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S.2704 /H.3117 - An Act designating July 8 as Massachusetts Emancipation Day

Instructions for Supporting Quock Walker Day with One Email

Quock Walker’s Precedent Setting Journey to Freedom
On May 4, 1754, Zedekiah Stone sold Mingo, Dinah, and 9-month-old Quock to James Caldwell of the Rutland District for 180 pounds. Twenty-seven years later, in 1781, Quock Walker self-emancipated and was awarded monetary damages for being assaulted by his former enslaver. His former enslaver, who was the widower of James Caldwell’s widow, appealed the decision that Walker was a free man and lost the second case as well. Two years later, in 1783, Justice William Cushing of Scituate, who was the Chief Justice of the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court during the last of the Quock Walker Cases, noted in his instructions to the jury, “the idea of slavery is inconsistent with our own conduct and Constitution”. Walker’s judicial journey ended slavery in Massachusetts and fostered growth of a Black middle class in Massachusetts. Children of the Quock Walker generation were born free and used their economic and political strength to fuel the abolitionist movement.

Youth of Quock Walker’s Generation and the Abolitionist Movement
Mary J. "Polly" Johnson (1784-1871) was an African American entrepreneur, one of New Bedford’s best-known abolitionists, and she and her husband provided the first free home for Frederick Douglass.
Mr. Walker’s nephew, Quock Walker Lewis (1798-1856), was born in Barre and was an active abolitionist and entrepreneur in Boston and Lowell. Mr. Walker Lewis, along with several fellow members of the Prince Hall Lodge, met in 1826 and established the Massachusetts General Colored Association (MGCA) “to promote the welfare of the race by working for the destruction of slavery.” The MGCA was the first all-black abolitionist organization in the United States. The MGCA later merged with William Lloyd Garrison’s New England Anti-Slavery Society, which was then renamed the Boston Anti-Slavery Society.