David Walker
Description
David Walker, a free (with a small f) black man, was one of the most significant African-American abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Born in a slave society before moving to Boston where, after the American Revolutionary War, slavery was abolished, Walker devoted his life to fighting slavery and antiblack racism.
In this book, Sherrow O. Pinder brings to light Walker's lived experience, activism, and the synchronizing of his Christian principles and reformist radicalism to demonstrate why and how slavery must be eliminated. Walker's call for blacks to regain their natural rights culminated in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, an enormously influential work that is now considered a founding text of black studies.
Today, given the escalation of antiblack racism manifested in the upholding of institutionalized violence by the state and the continued marginality of African-Americans, we cannot afford to forget Walker's push for racial egalitarianism: it is more urgent than ever.
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Content
Chapter 1: Envisioning David Walker's Life in the South
Chapter 2: David Walker Moves from the South to the North
Chapter 3: David Walker's Reproof of Blacks' Unequal Treatment and How to Promote Racial Equality
Chapter 4: David Walker's Fearless Speech in the Appeal and Its Aftermath
Conclusion: The Usefulness of David Walker's Thought for an Analysis of Antiblack Racism Today
1
Envisioning David Walker's Life in the South
David Walker was born into the world as a free black in Wilmington, which was the largest town in North Carolina at that time. No legal record of either his birth or his parents is available, so we cannot be sure of the date of his "first birth," as Hannah Arendt called it.1 As is well known, in the time of slavery, it was not unusual not to record the birth of a black person. The accumulated expurgations and/or misnaming of blacks' lives was not unusual. Abandoned to the ills of slavocracy, blacks were the dispossessed, inevitably subjected to the racial imperatives of their social conditions. Their personhood was undermined daily by the very idea of the fungibility of black lives. In other words, blacks were considered as saleable items (property) rather than people and thus were constantly in the throes of anguish.
In other words, suffering for blacks (free or slaves) is marked by their quotidian dehumanization in the slave regime. In fact, the undermining of blacks' personhood, a direct cause of their lives confined to the brutality and the epidemic violence inherent in a slave society, is akin to what Orlando Patterson, in Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study, refers to as "social death," or, what, following Patterson, I call a death-in-life. Yet, an unlivable life is still out in the open, and not without significance. In fact, the numerous ways in which the master exhausts his power over the enslaved reduces them to the "living dead,"2 "always living," in Christina Sharpe's suggestive phrase, "in the push toward [their] death."3 In Walker's words, of "the deeds done in the body while living,"4 one of the greatest heartaches is, of course, everything that fractures and breaks their livability and grievability, a neologism popularized by Judith Butler's Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? This is the kind of knowledge that Walker bears at an early age.
Walker's interlocutor, Henry Highland Garnet, in "Life and Character of David Walker," very much a participant in Walker's life, estimates his "first birth" as 1785.5 Garnet opens his study with a dossier that encourages many scholars to record 1785 as the official date of Walker's birth. However, Peter P. Hinks, in To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance, reveals the inconsistency of Walker's birth recorded by scholars, but concludes that we can estimate his birth around 1796 or 1797.6 Given that the first Naturalization Act of 1790 bestowed American citizenship only to white men, the owners of property, and was later revised in 1802 to limit naturalization to an "alien, being free and white" who lived in the United States at least for five years, Walker was legally denied American citizenship and had no rights "bound to be respected by whites," to paraphrase Judge Robert N. Taney in his decision in the case Dred Scott v. Sandford. And even though in the 1820s, "the privileges and immunities clause (Article IV, Section 2)" became of great significance in the debates about the rights of free blacks,7 it was not until the Civil Rights Act of 1866 ("The citizens of each state shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of citizens in the several states") and the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment of the United States Constitution in 1868 that blacks were legally granted American citizenship. However, as we will see later, Walker is more concerned with the universality of citizenship that was already embedded in natural rights (bestowed to us by God) and, in his view, the Declaration of Independence that emphasized "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." Precisely, for this reason, in the Appeal, he calls on "colored citizens," in Derrick R. Spires's words, "to assume the rights and subjectivity of citizenship."8
