David's Goliath

The Victory of the New Confederacy Demands We Unleash the Prophetic Fire of David Walker.

David’s Goliath ruled with a ruthless and depraved fist. The slave power of the early 19th century United States not only aspired to maintain the conditions of its bloodthirsty rule, but also to radically rewrite the organization of politics and the economy  towards the creation of an intercontinental slave empire. Malcontent with its overt destruction of millions of African peoples, David’s Goliath wanted more. While the titanic struggle over slavery would be decided on the bloody battlefields of the Civil War, one of the most significant attacks against this Goliath came at the hands of a free-born North Carolina native too committed to Black liberation to be denied.

The life of David Walker began with as much uncertainty as its end. Walker was born free in an indeterminate year during the 1790s in an inexact location, likely in or near Wilmington NC. Walker would spend his early life in Wilmington, one of the major cities in the south with a Black majority population and a large number of free Black communities. After spending his early years there, Walker made his way further south to Charleston, South Carolina, another bustling Black majority city, but one where a majority of the population were enslaved Africans. 

The dual experiences of being born free in a thriving Black Wilmington and to come into radical politics in a majority enslaved Black Charleston would leave an indelible mark on Walker. According to Peter P. Hinks, a Lecturer in American History at Yale University and author of ‘To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance’, it is likely but not certain that Walker would come across the clandestine organizing efforts of Denmark Vesey. Vesey was a preacher who in 1799 bought his freedom after winning the lottery and planned a full scale slave insurrection and subsequent escape to the new nation of Haiti. As revolutionary anti-slavery leaders, both Walker and Vesey would be inspired by the growing Black communities from which they came. Both would also be inspired by the Christian God of oppressed people to take the sacred commandment of love for the least fortunate  into the arena of politics. Hinks speculates that these convergences in religious conviction and revolutionary commitment culminated in Walker’s strategic support for Vesey’s organized armed insurrection. Walker would be one of the few co-strategists of the effort to escape the ordeal with his life. 

David Walker would set up his final base of operations in Boston, Massachusetts, a thriving abolitionist town in the North where reformist history and abolitionist political activity gave him space, time, and most importantly community and infrastructure to build abolitionist organization to support his ongoing crusade against the genocidal slave power. Today David Walker is most remembered for his pamphlet ‘Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World’, written with a prophetic fury and apocalyptic urgency. Written as a document to be read aloud to enslaved dignified Africans, Appeal was smuggled by boat from New York and Boston to the southern states and Black communities along the eastern seaboard. 

In this work, Walker calls for Black people to wage united resistance against oppression. He is ferocious and spirited in his denunciation of the hypocrisy of the slavers who signed the Declaration of Independence. Unbound in his criticism of the colonization movement, and rather than abandon America to its revanchist slave owning ruling class, Walker demands Black people's rightful place as the heirs of an America that remains to be fully realized. 

Walker's Appeal goes on to defend all justified resistance by Black people as moral means to secure freedom, up to and including principled self defense. In the December of 1982, the United Nations General Assembly passed passed resolution A/RES/37/43 guaranteeing the right for defense, and yet revolutionaries like Gaspar Yanga in 1570, Nanny of the Maroons in 1728 and Tom Copper in 1802 acted as forerunners to this inalienable right. The ‘Appeal’ would give self-defense a moral, philosophical and theological justification from the view of the oppressed.  But the profundity of Walker’s abolitionist politic wasn’t that he wrote a radical text, it was that he aimed to transform the minority radical abolitionism of his day into a majoritarian political force that would serve to break the back of his Goliath. Walker pursued that transformation by committing his life to building powerful community. He would also become the leader of Freedom's Journal, the first Black-owned newspaper published in the United States, and an active leader in the Massachusetts General Colored Association. The MGCA was founded on a 3 part platform: personal transformation of Black people through education and religion, social transformation of the segregationist laws governing Black civil society, and abolitionist transformation, which called for the unilateral abolition of slavery. The MGCA is considered to be the first Black abolitionist organization in the United States and while its life as an organization was short, the majoritarian politics it declared would live on in the struggles that would come later, struggles that would bring forth the destruction of chattel slavery. 

Only a few months after the publication of his ‘Appeal’, David Walker was most likely murdered at his own storefront. Meanwhile the ruling elites caught wind of the ‘Appeal’ and hurried to pass laws across the south further restricting the rights of free and enslaved Black people. The country sprinted towards war, and upon those battlefields would the movement for abolition triumph over the Goliath of David’s day. 

Today's Goliath, the white racial dictatorship that has governed this land since colonization, is modeled heavily after the old confederacy. Termed the New Confederacy, our Goliath in this moment in the United States is a majority white united front that has used racism, austerity and patriarchy to organize mostly white people,  along with a small number of Black people and people of color, under the leadership of the most reactionary capitalists. The old confederacy is defeated and dead, but a New Confederacy, rooted in the strategy, geography and history of the old confederacy is resurrected and dominant in the United States. 

