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Freedom's Journal
2 articles on Freedom's Journal
Freedom's Journal
Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass
Word Count: 803 Includes: BibliographyFreedom's Journal, published in New York City from 1827 to 1829, was the first African American newspaper in U.S. history. The newspaper employed sales agents from Washington, D.C., to Maine to build up a base of more than one thousand subscribers. The editors sought to advance a broad agenda of abolitionism, African American self-improvement, and cultural self-determination in an era that saw not only the virtual extinction of legal enslavement in the North but also increasingly virulent racism. A group of leading black New Yorkers encouraged Samuel Cornish, a Presbyterian minister, and John Brown Russwurm, one of the nation's first African American college graduates, to edit and publish the newspaper. The editors declared in the 16 March 1827inaugural issue, “Too long have others spoken for us ...
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Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition
Word Count: 295 Includes: BibliographyFirst African American newspaper in the United States. Begun in 1827 as a rebuttal to what was often racist journalism in the mainstream white press, Freedom's Journal was the first in what would become a long line of African American newspapers. Its editors, Samuel Cornish and John Brown Russwurm, proposed in their first editorial that their paper, a weekly, would provide an opportunity for black people to speak for themselves rather than be represented by whites. As the first black-owned and edited newspaper in the country, Freedom's Journal was a strong proponent of the abolition of slavery, and Cornish and Russwurm often employed black abolitionists.Despite the newspaper's wide popularity not only in its New York base but elsewhere—some subscribers were from as far away as Haiti—its publication ...
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