Walker's mother was a free black woman. His slave father, we are told, died a few months before Walker's "first birth." While there is not much definite information about Walker's father, there are some speculations that Anthony Walker, "an Ibo of Nigeria who was owned by the Revolutionary War hero Major General Robert Howe"9 was Walker's father. Given that in a slave society, the legal doctrine of partus sequitur ventrem establishes that a child is to inherit the non-status/non-being condition of the mother,10 Walker was deemed "not slave." The "not" in front of slave is to be understood not as a mere marker of identity but as an affixation of the wretchedness of blackness. The inheritance of a child's status through the mother's line is, as Jennifer Morgan concludes, "a simple and necessary corollary of racial slavery and the logical outgrowth of a labor system rooted in an increasingly inflexible and racialized understanding of heritability."11
Very early, Walker recognizes that he, along with the slaves, in the face of mounting inequality, are excluded from America's promise of equal humanity, which finds its most eloquent expression in the rights of all people to liberty and freedom as self-evident truths foregrounded in the Declaration of Independence. And if "the love of freedom . is an inborn sentiment, which the God of nature has planted deep in the heart," it is true, as George Tucker writes in 1802,12 that by enslaving blacks, Christians, in Walker's acknowledgment, "forget that God rules in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of the earth, having his ears continually open to the cries, tears and groans of his oppressed people; and being a just and holy Being will one day appear fully in behalf of the oppressed, and arrest the progress of the avaricious oppressors."13 And, this of course, would later have significant bearing on Walker's belief that Christian Americans are untrue to God's promise of equality for all people.
Furthermore, Walker remains convinced that whites, by enslaving blacks, choose to ignore the Christian doctrine according to which we should love one another because love comes from God, and "everyone that loveth is born of God and knoweth God."14 Let us say, therefore, as Walker concludes, that in adherence to Christian teaching, whites "treat [blacks] in open violation of the Bible."15 This is the reason why Walker qualifies whites as an "unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings"16 who are always after power and authority. At a very early age, Walker understands that whites are "the problem," and are always willing and ready to assert their superiority over blacks. In other words, he comprehends that the white power structure is always a problem for blacks.
Historian Ira Berlin reminds us that the "desire for liberty [is] inherent in human nature and impossible to stifle; surrounded by liberty but unable to enjoy it, blacks would naturally rebel."17 And so blacks did rebel,18 and continued to do, on and off the slave plantations. And even though slave revolts break the law in order to make the law accountable for its injustice toward blacks, slave revolts are alternative but necessary forms of liberation. In fact, slave revolts are correctives to their subjection.19 Thus, we will see later that Walker's awareness of the planning of a slave revolt by members of the "African Church"20 (which he attends when he moves to Charleston, South Carolina) excites and inspires him. It instills in him the idea that blacks' resistance to slavery would prove decisive in helping them to appreciate their self-worth as individuals and as a people, and equip them with the Spartan courage to affirm their status as object/property whose lives are, in Sharpe's words, "lived in/as proximity to knowledge of death."21
On his own account, as a young man, Walker's movements throughout the South allows him to observe the myriad of injustices endemic to the institution of slavery. And, although he was "not slave," he lived on the social, economic, and political margins of society. African American historian Brenda Stevenson in her study of the slave society observes that "the free black population endure mounting economic, political, and social discrimination."22 In other words, blacks' suffering, as Walker notes, "are so very numerous and aggravating"23 that when asked to define what he was, he answered: "I am one of the oppressed, degraded and wretched sons of Africa rendered so by the avaricious and unmerciful among the whites."24 In this sense, Walker's engagement with self and the world, as marked by his otherness, is not without importance. Viewed in this way, the "I" is no longer the epistemological center or part of an "us." It remains on the margin and is buried into a "them" associated to the thingness of an existence as object. Blacks' being can be rendered by the acronym NFTBM, or Not Free "To Be" Me - that is to say, "leaving existence by the...
