Jan. 2, 2025
David Walker: The Abolitionist Who Ignited a Revolution and Inspired Generations
Can one man’s words ignite a revolution? Join us as we uncover the remarkable life of David Walker, a fervent abolitionist whose fearless activism and groundbreaking publication, “Walker’s Appeal,” challenged the very foundation of slavery in America. Journey with us from Walker’s humble beginnings in Wilmington, North Carolina, to his influential role in Boston’s abolitionist movement. We illuminate his significant contributions to the African Methodist church, the Prince Hall Free Masonry, and the Massachusetts General Colored Association. Discover how Walker’s relentless fight against discrimination and his impassioned call for action inspired generations of activists and left an indelible mark on the struggle for freedom.
But the story doesn't end with history; it resonates powerfully today. We delve into the timeless theme of resilience, emphasizing the necessity of confronting adversity to forge a path to success. Life is bound to challenge us, but our true measure lies in our ability to endure and rise above. This episode serves as both a tribute to our ancestors and a motivational rallying cry for all who seek to overcome obstacles and achieve their full potential. Tune in for a compelling and empowering discussion that not only honors the legacy of David Walker but also urges us to take charge of our own destinies.
00:12 - David Walker's Anti-Slavery Activism
19:11 - Overcoming Adversity and Pursuing Success
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Hello, my friends, and welcome to another moment.
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Yes, I'm back with another Black History Moment from Bo, and I am here to tell you today, today is a very hot day, but today is also a very good day.
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Good because we are alive today and the goals that we have set forth in our mind are still active.
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And so, when you woke up this morning, you should have had a smile on your face, because you know that everything that you attempt today is going to work, and I'm not telling you it's going to be easy, but I'm telling you it's going to be worth it.
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My friends, we are going to live this day with joy and determination, and I know, sometimes it's hard and you won't always be motivated.
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You just have to be disciplined.
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And do you know what self-discipline is?
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It's the ability to do what you should do when you should do it, whether you feel like it or not.
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And, oh, my friends, I have a bunch of days like that, days when I don't feel like doing crap, but I do the shit anyway.
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And if you should be a new listener, we say welcome, welcome to our show.
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And if you do not like hearing the truth, this is not the show for you Because we don't sugarcoat anything.
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We tell you the truth and the facts, and sometimes it'll make you mad and sometimes it'll make you sad, and if it does either one of them, you are awakening.
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So sit back and listen as I slip into darkness and tell you about an evolutionist by the name of David Walker.
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David Walker was born September 28th 1796 and he was an American abolitionist, a writer and anti-slavery activist.
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You see, walker was born in Wilmington, north Carolina.
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His mother was free.
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His father, who had died before his birth, had been enslaved and since American law embraced the principle of partus equor venturum, which literally means that which is brought forth follows the womb.
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Therefore Walker inherited his mother's status as a free person.
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But you see, walker found the oppression of fellow black people unbearable.
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He said if I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long.
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I cannot remain where I must hear slave chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical enslavers.
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So consequently, as a young adult he moved to Charleston, south Carolina, and at that time Charleston was a mecca of upwardly mobile, free black people and he became affiliated with a strong African Methodist church community of activists, members of the first black denomination in the United States.
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He later visited and likely lived in Philadelphia, a shipbuilding center and location of an active black community where the AME church was founded.
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By 1825, walker had settled in Boston.
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You see, slavery was abolished in Massachusetts after the American Revolutionary War and on February the 23rd he married Eliza Butler, the daughter of Jonas Butler.
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Her family was an established black family in Boston.
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Their children was Linda Ann Walker, who died July 31st 1830, of lung fever at the age of one year and nine months, and Edward G Walker.
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Now Walker started a used clothing store in the city market.
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He next owned a clothing store on Brattle Street near the wars.
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There were three used clothing merchants, including Walker, who went to trial in 1828 for selling stolen property.
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The results was never known.
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You see, my friends, by helping runaway slaves he sold them used clothing because they were poor and needy.
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Walker took part in civic and religious organizations in Boston.
