Move To Boston and Subsequent Career
Walker settled in Boston in the 1820s, married Eliza Butler, and immediately became active within the black community on Beacon Hill. He operated a used clothing store near the wharves in the North End.
Walker took part in a variety of civic and religious organizations in Boston. He was involved with Prince Hall Freemasonry, an organization formed in the 1780s that stood up the against discriminatory treatment of blacks, a founder of the Massachusetts General Colored Association, which opposed colonization, and a member of Rev. Samuel Snowden’s Methodist church. Additionally, Walker served as a Boston agent and a writer for New York's short-lived but influential Freedom's Journal, the first abolitionist newspaper published by blacks in the United States. Walker also spoke publicly against slavery and racism.
Just five years after he arrived in Boston, Walker died suddenly in the summer of 1830. Though rumors subsequently suggested that he had been poisoned, most historians believe Walker died a natural death from tuberculosis, as listed in his death record. The disease was prevalent and had claimed Walker’s only daughter, Lydia Ann, the week before. Walker was buried in a South Boston cemetery for blacks. His probable grave site remains unmarked.
Read more about this topic: David Walker (abolitionist)
Famous quotes containing the words move, boston, subsequent and/or career:
“As they move into sharing parenting, men often are apprentices to women because they are not yet as skilled in child care. Mothers have to be willing to teach fathers—both by stepping in and showing and by stepping back and letting them learn.”
—Nancy Press Hawley. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 6 (1978)
“Consider the China pride and stagnant self-complacency of mankind. This generation inclines a little to congratulate itself on being the last of an illustrious line; and in Boston and London and Paris and Rome, thinking of its long descent, it speaks of its progress in art and science and literature with satisfaction.... It is the good Adam contemplating his own virtue.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Children of the same family, the same blood, with the same first associations and habits, have some means of enjoyment in their power, which no subsequent connections can supply; and it must be by a long and unnatural estrangement, by a divorce which no subsequent connection can justify, if such precious remains of the earliest attachments are ever entirely outlived.”
—Jane Austen (1775–1817)
“Each of the professions means a prejudice. The necessity for a career forces every one to take sides. We live in the age of the overworked, and the under-educated; the age in which people are so industrious that they become absolutely stupid.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)