Policing Ideas: David Walker's Appeal and the Klan at Chapel Hill

Who Gets to Speak

Debates over what may be taught and read are not new. Two November entries on the Equal Justice Initiative's calendar show a state criminalizing a Black abolitionist's words and a university welcoming a white supremacist's.

Walker's Appeal and the Law of 1830

In September 1829, David Walker, a free Black man born in Wilmington, North Carolina, and living in Boston, published An Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World. It was the first published demand for the immediate, uncompensated end of American slavery, and it called on Black people to resist oppression. Walker sewed copies into the clothes of sailors heading south.

The pamphlet spread, and Southern officials panicked. Georgia offered a reward for Walker. In North Carolina, Jacob Cowan, a literate enslaved man found with 200 copies, was sold to Alabama. On November 15, 1830, North Carolina passed laws to stop the pamphlet's circulation, making a second offense punishable by death. The legislature also tightened bans on teaching enslaved people to read.

Walker died in Boston in 1830, but the Appeal outlived the laws. It shaped the abolitionist movement and generations of Black political thought.

Chapel Hill, November 17, 1937

A century later, at the state's flagship university, the line ran the other way. On November 17, 1937, the University of North Carolina's political science department and the Carolina Political Union hosted Hiram Evans, Imperial Wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, for a talk titled "America and the Klan." More than 1,000 students and faculty attended.

Evans told them that "the Klan will continue to insist on white supremacy," attacked immigrants and warned against rising Black political leadership. The audience laughed and applauded. At the time, UNC admitted no Black students; it would not do so until courts forced the issue in 1951.

Then and Now

The contrast is the lesson. A Black writer's call for freedom was treated as a capital threat, while a white supremacist's call for domination was treated as academic discussion. Today, as states restrict lessons on race and remove books by Black authors from classrooms, the old question returns: whose ideas are called dangerous, and who decides?

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