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In Boston he was involved with Prince Hall Free Masonry, an organization formed in the 1780s that stood up against discriminatory treatment of Black people, became a founder of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which opposed colonization of free American black people to Africa, and was a member of Reverend Samuel Snowden's Methodist Church.
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Walker also spoke publicly against slavery and racism.
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Although they were not free from racist hostility and discrimination, black families in Boston lived a relatively benign conditions in the 1820s.
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The level of Black activism in Boston was particularly high.
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As historian Peter Hinks documented, the growth of Black enclaves in various cities and towns was inseparable from the development of an educated and socially involved local Black leadership.
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By the end of 1828, walker had become Boston's leading spokesman against slavery.
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You see, my friends, by this time this black man was just getting his damn feet warmed because he served as a Boston subscription sales agent and a writer for New York City's short-lived but influential Freedom's Journal.
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Short-lived but influential Freedom's Journal 1827 to 1829.
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And this was the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans.
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In September 1829, walker published his appeal to African Americans, entitled Walker's Appeal, in four articles, together with the preamble to the colored citizens of the world, but in particular and very expressly to those of the United States of America, written in Boston, state of Massachusetts, september 28, 1829.
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The first edition is quite rare.
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A second and then a third edition appeared in 1830.
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Walker's second edition of 1830 expressed his views even more strongly than the first edition.
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Walker appealed to his readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression, regardless of the risk, and to press white Americans to realize that slavery was morally and religiously repugnant.
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The appeal was semi-forgotten by 1848.
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A great deal of other abolitionist writings which inspired by Walker, had appeared in those 18 years.
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But it received a new life with its reprinting in 1848 by the black minister Henry Highland Garnett, who in another 17 years would be the first African American ever to address the US Congress.
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Garnett included the first biography of David Walker and similarly themed speech of his own, his address to the slaves of the United States of America, to the slaves of the United States of America, which was perceived as so radical that it was rejected for publication when delivered in 1843.
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The most influential white abolitionist, john Brown, played a role in getting the volume of Garnett printed.
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You see, my friend of Garnett printed.
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You see, my friend, the establishment of America at that time didn't want the damn truth printed.
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But that didn't stop Walker, because he challenged the racism of the early 19th century.
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He specifically targeted groups such as the American Colonization Society which sought to deport all free and freed black people from the United States to a colony in Africa.
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Ain't that a bitch, and you know what.
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This is how Liberia was established.
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He wrote against published assertions of black inferiority by the late President Thomas Jefferson, who died three years before Walker's pamphlet was published.
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As Walker explained, I say that unless we refute Mr Jefferson's arguments respecting us we will only establish them.
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He rejected the white assumption in the United States that dark skin was a sign of inferiority and lesser humanity, challenged critics to show him a damn page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found which maintains that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel by telling them that they were not of the human family, referring to the period when they were enslaved in Egypt.
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Friends, by the 1820s and 30s, individuals and groups had emerged with degrees of commitment to equal rights for black men and women, but no national anti-slavery movement existed at the time Walker's appeal was published.
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Here's the thing to be an abolitionist was not for the faint-hearted.
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That was a hell of a position to be in.
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You see, the slaveholders represented it for the first half of the 19th century, the most closely knit and most important single economic unit in the nation.
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There are millions of bondsmen and millions of acres of land comprising an investment of billions of dollars.
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This economic might had its counterpart in political power, given its possessor's dominance within the nation and predominance within the South.
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You see, that damn slave power thesis argued that slaveholders used their economic and political influence to control the United States government prior to the American Civil War.
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Now the damn three-fifths clause of the United States Constitution counted three-fifths of the enslaved population of a state towards its representation in Congress and the Electoral College, as enslaved people could not vote.
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This clause amounted to additional representation for large slave-holding slaves beyond what their free populations would normally warrant.
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Both the Democratic and the Whig parties saw abolitionism as a threat to party unity and opposed efforts to introduce slavery as an issue in national politics.
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Although white Southerners comprised a small minority of the overall US population, 11 of 15 presidents to serve prior to the Civil War came from slave-holding Southern families.
