David Walker

Born free in Wilmington, North Carolina, around 1785 to a free mother and an enslaved father, he later left the South and settled in Boston. There he became active in the city’s Black community, worked in used clothing, and wrote for Black newspapers while building a reputation as a bold antislavery thinker.

He is best known for Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, first published in 1829. The work was uncompromising in its attack on slavery and racism, and it quickly alarmed white authorities in the South, who moved to ban it and punish anyone caught distributing it.

Walker died in Boston in 1830, only a year after the Appeal appeared, but his writing endured. He is remembered as one of the most urgent and uncompromising political writers of the early United States, and his work remains central to the history of abolitionist literature.