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 Walkers lived experience, activism, and the synchronizing of his Christian principles and reformist radicalism to demonstrate why and how slavery must be eliminated. Walkers call for blacks to regain their natural rights culminated in hisAppeal 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 Walkers push for racial egalitarianism: it is more urgent than ever.

Black Lives Books