Courtoni Allen

Professor Kyles
History
14 April 2014
David Walker, Walkers Appeal, Afr Dig Pr ADP, 1830, Rpt. 2013
Walkers Appeal is a book written by an abolitionist named David Walker. David Walker was
born in Wilmington, North Carolina on September 28, 1796 to a free mother and an enslaved
father. Walkers Appeal brought attention to the abuses and inequities of slavery and the role of
individuals to act responsibly for racial equality, according to religious and political tenets. At the
time, some people were outraged and fearful of the reaction that the pamphlet would have. Many
abolitionists thought the views were extreme. Walker's statements and observations about taking
immediate action most effectively reached his white readers and caused great uneasiness and
stress among them, while also providing further reassurance among his black readers.
In Article I Walker tells about how he feels about interracial relationships. "And I do say
it, that the black man, or man of colour, who will leave his own colour and marry a white
woman, to be a double slave to her, just because she is white, ought to be treated by her as he
surely will be. The Appeal described the pernicious effects of both slavery and the subservience
of and discrimination against free blacks. Those outside of slavery were said to need special
regulation because they could not be relied on to regulate their selves and because they might
overstep the boundaries society had placed around them. Walker takes on Thomas Jefferson and
his book Notes on the State of Virginia; refuting Jefferson's notion that blacks are inferior to
whites. Walker also offers that the treatment of the Israelites under the Egyptian Pharaohs as
being far better than the treatment of blacks under whites. The article of consequence of slavery
coincides with his appeal of slaves being ignorant because of slavery.
In Article II Walker talks about how black are imprisoned in ignorance because of they are
oppressed and uneducated and this is how slaves are kept enslaved. The thought of an educated

black man strikes fear in the heart of the white slave master but it's only through education and
enlightenment can one envision freedom and break the bonds of slavery. Ignorance and
treachery one against the other--a groveling servile and abject submission to the lash of tyrants,
we see plainly, my brethren, are not the natural elements of the blacks, as the Americans try to
make us believe, blacks were not educated because of the fear of what they might accomplish.
To never make this belief a reality slave masters keep the slaves at a level beneath their
intellectual. Under those circumstances, when the judgment day for these slave masters God
shall reject these human as they did on earth to slaves.
Article III Walker is about judgment: "What right, then, has one of us to despise another,
and to treat him cruel, on account of his colour, which none, but God who made can alter." God
is not a God of any mistakes, meaning when he made a man he made him without error. Whether
it is a white or black man does not decide the fate of his life. I have known 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, says Walker. Preachers teach that
enslavement will not make God view the person you are any differently, but consequently these
slave owners will know the error of their ways when God calls, and they figure that the
ignorance of their preacher have caused God to be unsatisfied with the way he lived his life on
earth.
In Article IV has to do with Henry Clay's Colonizing Plan, a scheme to return free blacks
to Africa to a supposedly greater freedom while keeping the enslaved blacks in America. It is
said by the Southern slave-holders, that the more ignorant they can bring up the Africans, the
better slaves they make, ('go and come.') Is there any fitness for such people to be colonized in a
far country to be their own rulers? Walkers view on the colonization plan is why would we

trust the same people that have imprisoned and enslaved us to be the same people that will help
us to freedom? There is never a time where your enemy will help you to succeed, so the
colonization plan brought on by Henry Clay will consequently land us back in our same position.
David Walker was trying to appeal that things did not have to continue to exist the way
they were because they had just as much freedom to life as their masters did. David Walker tells
about the enslavement cruelties due to a slave master saying that slavery had made blacks into
the most wretched degraded and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world begun.
What the slaves endured was compared to the suffering of the Israelites in Egypt, the Helots on
Sparta and the Roman slaves. David Walkers claim was that White Americans having reduced
us to the wretched state of slavery treat us in that condition more cruel than any heathen nation
did any people who it had reduced to our condition. David Walker refers back to the Israelites in
Egypt under pharaoh and his people who, through force, oppressed labor such as building Pithom
and Rameses, cities built for pharaoh. Walker made this to show how much lower we are held,
and how much more cruel we are treated by the Americans, than the children of Jacob, by the
Egyptians. Another claim that David Walker makes is everyone on this earth except for the sons
of Africa are called men, and he believed that they should have been free. But to the Americans
they should be slaves to American people forever. Even though Walker wanted everyone to be
treated equally and Jesus Christ is the only master, Walker had concerns about whites thinking
that blacks were not pleased with God for making them black just as the whites was pleased with
God for making them white. Walker said They think because they hold us in their infernal
chains of slavery, that we wish to be white, or of their color-but they are dreadfully deceived we
wish to be just as it pleased our creator to have made us. Walker also questioned the judgment
day of slave masters, have they not to make their appearance before the tribunal of Heaven, to

answer for the deeds done in the body, as well as we? Walker, in this quote, is referring to the
cruel treatment of the slaves. In summary, Walkers Appeal to the coloured citizens of the world
is to protect the black man in America. Fairness is deserved and should be given. God did not
give us life to control a human. As a final point, The Walkers Appeal changed the world in a
positive way, and it is important because Walker was one the first black men to write about
slavery. And after his death it changed the dimensions of slavery.