  For a Negro, slave or free, to indulge in the articulation of critical reflections on the nature of their being and the conditions of their life was a bold contradiction of prevailing characterizations of African peoples and their descendants in the racialized ontologies of White Racial Supremacy, and a dangerous threat to the enterprise. David Walker (1785–1830) exemplified the threat. He sent shockwaves of fear across the slaveholding South, especially, with the publication and wide distribution of his 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 (1829) in which he advocated forcefully that Coloured people rise up in armed struggle against their oppressors. Moreover, in articulating his provocative appeal in a written document, Walker employed with great skill and impact a strategic use of rhetoric to gain leverage in the public sphere: while ostensibly directing the Appeal to an audience of “Coloured Citizens” almost none of whom were regarded as citizens and very few of whom, among those enslaved certainly, could read and, if they could, would have been prohibited from getting their hands and minds on such an appeal, in truth was also directed at White slaveowners and oppressors. This strategy would become a staple in the arsenal of discursive strategies Black folks would use to engage in the work of articulating their considerations and advocating for life-enhancing changes.