About Freedom's Journal

Freedom's Journal

Freedom's Journal was the first African American-owned and operated newspaper published in the United States. It was published weekly in New York City from March 16, 1827, to March 28, 1829. Founded by free Black men in a city and state where slavery was only then being abolished, the four-page weekly declared its purpose on its first front page: its editors wished to plead their own cause, after others had spoken for Black Americans for too long.

In a life of only two years and 103 issues, the Journal denounced slavery and lynching, argued for civil rights, printed the births, marriages and deaths of New York's Black community, and circulated in eleven states, the District of Columbia, Haiti, Europe and Canada. Its brief existence launched the tradition of the Black press in America.

Founding in 1827

The first issue of Freedom's Journal appeared on March 16, 1827, published at 5 Varick Street in Lower Manhattan. The year was a landmark one: 1827 was the year New York State abolished slavery. The paper was founded by the Reverend Samuel Eli Cornish, John Brown Russwurm and other free Black men, among them figures from New York's organised free Black community. Cornish and Russwurm served as its editors, publishing under the name Cornish and Russwurm.

The editors were explicit about why a Black newspaper was needed. Racist commentary filled the mainstream press of the day, and white editors spoke about Black people without Black people answering in print. The Journal was created to be that answer — a paper owned, edited and written by African Americans themselves, of record for their community.

The Editors: Cornish and Russwurm

Samuel Eli Cornish, the senior editor, was born in Sussex County, Delaware, and was a graduate of the Free African School in Philadelphia. He was a Presbyterian minister who in 1822 had founded Shiloh Presbyterian Church, the first Black Presbyterian church in Manhattan, and he was pastor of the First Colored Presbyterian Church in New York. Cornish served as co-editor from March 16, 1827, until he resigned on September 14, 1827, leaving Russwurm as sole editor.

John Brown Russwurm was born in Jamaica and was a graduate of Bowdoin College in Maine — the college's first African American graduate, and only the third Black person to graduate from an American college. After Cornish's resignation, Russwurm edited the Journal alone for the rest of its life. The two men's partnership lasted barely six months, but between them they set the template for Black editorship in the United States.

What the Journal Published

Freedom's Journal was a four-page, four-column weekly. It carried international, national and regional news of current events, editorials, short stories, and biographies of prominent African Americans. Its editorials declaimed against slavery, lynching and other injustices, and it directly challenged the racist attacks on Black people that appeared in other newspapers. It advocated voting rights and published articles on improving education, health and living conditions for the more than 300,000 free Black men and women living in the northern states.

The paper was also a community record. It printed listings of births, deaths and marriages in New York's African American community — vital records that no white paper bothered to keep — and a classified section listing schools, jobs and affordable places to live. For its readers, the Journal functioned simultaneously as a newspaper, a forum and a community bulletin.

Circulation and Agents

Estimates suggest the Journal had at least 800 subscribers, Black and white, a figure that rivalled the circulation of many other weekly newspapers of the time. Actual readership was larger still, because copies were shared between individuals and read collectively. The paper circulated in eleven states and the District of Columbia, and reached Haiti, Europe and Canada, at an annual subscription cost of three dollars.

Distribution depended on subscription agents in Black communities across the North. One of those agents was David Walker of Boston, who in 1829 published his famous Appeal calling on enslaved people to resist. Walker distributed copies of his pamphlet into the South, where it was widely banned — an indication of how seriously the slave states took the networks that papers like Freedom's Journal had built.

A Forum on Colonization

One of the great debates inside the Journal's pages concerned colonization — the proposal, promoted by the American Colonization Society, to resettle free Black Americans in Africa. The paper addressed the issues of slavery and the Colonization Society from its earliest issues and gave its readers a public space in which to argue the question for themselves. The emergence of Freedom's Journal marked a turning point in African American activism precisely because it fostered that space: African Americans could deliver critiques of slavery and colonization, and champion the cause of Black civil rights, in their own words and under their own control.

The Split Between the Editors

The partnership broke over that very question. After Cornish resigned in September 1827, Russwurm's editorial direction shifted, and he came to support emigration to Liberia. Many subscribers were disappointed with the direction the Journal took under his sole editorship — a number of the old subscribers later refused to take the paper's successor because of that disappointment. The disagreement was an early demonstration of a dilemma that would run through Black journalism for decades: whether the future of free Black people lay in fighting for full rights in the United States or in building a new home in Africa.

Closure and The Rights of All

Freedom's Journal ceased publication with its issue of March 28, 1829, after 103 issues. It was superseded the same year by The Rights of All, published between 1829 and 1830 by Samuel Cornish, the Journal's former senior editor, who returned to editorship to carry on the work on the other side of the colonization argument. Russwurm himself emigrated to Liberia shortly afterwards, acting on the conviction his editorials had come to express.

Place in Black Press History

Although it folded in 1829, Freedom's Journal spawned at least forty similar papers over the next four decades. Papers that followed in its tradition included The Colored American, The North Star and the many antebellum Black weeklies that fought slavery before the Civil War. Historians of the Black press conventionally date the entire tradition from March 16, 1827: March 16 is still observed as Black Press Day, marking the Journal's first issue.

Survival and Study

Remarkably for so early and so small a paper, Freedom's Journal survived complete. A digitised archive of all 103 issues is available through the Wisconsin Historical Society, and the paper is catalogued by the Library of Congress. Because the full run survives, scholars can read the Journal week by week as its first readers did — following its news, its editorials against slavery and lynching, its biographies, and its record of births, marriages and deaths in free Black New York. Few American newspapers of the 1820s, of any kind, left so usable a record.

Legacy

Freedom's Journal was remembered as the founding document of the African American press: the first newspaper in the United States owned and operated by Black people, created so that Black Americans could plead their own cause. Its two editors went on to shape the tradition further — Cornish through The Rights of All and later The Colored American, Russwurm through his emigration to Liberia. The paper's real achievement was proof of concept. It showed that a Black-owned weekly could find subscribers in eleven states and three foreign countries, sustain serious editorial argument, and keep a community's record — and every Black newspaper that followed built on the ground it had broken in 1827.