Yall are more than free to contribute to the thread but lets at least be organized and not flood shyt. The end of this song mentions my first candidate up to bat. IMO, one of the forefathers of Black Nationalism. The abolitionist David Walker.
Freedom's Journal
An issue of Freedom's Journal
Additionally, Walker served as a Boston subscription ales agent and a writer for New York City's short-lived but influential Freedom's Journal (1827-1829), the first newspaper owned and operated by African Americans in the United States.
By the end of 1828, Walker had become Boston's leading spokesman against slavery.
Walker's 1829 Appeal
Frontispiece from the 1830 edition of David Walker’s Appeal
Title page of the 1830 edition of David Walker’s Appeal...to the Colored Citizens of the World.
In September 1829, Walker published his appeal to black people entitled Walker's Appeal in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular and Very Expressly to Those of the United States of America. The purpose of the document was to encourage readers to take an active role in fighting their oppression, regardless of the risk, and to press white Americans to realize the moral and religious failure of slavery.
Core issues
Racism
Walker challenged the racism of the early 19th century. He specifically targeted groups like the American Colonization Society, which sought to deport all free and freed blacks from the United States to a colony in Africa (this was how Liberia was established.), He wrote against published assertions of black inferiority by the late President Thomas Jefferson, who died three years before Walker's pamphlet was published. As he explained, “I say, that unless we refute Mr. Jefferson’s arguments respecting us, we will only establish them.
He rejected the white assumption in the United States that dark skin was a sign of inferiority and lesser humanity. He challenged critics to show him “a page of history, either sacred or profane, on which a verse can be found, which maintains that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family,” referring to the period when they were enslaved in Egypt.
Equal rights
By the 1820s and 30s, individuals and groups had emerged with degrees of commitment to equal rights for black men and women, but no national anti-slavery movement existed at the time Walker's Appeal was published. As historian Herbert Aptheker wrote,
“[t]o be an Abolitionist was not for the faint-hearted. The slaveholders represented for the first half of the nineteenth century the most closely knit and most important single economic unit in the nation, their millions of bondsmen and millions of acres of land comprising an investment of billions of dollars. This economic might had its counterpart in political power, given its possessors dominance within the nation and predominance within the South.
He was referring to the provision in the Constitution that counted three-fifths of the slave population toward the total of any state, for purposes of apportionment of Congressional seats and the electoral college. This gave the white voters in the South power in electoral office much greater than their numbers represented; neither slaves nor free blacks could vote. It resulted in Southern politicians having enormous power and to the election of Southerners as president.
Effects of slavery
The Appeal described the pernicious effects of both slavery and the subservience of and discrimination against free blacks. Those outside of slavery were said to need special regulation “because they could not be relied on to regulate themselves and because they might overstep the boundaries society had placed around them."
Distribution
Walker distributed his pamphlet through black communication networks along the Atlantic coast, which included free and enslaved black civil rights activists, laborers, black church and revivalist networks, contacts with free black benevolent societies, and maroon communities.
Reaction
Efforts to prevent distribution
Southern officials worked to prevent the Appeal from reaching its residents. Blacks in Charleston and New Orleans were arrested for distributing the pamphlet while authorities in Savannah, Georgia instituted a ban on the disembarkation of black seamen. Various southern governmental bodies, meanwhile, labeled the Appeal seditious and imposed harsh penalties on those who circulated it. Despite such efforts, Walker's pamphlet was widespread by early 1830. Having failed to contain the Appeal, southern officials criticized both the pamphlet and its author. Newspapers like the Richmond Enquirer railed against what it called Walker’s “monstrous slander” of the region. Outrage over the Appeal even led Georgia to announce an award of $10,000 to anyone who could hand over Walker alive, and $1,000 to anyone who would murder him.
The Nat Turner Rebellion of August 1831 "overshadowed" the concern about Walker's Appeal. In addition, it did not gain the favor of "most Abolitionists or free blacks" because of its extreme viewpoints.
Immediate significance
Three months after Walker died, the Boston Evening Transcript noted that blacks regarded the Appeal "as if it were a star in the east guiding them to freedom and emancipation.” Whites, meanwhile, were radicalized by reading Walker's pamphlet.
William Lloyd Garrison, one of the most influential American abolitionists, began publishing The Liberator in January 1831 not long after the Appeal as published. Early weekly editions of Garrison's newspaper focused on Walker's pamphlet. Garrison, who believed slaveowners would be punished by God, rejected the violence Walker advocated but recognized that slaveowners were courting disaster by refusing to free their slaves. "Every sentence that they write — every word that they speak — every resistance that they make, against foreign oppression, is a call upon their slaves to destroy them," Garrison wrote.
Walker's Appeal and the slave rebellion led by Nat Turner in Virginia in 1831, struck fear into the hearts of slaveowners. Though there is no evidence to suggest that the Appeal specifically informed or inspired Turner, the two events, which occurred just a few years apart, intensified white anxiety in the South about the potential for future insurrections. Southern states passed laws restricting free blacks and slaves. Moreover, many white people in Virginia and neighboring North Carolina speculated that Turner may have been influenced by Walker's Appeal or other abolitionist literature.
Lasting influence
The spirit of Walker lives on. Henry Highland Garnet, Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. DuBois, Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, a number of liberation theologians and many others have respectfully followed in David Walker’s footsteps. Echoes of Walker’s Appeal can be heard vividly, for example, in Frederick Douglass’ famous 1852 speech, "The Meaning of the Fourth of July for the Negro."
