The David Walker Memorial Project

Abstract

Launched at the Museum of African American History in Boston, Massachusetts, in September 2012, the David Walker Memorial Project (dwmp) is a nonprofit organization dedicated to preserving the life and work of the African American abolitionist David Walker. In addition to hosting symposia and staged readings and organizing marches, the dwmp has built a digital exhibit to educate the public about the work of an “unsung hero.” To that end, this exhibit sketches Walker's upbringing in the South and his early activism in Boston; it analyzes his polemic 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World; and it traces his influence on the abolition movement. Given this solid start, the dwmp will likely fulfill its objective to memorialize Walker as a hero of the African American freedom struggle. It is presumed—perhaps rightfully so—that Walker's activism is a subject that escapes all but the most well-versed U.S. historians. The dwmp argues that Walker deserves a place alongside other more well-known African American activists such as Harriet Tubman and Frederick Douglass. Relying on the latest scholarship from James Horton and Lois Horton, Peter P. Hinks, and Donald Jacobs (among others), this digital exhibit demonstrates how Walker encouraged enslaved and free African Americans and their allies to play a distinctive role in abolishing slavery and eradicating racial prejudice in the United States. While this exhibit considers Walker's impact on abolitionists such as William Lloyd Garrison, there is an equally fascinating, though unexplored, discussion about Walker's friendship with Maria Stewart, an African American abolitionist who was one of the first women to lecture in public on political issues.