YOU CAN rATIONALIZE ANYTHING:

Walker's 1829 pamphlet, an "Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World," was a revolutionary document that lit a fire under the growing abolition movement, which found a home in Boston, and terrified Southern slaveholders.

America had never read anything like it.

"My object is, if possible, to awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded, and slumbering brethren a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty," Walker wrote.

Walker's call for freedom, abolitionist Frederick Douglass said, "startled the land like a trump of coming judgment."

Walker, who died in 1830 at age 34, is not widely known today, although a plaque marks his home on Joy Street. But when the "Appeal" was published, its message was a clarion call for free Black people, who embraced its demand for civil rights, and the enslaved, who were read clandestine copies smuggled into Southern ports by Black sailors who had passed through Boston.

Government officials in Georgia were so alarmed by the "Appeal" that they offered a $10,000 bounty for Walker's capture; $1,000 if dead.

The "Appeal" made a broad intellectual and moral case for racial equality, assailing an America that embraced religion but also could rationalize the immorality of slavery.

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