David Walker (abolitionist) - Walker's Appeal (1829)

Walker's Appeal (1829)

Walker's Appeal sought to undermine racist ideology, encourage black self-help through education and religion, exhort readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression, and press white Americans to uphold the self-evident truth that all men are created equal.

As in his public speeches, Walker, in his Appeal, challenged the racism of the early 19th century. He specifically targeted groups like the American Colonization Society, which sought to deport all free and freed blacks from the United States, and public assertions of black inferiority by Thomas Jefferson, who died three years before the publication of Walker's pamphlet. Walker recognized that racist ideology, articulated and encouraged by a man of Jefferson’s stature, posed a powerful long-term threat to the black community and the promise of democracy. As he explained, “I say, that unless we refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.”

Walker's Appeal argued that blacks had to assume responsibility for themselves if they wanted to overcome oppression. As historian Peter Hinks made clear, Walker believed that the “key to the uplift of the race was a zealous commitment to the tenets of individual moral improvement: education, temperance, protestant religious practice, regular work habits, and self-regulation.” Education and religion were especially important to Walker. Black knowledge, he argued, would not only undermine the assertion that blacks were inherently inferior, it would terrify whites. "The bare name of educating the coloured people," Walker wrote, "scares our cruel oppressors almost to death." Those who were educated, Walker argued, had a special obligation to teach their brethren, and literate blacks were urged to read his pamphlet to those who could not. As Walker explained, "t is expected that all coloured 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 some one to read it to them, for it is designed more particularly for them." Just as whites had denied blacks education, moreover, so too had whites endeavored to keep blacks ignorant of God and manipulated his teachings in order to justify slavery. Walker excoriated the hypocrisy of "pretended preachers of the gospel of my Master, who not only held us as their natural inheritance, but treated us with as much rigor as any Infidel or Deist in the world--just as though they were intent only on taking our blood and groans to glorify the Lord Jesus Christ." It fell upon blacks, Walker argued, to reject the notion that the Bible sanctioned slavery and urge whites to repent before God could punish them for their wickedness. As historian Sean Wilentz has maintained, Walker, in his Appeal, "offered a version of Christianity that was purged of racist heresies, one which held that God was a God of justice to all His creatures."

In his Appeal Walker implored the black community to take action against slavery and discrimination. "What gives unity to Walker's polemic," historian Paul Goodman has argued, "is the argument for racial equality and the active part to be taken by black people in achieving it." Literary scholar Chris Apap has echoed these sentiments. The Appeal, Apap has asserted, rejected the notion that the black community should do nothing more than pray for its liberation. Apap has drawn particular attention to a passage of the Appeal in which Walker encourages blacks to “ever make an attempt to gain freedom or natural right, from under our cruel oppressors and murderers, until you see your ways clear; when that hour arrives and you move, be not afraid or dismayed.” Apap has interpreted Walker’s words as a play on the Biblical injunction to “be not afraid or dismayed.” 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, all the Israelites are expected to do is pray, but Walker asserts that the black community must "move." Apap insists that in prompting his readers to "move,” Walker rejected the notion that the blacks should “sit idly by and wait for God to fight their battles--they must (and implicit in Walker's language is the assumption that they will) take action and move to claim what is rightfully and morally theirs.”

Despite the criticism Walker heaped upon the United States, his Appeal did not declare the nation irredeemable. He may have charged white Americans with the sin of turning "coloured people of these United States" into "the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,", but as historian Sean Wilentz has argued, "even in his bitterest passages Walker did not repudiate...republican principles, or his native country." In quoting from the Declaration of Independence at length, in fact, Walker suggested that white Americans only needed to consider their own purported values to see the error of their ways.