2.19 - Black Political Thought: Radical Resistance
What Radical Resistance Looked Like
By the nineteenth century, some Black activists had concluded that slavery couldn't be reasoned or persuaded away, it needed to be actively overthrown. Advocates of radical resistance supported direct action, including revolts and, if necessary, violence, as legitimate responses to the daily, urgent reality of living and dying under slavery.
This put them in direct conflict with a different strategy popular in the 1830s and 1840s: moral suasion, the belief that African Americans' status in society could be changed through persuasion, by appealing to people's sense of morality and ethics. Radical resistance advocates rejected this approach as too slow and too dependent on the goodwill of people benefiting from the system.
To spread their message, radical resistance advocates relied heavily on publications that laid out the brutal realities of slavery in unflinching detail, publications meant to encourage enslaved African Americans to use whatever tactics were necessary, including violence, to win their freedom. These antislavery pamphlets were often smuggled directly into the South, a genuinely dangerous act of radical resistance in itself.
Two Voices of Radical Resistance
David Walker's Appeal, published in 1829, is one of the most significant texts in this tradition. Walker addressed his message to the broader African diaspora, not just African Americans in the U.S., and he firmly rejected the idea of emigrating to Africa as a solution. His writing was also a direct rebuttal to Thomas Jefferson, specifically countering the arguments Jefferson made in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), where Jefferson had claimed African Americans were naturally inferior, benefited from slavery, were incapable of self-governance, and should emigrate if ever freed. Walker's Appeal pushed back point by point against exactly that reasoning.
Walker was a free Black man born in Wilmington, North Carolina, who settled in Boston and ran a used-clothing shop. He addressed the Appeal "to the Coloured Citizens of the World," and it told enslaved people they had the right to fight back, even with violence, if their enslavers would not free them. Walker got copies into the South largely through sailors, some hidden in clothing, and when copies turned up in Southern ports, alarmed lawmakers passed new laws against spreading antislavery writing and against teaching enslaved people to read. Walker died in Boston in 1830, the year after the Appeal came out.
Walker's work is also considered an early example of Black religious nationalism. He insisted that God would punish the United States if it failed to repent and free enslaved people, arguing that slavery and true Christianity were fundamentally incompatible, a religious framing of resistance that would echo forward into the twentieth century through organizations like the Nation of Islam.
Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 "Address to the Slaves of the United States" belongs to this same radical tradition, urging enslaved people toward direct action rather than passive waiting. Interestingly, Garnet's own views evolved over time, by the mid-nineteenth century, he came to support African American emigration, a position Walker had explicitly rejected. Garnet went on to help establish the Cuban Anti-Slavery Society in New York in 1872, and after the Civil War, he was appointed United States minister to Liberia.
Garnet, who had escaped slavery in Maryland as a child and became a Presbyterian minister, delivered the address at the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, in 1843. He told enslaved people not to wait for others to free them: "Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance!" The speech was so controversial that the convention voted, by a single vote, not to endorse it, and Frederick Douglass, who still favored moral suasion at the time, argued against it. In 1848 Garnet published the address together with Walker's Appeal.
It's also worth knowing that Garnet didn't do this work alone. His wife, Julia Williams Garnet, was a leading abolitionist in her own right, she actually co-authored his famous 1843 address, and she went on to found an industrial school for girls in Jamaica, work that's often overshadowed by her husband's more widely cited legacy.
Required Sources
Appeal by David Walker, 1829
Walker's Appeal (1829) is divided into four articles, each explaining a cause of Black suffering: slavery, ignorance (being kept from education), the misuse of Christianity by preachers who defended slavery, and the colonization plan to send free Black people to Africa. Throughout, Walker answers Jefferson's racist claims from Notes on the State of Virginia almost point by point, turns the Declaration of Independence against the nation that wrote it, and warns that God will punish the United States if it does not end slavery. Reading it directly shows the main features of radical resistance: an urgent call to action, a refusal to rely only on moral suasion, and a willingness to accept violence to win freedom.
I am after those who know and feel, that we are MEN, as well as other people; to them, I say, that unless we try to refute Mr. Jefferson's arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.
[...] See your Declaration Americans!!! Do you understand your own language? Hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776: "We hold these truths to be self evident, that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL!! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!" [...]
Now, Americans! I ask you candidly, was your sufferings under Great Britain, one hundredth part as cruel and tyranical as you have rendered ours under you? [...]
David Walker, Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World (written 1829; third edition, 1830), pp. 19, 85, and 86. Source: Documenting the American South, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
"An Address to the Slaves of the United States" by Henry Highland Garnet, 1843
In the address, Garnet speaks directly to enslaved people rather than to white readers, which was itself a radical choice. He reminds them of rebels like Denmark Vesey, Nat Turner, Joseph Cinque (Sengbe Pieh), and Madison Washington, and tells them it is their duty to resist: "Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties." His wife, Julia Williams Garnet, coauthored the address, so it was a shared project between two committed abolitionists. Reading the speech alongside Garnet's later support for emigration also shows how radical resistance and emigrationist thinking, often treated as separate strategies, could exist within a single activist's political life.
Brethren and Fellow-Citizens: Your brethren of the North, East, and West have been accustomed to meet together in National Conventions [...] but we have never, until this time, sent a word of consolation and advice to you. [...]
[...] Brethren, arise, arise! Strike for your lives and liberties. Now is the day and the hour. Let every slave throughout the land do this, and the days of slavery are numbered. You cannot be more oppressed than you have been, you cannot suffer greater cruelties than you have already. Rather die freemen than live to be slaves. Remember that you are four millions! [...]
[...] Let your motto be resistance! resistance! resistance! No oppressed people have ever secured their liberty without resistance. [...]
Henry Highland Garnet, "An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America" (delivered 1843), as printed in Garnet's A Memorial Discourse (1865), pp. 44 to 51. Source: Internet Archive (scan of the 1865 book), the same text BlackPast posts