Go There To Know There

Perhaps one of the most intrepid and inflammatory anti-slavery documents ever written, David Walker's Appeal (1830) has been largely overlooked by historians, but lauded for its self-affirming, no-nonsense confrontation with white power structures over the issue of chattel slavery. Walker's act of open protest was, in many ways, one that was characteristic of an age of uprising, as Walker's words mirrored the courageous acts of other early civil rights martyrs such as Nat Turner, who led the historical slave rebellion in Southampton County, Virginia, the following year. Walker, the self-proclaimed "restless disturber of the peace" (Gates et al., 227) models his document after the United States Constitution, by presenting a preamble in which he decries the abhorrent state of his people. From the preamble Walker addresses the wrongs done to the colored people of the U.S. in articles and sections, denounces U.S. slavery as the most wretched manifestation of huma...

Harriet E. Wilson was born a free person of color in New Hampshire in 1825. A source encapsulates her early life, noting that she was born Harriet, “Hattie” Adams in Milford, New Hampshire, and was the biracial dauther of Margaret Adams Smith, an Irish woman, and Joshua Green, an African American. Her father died when Hattie was still a child, and her mother left her at the home of a wealthy New Hampshire farmer, where she was indentured to his family. This indenturement was, at the time, “a customary way for society at the time to arrange support and education for orphans. In exchange for labor, the orphan child would be given room, board and training in life skills, so that she could make her way in society” (1). Harriet Wilson is now considered by many scholars to have been the first African American to have published a novel in the United States. The novel, published anonymously in 1859, was entitled Our Nig, or Sketches from the Life of a Free Black , but received little a...