Freedom's Journal Prints Its First Issue

On March 16, 1827, Freedom's Journal published its first issue from a small office at No. 5 Varick Street in Manhattan, becoming the first newspaper in the United States owned, edited and operated by African Americans. Samuel Cornish, a Presbyterian minister, served as senior editor and John Brown Russwurm, one of the first Black college graduates in the country, as junior editor. New York had ended slavery within its own borders only a few weeks earlier, and the city's white press still ran freely with slurs and slander against free Black residents. Cornish and Russwurm built the paper to answer that directly, covering news, biography and opinion for a Black readership the rest of the press ignored or insulted.