This week, we’re revisiting a classic episode about the radical Black abolitionist David Walker. Walker was a transplant to Boston, moving here after possibly being involved in Denmark Vesey’s planned 1822 slave insurrection in South Carolina. At a time when very few whites spoke of ending slavery, Frederick Douglass said Walker’s book An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World “startled the land like a trump of coming judgement.” He demanded an immediate end to slavery, and he endorsed violence against white slave owners to bring about abolition. After the book helped inspire Nat Turner’s 1830 uprising in Virginia, southern slave states banned his book and offered a reward for anyone who would kill or kidnap him. With a price on his head, many people believed that David Walker’s mysterious death in a Beacon Hill doorway just a year after his landmark book was published was an assassination.

Full show notes: http://HUBhistory.com/190

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