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:
“A Man who always acts in the Severity of Wisdom, or the Haughtiness of Quality, seems to move in a personated Part: It looks too Constrained and Theatrical for a Man to be always in that Character which distinguishes him from others.”
—Richard Steele (1672–1729)
“Any balance we achieve between adult and parental identities, between children’s and our own needs, works only for a time—because, as one father says, “It’s a new ball game just about every week.” So we are always in the process of learning to be parents.”
—Joan Sheingold Ditzion, Dennie, and Palmer Wolf. Ourselves and Our Children, by Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, ch. 2 (1978)
“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)
“In time your relatives will come to accept the idea that a career is as important to you as your family. Of course, in time the polar ice cap will melt.”
—Barbara Dale (b. 1940)