Russwurm, John Brown

Impact on the world

Co-founding Freedom's Journal with Samuel Cornish on March 16, 1827 — a paper whose opening editorial declared “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us” — Russwurm helped establish the American Black press as an independent voice against slavery, colonization schemes, and misrepresentation in the white-owned newspapers of the era, with circulation reaching eleven states plus Haiti, Britain, and Canada. After Cornish's 1827 departure over a dispute about African colonization, Russwurm continued editing the paper alone before shifting its editorial stance toward support of the American Colonization Society, a controversial position that cost the paper much of its subscriber base and led to its closure in 1829; he then emigrated to Liberia himself, where he founded the Liberia Herald and eventually became the first Black governor of the colony's Maryland-in-Africa settlement, serving until his death.

Life & background

Born October 1, 1799, in Port Antonio, Jamaica, to an enslaved Black mother and a white American merchant father who acknowledged him as a free son and sent him to a Canadian boarding school in Montreal, Russwurm was later raised in Portland, Maine, by his father and stepmother, Susan Blanchard, who treated him as a full member of the family after his father's remarriage. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1826, becoming the third African American to graduate from a U.S. college and Bowdoin's first Black graduate, then moved to New York to co-found Freedom's Journal the following year and earned a master's degree from Bowdoin in 1829. In Liberia he served as superintendent of schools for the American Colonization Society, edited the Liberia Herald, and was appointed governor of the Maryland-in-Africa colony in 1836, a post he held until his death on June 17, 1851.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; BlackPast.org; Encyclopedia.com