David Walker (abolitionist) - Boston in The 1820s

Boston in The 1820s

A major determinant for Walker’s move to Boston was the fact that white proslavery attitudes and racist behaviors had hardened across the country as anxiety escalated about the visible organizing of enclaves of free blacks.

Walker was drawn to Boston at a time when the seaport city’s black community was expanding. He saw the connections to the black maritime culture in the Carolinas and the Atlantic. In the southeast, blacks regularly worked semi-autonomously in forestry, as boatmen, as skilled laborers in various occupations, free and enslaved. He recognized the power inherent in agency among both free and enslaved blacks.

Although they were not free from racist hostility and discrimination from whites, black families in Boston lived in relatively benign conditions in the 1820s. The level of black competency and activism in Boston was particularly high. As historian Peter Hinks documents: “The growth of black enclaves in various cities and towns was inseparable from the development of an educated and socially involved local black leadership.”

The Boston black community was friendly to newcomers and transients as a result of contemporary patterns of self-emancipation and survival mobility.

Black cosmopolitanism embodied remnants of African traditions, the common experiences of slavery, and survivors’ advocacy in a hostile, discriminatory world. The community centered around the African Meeting House, still standing on the north slope of Beacon Hill, demanded first-class citizenship. The Massachusetts General Colored Association--David Walker among its founders--opposed colonization, and was the first abolitionist organization in Boston committed to freeing African Americans from chattel slavery.