Edward G. Walker

Edward G. Walker
Edward G. Walker (1830–1901), son of David Walker (abolitionist), one of the first two black men elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature.
Member of Massachusetts State Legislature
In office 1866–1867

Edward Garrison Walker, also known as Edwin Garrison Walker (1830–1901), was an American artisan in Boston who became an attorney in 1861; he was one of the first black men to pass the Massachusetts bar. He later became a politician and in 1866, nine years after the state extended the franchise to African-American men, he and Charles Lewis Mitchell were the first two black men elected to the Massachusetts State Legislature. Walker was the son of Eliza and David Walker, an abolitionist who had written an appeal in 1829 calling for the end of slavery.

An independent thinker, Walker had different ideas than many Republicans; the party did not renominate him as a candidate for the legislature. He joined the Democratic Party and was nominated by the Democratic governor three times to a position as a judge; the Republican-majority legislature rejected Walker each time. In 1896 Walker was nominated as a candidate for United States President by the Negro Party.

Edward Garrison Walker was born in Boston in 1830 to Eliza Walker, the widow of David Walker, who had died in early August 1830. At the time when the couple was expecting the birth of Edward, they already had a daughter named Lydia Ann. In 1830 a tuberculosis epidemic in Boston took the lives of Lydia Ann on July 30 and her father David on August 6. David had collapsed and died at the entrance to his store. He was a free black from Wilmington, North Carolina who had settled in Boston about 1825, where he became a prominent abolitionist.

When Walker died, his widow Eliza was unable to keep up the annual payments of $266 ("a huge sum for Walker") made to George Parkman for the purchase of their home, and she lost it. In his pamphlet Appeal, Walker had earlier written: "But I must, really, observe that 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."