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Civil War came from slave-holding Southern families and none except John Adams and John Quincy Adams was elected without carrying a majority of Southern electoral votes.
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I hope you're with me, my friends.
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If you do not understand, go back and listen again.
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The appeal described the effects of both slavery and the subservience of and discrimination against free black Americans.
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Those outside of slavery were said to need special regulation because they cannot be relied upon to regulate themselves and because they might overstep the boundaries society had placed around them.
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Ain't that a bitch?
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We could not regulate ourselves.
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In his appeal, walker implored the black community to take action against slavery and discrimination.
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What gives unity to Walker's poemic is the argument of racial equality and the active part to be taken by Black people in achieving it.
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The appeal has rejected the notion that Black community should do nothing more than pray for its liberation.
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A PAP has drawn particular attention to a passage of the appeal in which Walker encourages blacks to never make an attempt to gain freedom or natural right from under our cruel oppressors and murderers until you see your ways clear.
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When that hour arrives, you move.
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Be not afraid or dismayed.
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A pap has interpreted Walker's words as a play on the biblical injunction to be not afraid or dismayed.
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As he points out, be not afraid or dismayed is a direct quote from 2 Chronicles 20.15, where the Israelites are told to be not afraid or dismayed because God would fight the battle for them and save them from their enemies without their having to lift a finger In the Bible.
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All the Israelites are expected to do is pray, but Walker asserted that the black community must move.
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Adapt insists that in prompting his readers to move, walker rejected the notion that black people in America should sit idly by and wait for God to fight their battles.
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They must take action and move to claim what is rightfully and morally theirs.
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Walker's appeal argued that black Americans had to assume responsibility for themselves if they wanted to overcome oppression.
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Walker believed that the key to the uplift of the race was a zealous commitment to the intents of individual moral improvement, education, moral improvement, education, temperance, protestant religious practice, regular work habits and self-regulation.
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America, walker argued, is more our country than it is.
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The whites.
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We have enriched it with our blood and tears.
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Education and religion were especially important to Walker.
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Black knowledge, he argued, would not only undermine the assertion that black people were inherently inferior, it would terrify white people.
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The bare name of educating the colored people, he wrote, scares our cruel oppressors almost to death.
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Those who were educated, walker argued, had a special obligation to teach their brethren and literate.
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Black people were urged to read his pamphlets to those who could not, as he explained, it is expected that all colored men, women and children of every nation, language and tongue under heaven will try to procure a copy of this appeal and read it, or get someone to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them.
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Walker has often been regarded as an abolitionist with black nationalist views, in large measure because he envisioned a future for black Americans that included self-rule.
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As he wrote in the appeal, our sufferings will come to an end, in spite of all the Americans, this side of eternity.
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Then we will want all the learning and talents, and perhaps more, to govern ourselves.
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This country is as much ours as it is the whites.
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Whether they will admit it now or not, they will see it and believe it.
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By and by my friends, that was David Walker, a great abolitionist, and if you should happen to get a copy of the Appeal, I inspire you to read it, because this man was so far ahead of his time and, yes, he truly did have black nationalism views and he talked about whiteness and this war that we are still in today.
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Rest in peace, my brother, because your story has been told and I pray that anyone who hears about you reads your appeal.
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My friends, that music tells me that it's time for me to get out of here.
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I hope you enjoyed this day and have a great rest of your day.
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But before I go, let me tell you something you already know.
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The world ain't all sunshine and rainbows.
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It's a very mean and nasty place and it will beat you to your knees and keep you there permanently if you let it.
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You, me or nobody is going to hit as hard as life.
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But it ain't about how hard you hit.
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It's about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward, how much you can take and keep moving forward.
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That's how winning is done.
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Now, if you know what you're worth, get the hell out there and get what you're worth.
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But you got to be willing to take the hits and not point fingers saying you ain't where you want to be because of him or her or anybody.
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Cowards do that and that ain't.
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You.
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Have a great day, my friends, until next time.
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It has been my honor.
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Peace to my ancestors and my elders.
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I walk in your strength, legacy and power today and every day.
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