Publish or perish

New Crisis, The, Mar/Apr 2002 by Burroughs, Todd Steven

175 years ago, Freedom's Journal, the first Black newspaper was founded

The response to adversity often contains the first step toward new possibilities. Such a phenomenon gave two freemen in New York City, during slavery, the audacity to do what no other Black men had yet done: create America's first Black newspaper. Their legacy lives on in the work of all of the Black journalists who continue to tell the stories of African America today, in the Black press and in mainstream media.

Freedom's Journal was launched 175 years ago by the Rev. Samuel E. Cornish and John Brown Russwurm. Cornish, a Presbyterian minister, headed a mission in New York. Russwurm, a Bowdoin College alumni and one of the first Blacks in America to graduate from college, was an articulate abolitionist who settled in New York after his graduation in 1826.

The New York City of their day boasted the largest population of Blacks in any Northern city - an estimated 15,000, which was 10 percent of the 150,000 free "colored" people living in the North. By the early 1800s, these free Blacks and escaped slaves, who lived in a segregated world, had developed their own churches, schools and clubs. In a country that kept 90 percent of Black people in bondage, these institutions provided more than social outlets, they meant survival.

"These folks were privileged in relation to slaves, but not in relation to most of the nation," says Jane Rhodes, author of Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century and a professor of ethnic studies at the University of California at San Diego. "And they had to struggle to gain an education, to become literate and to have some economic mobility."

For these freeman, life was made even harder by the racial stereotypes, promulgated by the white media of the day, which mostly depicted Blacks as lazy, shiftless, subhuman creatures.

A main proponent of this brand of journalism was Major Mordecai Menassah Noah, editor of the Enquirer, a New York newspaper that he founded in 1826 - after stints editing newspapers in New York and Charleston, S.C. Noah hated the existence of free Blacks in America, which his four-page proslavery tabloid made clear in each issue.

"Whatever mention the editor made of the Negro usually came in the form of ridicule or diatribe," wrote historians Clint C. Wilson II and the late Armistead Pride in A History of The Black Press.

One Enquirer editorial in particular outraged Russwurm and Cornish. It "cheered the news of the deaths of the Black colonizers who were on their way to Liberia from Boston." (Emigration to Liberia was a major issue of the day.) Both men wrote letters to the paper protesting such treatment, but the Enquirer refused to print them.

This outraged Russwurm and Cornish - and much of New York's Black community - even further. Deciding to fight back, community leaders called a meeting, held at the home of M. Boston Crummell-founder of the Phoenix Society, a Black fraternal organization - in early 1827. The group decided that Blacks needed a vehicle to speak for themselves. Historians have yet to uncover all the details of how the paper was formed and funded, but they believe that Russwurm and Cornish, the Journal's emergent publishers, attended the meeting.

The new publishers quickly set up shop at 6 Varick Street, and the first issue of their four-page, four-- column newspaper appeared on March 16, 1827. Their first editorial, "To Our Patrons," which explained the paper's mission to allow Blacks to speak for the interests of Black America, appeared on its front page (see sidebar).

In addition to providing an alternative to the racist white press, Freedom's Journal also put the predominantly white abolitionist movement on notice that free Blacks and escaped slaves were ready to define themselves. Even the most radical of the abolitionist papers was not prepared to fight for full citizenship for Blacks. Freedom was one thing, but being equal was entirely different. "One of the key things about African Americans having a newspaper was that it refuted the idea that African Americans did not have the intellectual capacity for citizenship," Rhodes says. "This was a complete demonstration of the fact that African Americans were not only ready for citizenship but entirely entitled to citizenship."

The paper captured the energy and spirit of the abolitionist drive from Blacks' perspective, added journalist Herb Boyd, editor of Autobiography of a People and Brotherman. "And [publishing their own newspaper] was the only way [for Blacks] to document that struggle."

The newspaper also chronicled Black life of the period, recording births, deaths and marriages - parts of free Black American life the white press ignored. In addition, the paper's reach went far beyond New York. The paper's 44 agents sold subscriptions for $3 annually - in other cities, including the District of Columbia, and in other countries, including Canada, England and Haiti.

In addition to being political, Russwurm and Cornish were also business-minded and wouldn't hesitate to demand their money. According to Wilson and Pride, they "went so far as to threaten to print the names of delinquent subscribers." They also solicited businesses for small ads of 12 to 22 lines for 75 cents. Circulation grew to an estimated 800 weekly.