Abstract
There are readily available a number of scholarly discussions concerning David Walker’s famous “Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World”, a document originally written in 1829. Such discussions treat Walker’s Appeal from various viewpoints. For examples: Gayraud S. Wilmore, in his recently published Black Religion and Black Radicalism, accomplishes an excellent task of interpreting Walker from an historical vantage point, and placing him in the stream of radicalism in the black religious community. Herbert Aptheker’s “One Continual Cry”, which includes the full text of the third — and last — edition of Walker’s
Appeal, interprets the document in terms of American secular history and the politics of the early nineteenth century. While both of these treatments of Walker are extremely valuable, a different approach to Walker can be made, namely, the effort to interpret him theologically. This present article represents my initial effort at such theological interpretation and forms part of the preliminary research for a larger work devoted to the theological history of black Christians in America from the earliest period to the Civil War.