The study of African American political thought is at a pivotal moment. Recent works, including Derrick R. Spires’ The Practice of Citizenship (2019), African American Political Thought: A Collected History (2021), edited by Jack Turner and myself, Charisse Burden-Stelly’s Black Scare/Red Scare (2023), and Keidrick Roy’s American Dark Age (2024), have explored the enduring legacies of racial oppression and the philosophical sophistication of African Americans’ responses to them. Amid this flourishing scholarship, Sherrow O. Pinder’s David Walker: The Politics of Racial Egalitarianism critically engages with one of African American political thought’s most uncompromising voices. Part of Polity’s Black Lives series, David Walker joins an impressive roster, including Elvira Basevich’s W. E. B. Du Bois (2020), Utz McKnight’s Frances E. W. Harper (2020), Joshua Myers’ Cedric Robinson (2021), Denise Lynn’s Claudia Jones (2023), and Nigel C. Gibson’s Frantz Fanon (2024).

Due to his untimely death, Walker’s corpus is admittedly thin, with his Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (first published in 1829; hereafter Appeal) serving as his signature contribution. Yet, it is a work from which many roads follow. It is a Jeremiad critiquing the United States’ moral failures, envisioning Black Americans as stewards of their political destiny, aiming for racial equality through republican means, and endorsing resistance—even violence—if whites opposed it.

After two helpful biographical chapters on Walker’s life, Pinder’s text rightly focuses on the Appeal, underscoring the intellectual and moral urgency of Walker’s critique of slavery and white supremacy. Pinder’s analysis reveals Walker as a towering moral figure who wielded his Christian faith and Enlightenment ideals against the contradictions of a slaveholding republic. His Appeal is both an indictment of white supremacy and a clarion call to Black Americans to recognize their intrinsic worth and agency. Pinder effectively captures Walker’s use of moral language to expose slavery as a theological and philosophical abomination (pp. 2–5). Central to her analysis is Walker’s incisive critique of Christian hypocrisy, which dismantled the moral legitimacy of white Americans who claimed allegiance to Christian principles while perpetuating systemic violence and degradation.

Her engagement with Walker’s theological framing is particularly insightful. Walker’s insistence that freedom is divinely ordained and that Black Americans have a duty to resist their oppression elevates his critique beyond a political or economic argument. This is powerfully explored in Chapter 3. What should not be missed, however, is that Walker’s defense of freedom partly follows from a prior fact—namely, that in us all being the creations of God, we are each of equal moral worth with capacities for self-direction. Slavery offends our fundamental equality and thus denies our freedom by asserting an illegitimate hierarchy. As Pinder writes, “Walker is more interested in a critique of slavery so as to provide an account of how … [Blacks] are excluded from the inexorable and overwhelming truth of equal humanity…. (p. 97).” For Walker, resistance was a spiritual imperative, rooted as much in achieving freedom as in affirming one’s equal human station. More pointedly, it is only through our shared equality that we can provide for our freedom—a point that Walker insists on in his defense of Black solidarity (pp. 124–125; 119–121). Pinder’s exploration of this dimension situates Walker as a radical figure who used faith as a weapon against the structures of racial domination to affirm human equality. This reading powerfully aligns Walker’s understanding of the Declaration of Independence, for instance, with Danielle Allen’s insightful interpretation of that document in which she makes equality (rather than freedom) its first concern (see Allen’s, Our Declaration, 2014).

A central theme of Pinder’s book is Walker’s insistence on the necessity of resistance. His refusal to accept the servility imposed by slavery is powerfully rendered in her analysis. She emphasizes Walker’s call for Black Americans to reject internalized oppression and to assert their dignity and humanity (pp. 119–131). This theme became one of the cornerstones of African American political thought, echoed by thinkers as varied as Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, W. E. B. Du Bois, and many of the writers of the Harlem Renaissance. For Walker, resistance was not merely defiance against slavery’s external structures but also an internal revolution—a rejection of its psychological chains. This internal resistance was of utmost importance, for in a world where one accepts one’s diminishment, the inner resources to imagine an emancipatory future will likely go unrealized.

Chapter 4 of Pinder’s book focuses on the Appeal and its aftermath. It sheds light on the dangers of fearless speech in a society structured by white supremacy. After all, Walker’s writings provoked a violent backlash, what Pinder refers to as creating “all kinds of trouble” (p. 140), resulting in some of the strictest censorship laws of the time. She recounts this accurately, illustrating the high stakes of Walker’s rhetorical defiance. She also highlights the rhetorical strategies Walker employed to amplify his message—his use of bold typography, direct appeals to both Black and white audiences, and vivid descriptions of slavery’s horrors. As Pinder shows, Walker’s writing provoked outrage and action, embodying the Appeal’s dual role as a moral indictment and revolutionary manifesto.

Today, it may seem naïve to ascribe such power to rhetoric or to view the author’s syntactical choices as tools of resistance. But for Walker, language was a means by which Black Americans situated themselves in a world that denied their standing. To his mind, it was an initial way of vivifying one’s standing in the world. It also, for him, served as a means by which one might move one’s audience. Walker sought to inspire Black readers to affirm their inherent freedom and equality and to move white Americans to a position of moral rectitude. In this regard, Pinder’s book complements Marcy J. Dinius’s The Textual Effects of David Walker’s “Appeal” (2022), which explores the Appeal’s role in antebellum print-based activism.

Pinder’s David Walker is a meticulously argued and thought-provoking contribution. The book’s strength lies in its ability to distill complex arguments into accessible prose while maintaining analytical depth.

However, the book’s heavy reliance on theoretical frameworks may challenge those not inclined to reach for Michel Foucault or Saidiya Hartman when reading Walker. These theoretical frameworks sometimes muddle or distort rather than clarify Walker’s vision. For instance, unlike Hartman (as suggested on p. 145), Walker embraced rights discourse. Walker was explicit about the demands of rights and the failures of white Americans to honor those rights, critiquing not the concept of republicanism itself but the practices of white Americans. Within his theological framework, Walker held out hope for transformation—that the afterlife of slavery may haunt but need not deform the nation’s capacity to fulfill the Declaration’s promise. A heavier lean in the direction of the history of political thought, rather than the reach for contemporary theoretical formulations, would have avoided these missteps.

In sum, Pinder’s David Walker is an important addition to the broader scholarship on Walker and African American political thought. It is an excellent philosophical companion to Peter Hinks’s now-classic study, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren (1996). As African American political thought continues to evolve, works like Pinder’s remind us of the enduring power of voices like Walker’s to challenge injustice and inspire transformation.