The University's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library received Feb. 1 one of seven existing copies of David Walker's anti-slavery "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World." Originally published in 1829, the pamphlet voiced Walker's abolitionist views and philosophy of self-empowerment.
The pamphlet was purchased with funds from the Robert and Virginia Tunstall Trust Fund, and is the first copy discovered since 1984.
Walker's "Appeal" has been attributed to the long tradition of political dissent and pamphleteering, Deborah McDowell, director of the Woodson Institute for African-American and African Studies at the University, said in an e-mail. Many scholars liken the articles to a declaration of independence for black Americans, she added.
Walker was born to an enslaved father and a free mother and actively worked toward the abolishment of slavery. When Southerners as well as Northern detractors who feared Walker's proposed violence in the "Appeal" stifled distribution of his pamphlets, it is believed Walker distributed the copies illegally by sewing them into the lining of outfits he sold at a clothing store he ran in Boston. Multiple copies may have been smuggled to Southern states this way, Edward Gaynor, head of collection development and description for the library, said in a press release.
"We never believed we'd have the chance to acquire this," Gaynor said.
Although McDowell believes the acquisition of "Appeal" would be beneficial to any library, she is particularly excited for its arrival on Grounds, because Walker's text engages directly and forcefully with Thomas Jefferson's "Notes on the State of Virginia," particularly with Jefferson's arguments about race, she said.
"Walker quarreled specifically with Jefferson's influential notion that blacks were 'inferior to the whites in ... endowments both of body and mind,' and urged blacks to commit themselves to its refutation," McDowell added.
The Special Collections Library is open to the public Monday through Saturday.
"Students and faculty should be urged to visit the library to hold in hand Walker's radical critique of the moral corruption underlying American ideas of freedom and equality, which developed as slavery and subordination became the law of the land," McDowell said.
-compiled by Audrey Waldrop
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