User:SonnieMunroe/sandbox

Samuel Cornish (1795-1858)
Born in Sussex County, Delaware to free Black parents, Samuel Cornish was a founder and coeditor of Freedom's Journal. He studied at Philadelphia's Free African School and went on to become the first African American to complete the difficult process of becoming a Presbyterian minister. He completed his ministerial training with the Philadelphia Presbytery and was ordained in 1822. From there, he moved back to New York and established the first Black Presbyterian Church in the city.

Samuel Cornish was a firm advocate for the full liberty of African Americans in the North and the abolition of slavery in the South. Cornish, along with a group of other African American activists, assembled at the home of community organizer Boston Crummell to create Freedom's Journal which would serve as a voice for the African American community in New York City. Cornish would serve as senior editor for the publication.

Cornish left the Freedom's Journal after only six months of editing the paper. Reportedly, Samuel Cornish took issue with junior editor John B. Russwurm's stance on the issue of colonization. Cornish was in opposition of free Black Americans emigrating to U.S.-controlled Liberia. After Russwurm's departure from Freedom's Journal in 1829, Cornish briefly returned to the paper, renamed The Rights of All. The publication officially shut down in 1830.

John B. Russwurm (1799-1851)
Junior editor John B. Russwurm was born in 1799 to an enslaved Black woman and a White American merchant in Port Antonia, Jamaica. His father, considering his son to be a free citizen, enrolled young Russwurm in a Canadian boarding school in Montreal. His father would later move to Portland, Maine and remarry a White woman, Susan Blanchard, who saw step-son Russwurm as a full part of her family. After his father's death in 1815, Blanchard ensured that Russwurm would complete his secondary education at Hebron Academy in Maine. When Susan Blanchard remarried, both she and her new husband oversaw Russwurm's admission to Bowdoin College in 1824. There, John B. Russwurm became the second known African American to earn a bachelor's degree from a U.S. university.

After graduation, John B. Russwurm moved back to New York City to become an activist for antiracism and abolition. He was appointed the role of junior editor of Freedom's Journal only a year after receiving his degree. He served as an editor at the publication until 1829 when he announced he would be moving to Liberia.

In Liberia, Russwurm first served as the superintendent of schools and the editor of the Liberia Herald. He later became the governor of Liberia's Maryland Settlement in 1836. It seemed to Russwurm that there was a genuine opportunity for African Americans to put racial prejudice behind them in Liberia, allowing for the creation of an equitable and viable society.