many Blacks had rightfully come to believe deeply that America was their country at least as much as anyone else’s, and to reject altogether this idea that the solution to America’s crisis of race was for them to find another home. One Black abolitionist, David Walker, whose urgent 1829 publication, Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, has been compared with Thomas Paine’s Common Sense, spoke of African Americans as the “chosen people” through whose struggles alone could America’s ideals be fully realized.
