Biography of david walker
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Source: From DICTIONARY OF NORTH CAROLINA BIOGRAPHY edited by William S. Powell. Copyright (c) 1979-1996 by the University of North Carolina Press. Used by permission of the publisher. www.uncpress.unc.edu
David Walker (28 Sept. 1785-28 June 1830), black author of an incendiary antislavery pamphlet, was born in Wilmington to a free mother and a slave father who died before his birth. Despite his free status inherited from his mother, he grew up stifled by life in a slave society and developed a strong hatred of the institution. He left the South, stating that "If I remain in this bloody land, I will not live long. . . . I cannot remain where I must hear slaves' chains continually and where I must encounter the insults of their hypocritical enslavers." He traveled extensively around the country and by 1827 had settled in Boston, where he established a profitable secondhand clothing business. Active in helping the poor and needy, including runaway slaves, he earned a
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David Walker, Early African American political writer
David Walker was born around 1796 in North Carolina, USA most likely to an enslaved father and free mother. He grew up in the South and traveled the United States extensively before settling in Boston, where he ran a used clothing shop and became an early antiracist activist, selling subscriptions to Freedom’s Journal, the first Black-owned and operated newspaper in the United States.
Between 1826 and 1828, Walker helped funnen the Massachusetts General Coloured Association in order to, in his own words, “unite the coloured population.” Though Walker and many of his associates were free according to the letter of the law, Walker knew that its spirit tended toward Black bondage and perpetual liability to premature death.
And so, in 1829, he published the stunning pamphlet that has cemented his international legacy, Walker’s Appeal, in fyra Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens • David Walker, a lawyer, a jurist, and an early settler of Fayetteville (Washington County), was the leading Whig in the state’s “great northwest” distrikt for nearly fifty years. He began his career as a member of the convention that wrote the state’s first constitution in 1836. He chaired the 1861 convention, and remained active in politics and law until shortly before his death. David Walker was born on February 19, 1806, near Elkton, Kentucky, to Jacob Wythe Walker and Nancy Hawkins Walker. The Walkers were a prolific and politically prominent family in Arkansas, Kentucky, and Virginia. In 1808, his father moved to Logan County, Kentucky, where in 1811 Walker first attended school. In two years, he memorized the grammatical rules of Latin. Thereafter, due largely to the family’s financial problems, his schooling was spotty, with none between ages twelve and eighteen. A badly spoiled child, he was known as “Devil Dave.” His father, “an indulgent master and David Walker (1806–1879)