Rather than the formal succession of its predecessor, this New Confederacy is achieving a strategy of neo-session, creating a reactionary republic within the decaying liberal bourgeois democracy of this country.  It has taken hold of the vast legal power of the judiciary system, transforming it into the primary staging grounds for a full-on assault on the freedom movement amendments to the Constitution—the 13th, 14th and 15th Reconstruction Amendments, and the 23rd, 24th and 26th Civil Rights Amendments. Rather than a formal declaration of war, this New Confederacy and its right wing billionaire benefactors have funded tens of thousands of right wing militias throughout the country, ready and itching to go to war against the ‘woke mob’. Donald Trump is the towering head of the New Confederate hydra, who immediately upon assuming office has declared a war of deportation against millions of people, has threatened to complete the ethnic cleansing campaign in Gaza and has orchestrated chaos on his march to dictatorship. And similar to its predecessor, the New Confederacy places the defeat and destruction of Black freedom at the center.

The illegitimate victory of the New Confederacy last November has sent shockwaves through civil society and social movements. The coming months and years will almost certainly bear witness to an unbridled assault on civil and social institutions, an assault that has been funded by a rightwing billionaire class desperate to maintain the conditions of its rule. While the seeds for a class-conscious and therefore potentially revolutionary politic could emerge from the rising cauldron of anti-elitism, US history shows that what is just as likely is the potential for genocidal and aspiring fascist demagogues  to channel this rage against those who are ‘political enemies within’. For Andrew Jackson these ‘enemies’ were First Nation anti-imperialists and the nascent abolitionist movement. For Ronald Reagan, these ‘enemies’ were the remnants of the Black Power movement, pro-communist struggles and poor and working class Black women he labeled ‘welfare queens’. For Donald Trump, these ‘enemies’ are women, immigrants, trans people and even the liberal institutions ostensibly positioned to safeguard foundational pillars of civil society. 

Many of the people in the social base of the New Confederate regime believe Black people were never supposed to ‘succeed’ in this country. So we must count Black people among the communities that many New Confederates view as an increasingly ‘elite’ social force; Black people are seen as elite given our victories during the civil rights movement and relative preferential treatment under promising but lackluster affirmative action programs. We are also considered ‘elite’ in the eyes of some given our increasing visibility in high profile leadership positions in the private, nonprofit and public sectors as well as in cultural life. We can expect the revanchist reaction this false class consciousness will fuel to target all of the oppressed, and that includes our precious and dignified Black people. 

These circumstances and the fright they elicit require us to look back in order to move forward. What we need in this moment is the unleashing of the ferocious spirit of David Walker, a man who was preparing for a fight no less significant than the one his Biblical namesake prepared for; a holy war of love and liberation against a tyrant of domination. Like Walker, we need everyday people to prepare for this fight. 

A major part of this preparation must include organizers and leaders committing to transforming our radical politics into majoritarian organizations. Organizations are the organized force of a people. Organizations are not abstract criticisms of concrete horror. Organizations cannot be the staging grounds for career advancement or vehicles for us to rehearse our victimhood patterns. Instead, organizations, ones rooted in permanent, popular, democratic and anti-Confederate visions, ones grounded in solidarity and guided by strategy, must be the slingshot we use to enter the fight against Goliath from a position of strength. 

Walker’s legacy also reminds us that it is not enough to live life critiquing reality. The profound power of his work building organized resistance must be remembered with as much honor as his ‘Appeal’. In his own religious lineage, it is made clear to believers that faith without works is a dead faith. Walker did not relegate his work to incessant critique of the system of slavery. Rather, his life's calling was in building powerful organizations with the audacity to govern society. Walker was an organizer precisely because he was a leader. It was clear to him that to be an organizer meant to be a leader who unleashes the greatness of others rather than burying them  under the weight of well-articulated criticisms. Today we can look to Walker and be reminded that we need our words and speech acts to tell the truth, yes, but we must also endeavor to relinquish every witness that comes across them from the temptations of despair. 

Organizers build organizations precisely because we are responsive to and responsible for the fate of the whole world. This is not hyperbole. This is the animating energy and revolutionary spirit that inspired Cécile Fatiman, Rani Lakshmibai of Jhansi and Marsha P. Johnson. David Walker belongs to this lineage. His life and death are a testament to how each of us must dare to look unflinchingly at the state of the world in order to transform the potential energy of our people into a kinetic energy of ferocious generosity. We need those of us who cherish life and love the Earth, those of us full of overflowing fury and compassion, those of us who feel responsive to the moment and responsible for the fate of the whole Earth to give it our all in the coming period. 

David Walker’s revolutionary legacy demands nothing less.