7.3: Radical Abolition and The Liberator
Read this short introduction to two abolitionist figures, David Walker and William Lloyd Garrison, and the concept of "radical abolitionism".
- In this introduction to the first edition of the antislavery paper he published for more than 30 years, you will encounter Garrison's straightforward and uncompromising statement of aims. Garrison began his antislavery newspaper The Liberator with a fiery introduction in which he stated his unequivocal abolitionist perspective and demanded that he be heard. Walker's text appeared a few years before Garrison began The Liberator and called upon African Americans to resist slavery by any means necessary.
Read these excerpts from David Walker's 1829 "Appeal", a radical document by a free African American living in Boston.
Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880) was a Quaker minister, abolitionist, social reformer, and proponent of women's rights. She is sometimes credited with being the first American feminist, but was more accurately one of the first political advocates for women in the early nineteenth century. During a time when women rarely spoke in public, she became an outspoken orator as an ordained minister for the Quaker Church, and she publicly condemned the horrors of slavery. Read this biographical sketch of her life and fight against slavery. Many women activists fought for both the rights of women and African-Americans at the same time.