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Walker’S Appeal, In Four Articles; Together With A Preamble, To The Coloured Citizens Of The World, … (Boston, 1830), David Walker, Paul Royster , Editor & Depositor
Walker’S Appeal, In Four Articles; Together With A Preamble, To The Coloured Citizens Of The World, … (Boston, 1830), David Walker, Paul Royster , Editor & Depositor
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Walker’s Appeal ... is a radical antislavery and antiracist manifesto by a free American of African ancestry. Its bold denunciation of European culture was unprecedented, unrestrained, and startling, viz.:
“The whites have always been an unjust, jealous, unmerciful, avaricious and blood-thirsty set of beings, always seeking after power and authority.”
Walker attacks the slave system and its rampant racism from the viewpoint of America’s allegiance to the idea of freedom; he quotes the Declaration of Independence at length, and strikes a recognizably jeremiad note:
“O Americans! Americans!! I call God—I call angels— I call men, to witness, that your destruction …