “Whites are dragging us around in chains and hand cuffs to their new state to mines and farms” (1). Fredrick Douglass contended in What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July? that laws were enacted to forbid the teachings of slaves to read and write, while Walker compared the learning and teachings of Epictetus, Terence, and Phaedrus all born into Roman slavery. He explained the disparities of education as a matter of race, stating: “It’s not their condition then, but nature, which has produced distinction (pg. 775)” African Americans in the Nineteenth Century were also key component in American Capitalism. It can be interpreted that David Walker’s attested to generational wealth that was built on the blood and tears of the agricultural enslaved laborer’s cultivating tobacco, rice, sugar and