[To celebrate
one of my favorite American holidays, this week I’ll AmericanStudy a handful of
inspiring African American leaders, starting with my annual post on more fully
remembering King himself. And leading up to a special Guest Post from one of my
favorite current scholars and writers!]
On one of the
most aggressive, impassioned, and eloquent—if tragically short-lived—voices for
social equality in our nation’s history.
When it comes to
social progress and change, as I
wrote most explicitly in this post on the Civil Rights movement (and as
certainly informed my thoughts in Monday’s MLK Day post), I think our national
narratives tend to emphasize peaceful mechanisms like passive resistance (which
is of course not, as
I also argued in this Occupy Davis post, necessarily peaceful nor passive)
more than they do aggressive protests or challenges to the established order or
society. That’s a perfectly understandable perspective, since it allows us to
recognize the need for change while likewise celebrating peace, love, and other
importantly unifying ideas. But just as Martin Luther King pushed back on such
perspectives by arguing for Why We Can’t
Wait, and just as Frederick
Douglass illustrated by challenging his audience directly in his seminal
“What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” speech, significant social change
depends as well, if not indeed centrally, on aggressive voices and protests.
When it comes to
abolitionism, there is certainly no shortage of aggressive voices to include in
our national narratives: Douglass himself, Sojourner
Truth, William
Lloyd Garrison, even (if also exemplifying the conflicts and violence that
such aggression can produce) John
Brown. But perhaps the most aggressive and angry, yet also eloquent and
powerful, such abolitionist voice belongs to an almost entirely forgotten early
19th century American: David Walker. Walker’s
life, and even more so his public prominence, were tragically short-lived—he
burst onto the scene as one of
Boston’s and the nation’s most vocal abolitionists in 1827/1828, published
his seminal Walker’s Appeal (the
full title is much much longer than that, and I insist you click the link to
check it out!) in 1829, and died (probably of
tuberculosis) at the age of 33 in 1830—which might explain in part his
disappearance from our collective memories. But I would argue that Walker’s
profoundly radical text and ideas likewise contributed to that elision—and are
precisely why we should instead remember and engage with him today.
The most overtly,
and not at all unimportantly, radical aspect of Walker’s Appeal is its typography: as scholar
Marcy Dinius has analyzed at length, Walker utilized capitalization,
exclamation points, enlarged typefaces, bold and italics, and many other
typographical elements to create a text that quite literally yells (screams,
even) at its audiences. Yet those typographical extremes parallel the book’s
many equally aggressive and challenging ideas and elements: Walker’s use of the
Constitution as a frame, in order to force the nation’s hypocrisies to the fore
throughout; his arguments for immediate and absolute emancipation by any and
every means, including violent slave revolts; and, perhaps most strikingly for
the era, his titular and
continued address not to fellow abolitionists, nor to slaveholders, or even
to white Americans at all, but “to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in
Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America.” That
address, like Walker’s book and voice overall, refuses to accept any of the conditions of slavery,
including its forced illiteracy and powerlessness, making a case instead for
the shared anger, challenge, passion, and eloquence of all African Americans.
Next figure tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Figures or histories you’d highlight?
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