Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life

Walker's Appeal, with a Brief Sketch of His Life
Author: David Walker
Publisher: Good Press
Total Pages: 92
Release: 2020-01-09
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

This book documents the life and ideas of David Walker, an American abolitionist, writer, and anti-slavery activist. Despite his father being enslaved, his mother's status as a free woman ensured his freedom as well (a legal principle known as partus sequitur ventrem). While living in Boston, Massachusetts, he collaborated with the African Grand Lodge (later named Prince Hall Grand Lodge, Jurisdiction of Massachusetts) to publish this book. It serves as a rallying call for black unity and resistance against slavery, exposing the injustices and brutalities of the institution and urging individuals to act according to religious and political principles. However, some were alarmed and fearful of the pamphlet's potential impact, particularly in the South where it was met with strong opposition, leading to the enactment of laws that prohibited circulation of "seditious publications."

The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal"

The Textual Effects of David Walker's
Author: Marcy J. Dinius
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2022-04-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 081229839X

Historians and literary historians alike recognize David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829-1830) as one of the most politically radical and consequential antislavery texts ever published, yet the pamphlet's significant impact on North American nineteenth-century print-based activism has gone under-examined. In The Textual Effects of David Walker's "Appeal" Marcy J. Dinius offers the first in-depth analysis of Walker's argumentatively and typographically radical pamphlet and its direct influence on five Black and Indigenous activist authors, Maria W. Stewart, William Apess, William Paul Quinn, Henry Highland Garnet, and Paola Brown, and the pamphlets that they wrote and published in the United States and Canada between 1831 and 1851. She also examines how Walker's Appeal exerted a powerful and lasting influence on William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator and other publications by White antislavery activists. Dinius contends that scholars have neglected the positive, transnational, and transformative effects of Walker's Appeal on print-based political activism and literary and book history—that is, its primarily textual effects—due to an enduringly narrow focus on the violence that the pamphlet may have occasioned. She offers as an alternative a broadened view of activism and resistance that centers the works of Walker, Stewart, Apess, Quinn, Garnet, and Brown within an exploration of radical forms of authorship, publication, civic participation, and resistance. In doing so, she has written a major contribution to African American literary studies and the history of the book in antebellum America.

William Wells Brown

William Wells Brown
Author: William Wells Brown
Publisher: University of Georgia Press
Total Pages: 486
Release: 2010-01-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0820336343

Born into slavery in Kentucky, William Wells Brown (1814-1884) was kept functionally illiterate until after his escape at the age of nineteen. Remarkably, he became the most widely published and versatile African American writer of the nineteenth century as well as an important leader in the abolitionist and temperance movements. Brown wrote extensively as a journalist but was also a pioneer in other literary genres. His many groundbreaking works include Clotel, the first African American novel; The Escape: or, A Leap for Freedom, the first published African American play; Three Years in Europe, the first African American European travelogue; and The Negro in the American Rebellion, the first history of African American military service in the Civil War. Brown also wrote one of the most important fugitive slave narratives and a striking array of subsequent self-narratives so inventively shifting in content, form, and textual presentation as to place him second only to Frederick Douglass among nineteenth-century African American autobiographers. Ezra Greenspan has selected the best of Brown's work in a range of fields including fiction, drama, history, politics, autobiography, and travel. The volume opens with an introductory essay that places Brown and his work in a cultural and political context. Each chapter begins with a detailed introductory headnote, and the contents are closely annotated; there is also a selected bibliography. This reader offers an introduction to the work of a major African American writer who was engaged in many of the important debates of his time.

African American Literature in Transition, 1830–1850: Volume 3

African American Literature in Transition, 1830–1850: Volume 3
Author: Benjamin Fagan
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 554
Release: 2021-05-13
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108395287

This volume charts the ways in which African American literature fosters transitions between material cultures and contexts from 1830 to 1850, and showcases work that explores how African American literature and lived experiences shaped one another. Chapters focus on the interplay between pivotal political and social events, including emancipation in the West Indies, the Irish Famine, and the Fugitive Slave Act, and key African American cultural productions, such as the poetry of Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, the writings of David Walker, and the genre of the Slave Narrative. Chapters also examine the relationship between African American literature and a variety of institutions including, the press, and the post office. The chapters are grouped together in three sections, each of which is focused on transitions within a particular geographic scale: the local, the national, and the transnational. Taken together, they offer a crucial account of how African Americans used the written word to respond to and drive the events and institutions of the 1830s, 1840s, and beyond.

