One year after he graduated from college, John B. Russwurm became a founding editor-publisher of Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black-owned and operated newspaper. In its first issue, published on March 16, 1827, in New York City, the Journal made it clear that one reason for its existence was the inaccurate and brutal portrayal of African Americans in the white-owned press. ’From the press and the pulpit, we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented,’ the Journal stated. ’Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed by unnoticed.” The paper, published in the same year that slavery was abolished in New York state, sought to give an outlet to an audience of 500,000 ’free persons of colour,’ and about 100,000 newly freed Blacks. The Journal provided international, national and local news. As a newspaper of record, it also was the first paper to list births, deaths and marriages of African Americans in the New York Community. It was circulated in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, Europe and Haiti.
Russwurm was born in Jamaica in 1799, the son of a white planter and a slave. He is believed to be the third Black in this country to obtain a college degree, and was the first Black graduate of Bowdoin College in Brunswick, Maine. Russwurm co-edited Freedom’s Journal with Samuel E. Cornish, a Presbyterian minister. Russwurm and Cornish’s partnership dissolved when Cornish resigned from the newspaper in September 1827 after Russwurm began using the paper to promote the issue of African-American colonization of Africa. In 1829, Russwurm left the Journal and emigrated to Liberia. There he edited The Liberia Herald. He then became governor of the Maryland Society in Liberia and held the post for 16 years, until his death in 1851.
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John B. Russwurm (1799-1851)
One year after he graduated from college, John B. Russwurm became a founding editor-publisher of Freedom’s Journal, the nation’s first Black-owned and operated newspaper. In its first issue, published on March 16, 1827, in New York City, the Journal made it clear that one reason for its existence was the inaccurate and brutal portrayal of African Americans in the white-owned press. ’From the press and the pulpit, we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented,’ the Journal stated. ’Our vices and our degradation are ever arrayed against us, but our virtues are passed by unnoticed.” The paper, published in the same year that slavery was abolished in New York state, sought to give an outlet to an audience of 500,000 ’free persons of colour,’ and about 100,000 newly freed Blacks. The Journal provided international, national and local news. As a newspaper of record, it also was the first paper to list births, deaths and marriages of African Americans in the New York Community. It was circulated in 11 states, the District of Columbia, Canada, Europe and Haiti.