Wednesday, February 28, 2001

WILMINGTON, NC – Dr. Peter Hinks, author, historian and lecturer of American history at Yale University, will speak about David Walker, the noted nineteenth-century black abolitionist. This free, public talk is scheduled for 7 p.m., Thursday, March 15, in UNCW’s Kenan Auditorium.

Hinks’ work To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance is the first full-length study of Walker’s life. In 1829, Walker, a free black born in Wilmington, wrote An Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World. In the pamphlet, Walker challenged his “afflicted and slumbering brethren” to rise up and cast off their chains. Walker’s efforts to circulate this pamphlet throughout the South outraged slaveholders, and a price was put on his head in Wilmington and other Southern cities, said Dr. Melton McLaurin, professor of history and associate vice chancellor for academic affairs at UNCW.

Penn State University Press, publisher of the biography, calls it “an ambitious book. Peter Hinks combines social biography with textual analysis to provide a powerful new interpretation of David Walker and his meaning for antebellum American history. Through his painstaking research, Hinks captures Walker’s life in early nineteenth-century coastal North and South Carolina. He discusses the impact of Wilmington’s independent black Methodist church upon Walker, the probable sources of his early education and the influence of religion and the resistance movement in Charleston and Boston.

Hinks shows how Walker labored to harness the optimistic activism of evangelical Christianity and revolutionary republicanism to inspire African Americans to a new sense of personal worth and to challenge the ideology and institutions of white supremacy. Though Walker died in 1830, his Appeal remained a rallying point for many African Americans for years to come.”



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For more information, contact Dr. Melton McLaurin at 910/962-3137.