Historian Herbert Aptheker has noted that
“Walker’s Appeal is the first sustained written assault upon slavery and racism to come from a black man in the United States. This was the main source of its overwhelming power in its own time; this is the source of the great relevance and enormous impact that remain in it, deep as we are in the twentieth century. Never before or since was there a more passionate denunciation of the hypocrisy of the nation as a whole — democratic and fraternal and equalitarian and all the other words. And Walker does this not as one who hates the country but rather as one who hates the institutions which disfigure it and make it a hissing in the world.”
Death
Edward G. Walker (1830-1901), son of David Walker (abolitionist), one of the first two black men elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature.
Just five years after he arrived in Boston, Walker died suddenly in the summer of 1830. Though rumors suggested that he had been poisoned, most historians believe Walker died a natural death from tuberculosis, as listed in his death record. The disease was prevalent and Walker’s only daughter, Lydia Ann, died of it the week before. Walker was buried in a South Boston cemetery for blacks. His probable grave site remains unmarked.
When Walker died, his wife was unable to keep up the annual payments of $266 ("a huge sum for Walker") made to George Parkman for the purchase of their house. She lost her home. In his pamphlet Appeal, Walker had written:
"But I must, really, observe that in this very city, when a man of color dies, if he owned any real estate it most generally galls into the hands of some white persons. The wife and children of the deceased may weep and lament if they please, but the estate will be kept snug enough of its white possessor."
His son Edward G. Walker (also known as Edwin G. Walker) was born after Walker's death. In 1866 he became the first black man elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature.
Legacy
As noted from the numerous sources, historians consider Walker a major abolitionist and inspirational figure in American history.
- The Library of Congress had an exhibit, Free Blacks in the Antebellum Period, which noted Walker's significance, along with that of other key black abolitionists: "Free people of color like Richard Allen, Frederick Douglass, Sojourner Truth, David Walker, and Prince Hall earned national reputations for themselves by writing, speaking, organizing, and agitating on behalf of their enslaved compatriots."
- The National Park Service has walking tours developed for the Boston African American National Historic Site, including of the Black Beacon Hill community. The comprehensive narratives include discussion of David Walker, who was integral to the black neighborhood and city activists. An online version of the tour is also available.
Taharqa's 26 year reign stands out from any other in the Third Intermediate Period by the extent of the building program he implemented in the first sixteen years of his reign, and the extent of the fighting against the Assyrians in the later years. Taharqa invested considerable resources into celebrating the glory of Amon, first in his native Kingdom of Napata, later in his Egyptian territories as well. Respectful of Egypt's cultural heritage, Taharqa set out to draw on the traditions of the Old and Middle Kingdoms, using new materials (previous Intermediate Period cash-strapped kings had taken to pilfering stone from older buildings) to restore and build anew. In the kingdom of Napata, he built in every important site: Sanam, Napata, Abu Dom, and Kawa. In Kawa particularly, he rebuilt and expanded a temple complex that became the second most important in Kush. In Egypt, it’s at Karnak that he made the greatest impact, thanks to the man he installed as Mayor of the City: the great Nubian Mentuemhet, a man who took an extraordinary pride out of his title as a fourth prophet to Amon. At Karnak, the Sacred Lake structures, the kiosk in the first court, and the colonnades at the temple entrance are all owed to Taharqa and Mentuemhet. Memphis, the capital of the Old Kingdom and royal residence of Kushyte kings also received much attention, respecting the importance of Ptah, despite the Kushyte's devotion to Amun.
Taharqa also warred against the Assyrians in Sydon around 677 BC which caused Esarhaddon’s campaigns against Lower Egypt in the following years. In 674 BC, King Esarhaddon of Assyria, angered over the Egyptian interference with his vassal states in Palestine and attacked Egypt. Taharqa swiftly rebuked their advance, and caused the invaders to retreat. But another three years later, in 671 BC, the Assyrians try again and succeed. The Delta subsequently falls into Assyrian possession while Taharqa escapes to Thebes. The Assyrians take Memphis, capture the royal queen and the crown prince and establish native puppet-chieftains and their representatives in all key positions. In Sais, a certain prince Nekau (Necho) swears allegiance to the Assyrians and his son is sent to Assyria for political training. As soon as the Assyrians leave the country to their Egyptian vassals, Taharqa drives his forces north again and regains full control of Egypt. In 669 BC Taharqa would have restored his rule over the complete Delta-region. In 667 BC, the Assyrians come back though, pushing much further south this time.
Taharqa flees to Napata this time and the Assyrians once again get Egyptian governors to pledge allegiance to Assyria. When they leave again, several local kings and governors plot to bring Taharqa back. But this time, the Assyrians squelch the insurrection by having all plotters assassinated. The only surviving Egyptian is Nekau, who had prudently abstained from participating in the plot while his son (the future Psamtik I) was still in the hands of the Assyrians. Taharqa now was betrayed a second time by the alien chiefs of the Delta and abandoned his hopes of ever regaining Egypt. Mentuemhet, the governor of Thebes, remained loyal to Taharqa, as did the Divine Adoratrice of Amon. (Text by Bart v. A.)
research on jebel barkel, nubian heiroglyphics arent even deciphered yet. shyt is fascinatingdon't know enough about the Nubias/queens. I feel like they are a huge missing link from Ethiopian history.
I dunno if this thread gon work but I decided to give it a shot. I'll post a different unknown, lesser known, or even famous figures of Black History for every day of the month, brought to you by wikipedia of course.
i'm gonna have to read this sh1t bit by bit. but i'll read it all.
already seems like just yesterday @