Written by Neil Horsky, this column was originally published in the September 2015 issue of the Boston Compass

Art by Josh MacPhee, “Agitate, Educate, Organize”

On September 28, 1829 Bostonian David Walker published the Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. The Appeal condemns slavery as immoral and barbaric, and calls for immediate abolition. Historian Herbet Aptheker heralds the Appeal as “the first sustained written assault upon slavery and racism to come from a black man in the United States.”

Walker, a devout Christian, charges the white Christian establishment with hypocrisy for supporting a de-humanizing fundamentally unchristian system, and demands repentance. He denounces the American Colonization Society’s plan to re-locate American free blacks to a new colony in West Africa, which was championed by Thomas Jefferson and other leaders, as a guise with the true intent of distancing potentially incendiary free blacks from the ignorant enslaved. Most urgently Walker appeals to his “afflicted and slumbering brethren” to “remember your freedom is your natural right,” and to assert “you are men as well as they.”

Walker owned and operated a used clothing store near Faneuil Hall where he sewed copies of the Appeal into the linings of garments, which were worn by traveling agents into the slave slates. There the pamphlets were covertly distributed and read aloud to the primarily illiterate slave population. The Appeal was threatening to slaveholders who feared slave resistance and uprising. Walker’s agents faced harsh penalties for possession of the Appeal in slave states, including in Louisiana life imprisonment or death. Likewise Walker became a marked man in Boston with Georgia offering a $10,000 bounty for his capture. Walker’s death the following year is attributed in public record to “consumption” from tuberculosis, a common public health problem at the time, however there is speculation that anti-abolitionist conspirators poisoned him for his radical literature.

Walker catapulted the Abolitionist movement that eventually achieved emancipation in 1863. His impassioned prose has informed and inspired African-American leaders such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Malcom X, and today’s Dr. Cornel West who honors the Appeal as “the most powerful theological critique of slavery from the black Christian tradition.”