David Walker: Wilmington's Radical Voice Against Slavery

David Walker grew up free in Wilmington in the early eighteen hundreds, born around seventeen ninety-six of an enslaved father and a free mother. He eventually moved to Boston, where he opened a secondhand clothing store on the waterfront. There he devised a remarkable strategy: he is said to have hidden copies of his radical anti-slavery pamphlet in the pockets of clothes he sold to sailors, reasoning the garments would travel to Southern ports.

Published in September of eighteen twenty-nine, his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World called on enslaved people to resist and denounced American slavery as a moral catastrophe. Several Southern states reacted by restricting abolitionist literature. Walker died less than a year after publication, at thirty-three.