David Walker, a free (with a small f) black man, was one of the most significant African-American abolitionists of the nineteenth century. Born in a slave society before moving to Boston where, after the American Revolutionary War, slavery was abolished, Walker devoted his life to fighting slavery and antiblack racism.

In this book, Sherrow O. Pinder brings to light Walker’s lived experience, activism, and the synchronizing of his Christian principles and reformist radicalism to demonstrate why and how slavery must be eliminated. Walker’s call for blacks to regain their natural rights guaranteed under God’s law and the Declaration of Independence culminated in An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, an enormously influential work that is now considered a founding text of black studies.

Today, given the escalation of antiblack racism manifested in the upholding of institutionalized violence by the state, the continued economic and social marginality of African-Americans, and the escalation of failing infrastructures in black neighborhoods, we cannot afford to forget Walker’s push for racial egalitarianism: it is more urgent than ever.