Monday, September 28, 2009

Quote of the Day (David Walker, on the “Wretched” Condition of American Blacks)


“There are not a more wretched, ignorant, miserable and abject set of beings in all the world than the blacks in the southern and western sections of this country, under tyrants and devils. The preachers of America can not see them, but they can send out missionaries to convert the heathens, notwithstanding….O Americans! Americans! I call God—I call angels—I call men, to witness, that your destruction is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you repent.”—David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles, Together With a Preamble to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and very Expressly to Those of the United States (1829)

He was only the owner of a secondhand clothing shop, not, perhaps in 21st century eyes, a great deal higher than the “wretched, ignorant, miserable and abject” condition of the slaves he bemoaned, and he died less than a year after the appearance of the powerful 76-page tract on which his claim to history rests.

Nevertheless, in David Walker’s Appeal, published on this date in 1829 (the author’s 44th birthday) in Boston, this son of a slave father and free mother sounded a clarion call on what remains, all these many years later, the thorniest of American topics: race.

David Walker put his finger unmistakably on the hypocrisy of a nation that could denounce Turks for their brutal treatment of Greeks, while allowing in its own boundaries conditions that equaled or exceeded these. At the same time, he asked the uncomfortable question why white clergymen could preach of justice all the time it was violated in this country.

The North Carolina native had made his way up to Boston, where he became instrumental in the rising abolitionist movement. His manifesto resonated deeply with a New England used to jeremiads by preachers who foretold God’s destruction if human beings didn’t mend their ways and return to the ways of their forefathers.

(Walker also knew how to prick the conscience of the region where he made his home, noting that even in Boston, a hotbed of anti-slavery sentiment, “in the very houses erected to the Lord, they have built little places for the reception of coloured people, where they must sit during meeting, or keep away from the house of God.”)

Colonization of free blacks in America, the solution to slavery preferred by Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and Henry Clay, held no charms for Walker, who rightly believed that African-Americans had enriched the land with their blood. But what raised hackles everywhere below the Mason-Dixon line was his call for insurrection, a remedy acted upon in 1831 by Nat Turner—and dreaded for the next 30 years by the South.

Though contemporary American politics has often been likened to a contact sport, it was infinitely more dangerous in the antebellum period, when violence raged everywhere over slavery. Not only was the “peculiar institution” maintained by brutal treatment of slaves, but by resort to duels, caning (of Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, a particularly fierce opponent), and mob action (against newspaper editor Elijah Lovejoy).

That very likely was the fate meted out to Walker. A $1,000 reward had been offered for his death. He was found dead the following year, after the third edition of his essay. The mystery of his death was not solved, though a number of people suspected he’d been poisoned.

The condition of African-Americans has changed fundamentally since Walker’s time, needless to say, but the progress is also surely not as advanced as we’d like. Despair still is still the order of the day in so many parts of the African-American community.

For instance, last night, as I worked on this post, CNN led with a video of a Chicago honors student being brutally beaten to death by gang members.

Crime, subpar school systems, and collapsing family units—interrelated phenomenon—represent the next great arena of civil rights in America. Where is the outrage that will change these conditions, the way that Walker’s protest eventually did?

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