The Speeches of Frederick Douglass

The Speeches of Frederick Douglass
Author: Frederick Douglass
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 686
Release: 2018-01-01
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 0300192177

A collection of twenty of Frederick Douglass's most important orations This volume brings together twenty of Frederick Douglass's most historically significant speeches on a range of issues, including slavery, abolitionism, civil rights, sectionalism, temperance, women's rights, economic development, and immigration. Douglass's oratory is accompanied by speeches that influenced him, his reflections on successful rhetorical strategies, contemporary commentary on his performances, and modern-day assessments of his rhetorical legacy.

The White Image in the Black Mind

The White Image in the Black Mind
Author: Mia Bay
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2000-02-10
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199881073

How did African-American slaves view their white masters? As demons, deities or another race entirely? When nineteenth-century white Americans proclaimed their innate superiority, did blacks agree? If not, why not? How did blacks assess the status of the white race? Mia Bay traces African-American perceptions of whites between 1830 and 1925 to depict America's shifting attitudes about race in a period that saw slavery, emancipation, Reconstruction, and urban migration. Much has been written about how the whites of this time viewed blacks, and about how blacks viewed themselves. By contrast, the ways in which blacks saw whites have remained a historical and intellectual mystery. Reversing the focus of such fundamental studies as George Fredrickson's The Black Image in the White Mind, Bay investigates this mystery. In doing so, she uncovers and elucidates the racial thought of a wide range of nineteenth-century African-Americans--educated and unlettered, male and female, free and enslaved.

The Amistad Rebellion

The Amistad Rebellion
Author: Marcus Rediker
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 319
Release: 2013-11-26
Genre: History
ISBN: 014312398X

"Vividly drawn . . . this stunning book honors the achievement of the captive Africans who fought for—and won—their freedom.”—The Philadelphia Tribune A unique account of the most successful slave rebellion in American history, now updated with a new epilogue—from the award-winning author of The Slave Ship In this powerful and highly original account, Marcus Rediker reclaims the Amistad rebellion for its true proponents: the enslaved Africans who risked death to stake a claim for freedom. Using newly discovered evidence and featuring vividly drawn portraits of the rebels, their captors, and their abolitionist allies, Rediker reframes the story to show how a small group of courageous men fought and won an epic battle against Spanish and American slaveholders and their governments. The successful Amistad rebellion changed the very nature of the struggle against slavery. As a handful of self-emancipated Africans steered their own course for freedom, they opened a way for millions to follow. This edition includes a new epilogue about the author's trip to Sierra Leona to search for Lomboko, the slave-trading factory where the Amistad Africans were incarcerated, and other relics and connections to the Amistad rebellion, especially living local memory of the uprising and the people who made it.

The Mount of Vision

The Mount of Vision
Author: Christopher Z. Hobson
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2012-09-01
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0199895872

Drawing on speeches, essays, sermons, reminiscences, and works of theological speculation from 1800 to 1950, Christopher Z. Hobson offers an in-depth study of prophetic traditions in African American religion. He shows how African American prophets shared a belief in a "God of the oppressed:" a God who tested the nation's ability to move toward justice and who showed favor toward struggles for equality. Hobson also provides insight into the conflict between the African American prophets who believed that the nation could one day be redeemed through struggle, and those who felt that its hypocrisy and malevolence lay too deep for redemption. Contrary to the prevalent view that black nationalism is the strongest African American justice tradition, Hobson argues that the reformative tradition in prophecy has been most important and constant in the struggle for equality, and has sparked a politics of prophetic integrationism spanning most of two centuries. Hobson shows too the special role of millennial teaching in sustaining hope for oppressed people and cross-fertilizing other prophecy traditions. The Mount of Vision concludes with an examination of the meaning of African American prohecy today, in the time of the first African American presidency, the semicentenary of the civil rights movement, and the sesquicentennial of the American Civil War: paradoxical moments in which our "post-racial" society is still pervaded by injustice, and prophecy is not fulfilled but endures as a challenge.