David Walker

David Walker was a free Black man born in North Carolina who settled in Boston, kept a used-clothing shop near the docks, and wrote An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in 1829, the first sustained call by a Black author for the enslaved to resist, by force if necessary, and a point-by-point answer to Jefferson’s speculations on Black inferiority. He sewed copies into the coats of sailors bound south; Georgia and Louisiana passed laws against it, and a price was put on his head. He was found dead in his doorway in 1830, at thirty-three, of what was probably tuberculosis and was widely believed to be poison.